LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD HAVE FASCINATING DATES

I pointed out earlier how the letter discovered in Baghdad revealing that Russia provided a list of available Western assassins for Saddam was dated the day after Katherine Harris certified George Bush winner of the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida. A very curious fact, considering Saddam had attempted in 1993 to bomb the Bush family motorcade in Kuwait.

Now it looks like the letters discovered connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda also show an interesting date and location pattern: Sudan, February 1998. That month is also infamously related to the Clinton Administration's continued inaction in Sudan following the U.S. refusal in 1996 to accept custody of bin Laden from the Sudanese. Sandy Berger instead urged the expulsion of bin Laden to his terrorist utopia in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). More on that later.

It seems Saddam was probably offering the remaining Sudanese al-Qaeda a safe backup home in the region in exchange for their assistance. It may have never gone through exactly as planned, but Saddam has already been tied to other al-Qaeda through literally hundreds of links. More will be known soon enough. Saddam's powerfully connected intel agency likely anticipated Clinton would eventually accept Sudan's increasingly persistent offers to root the rest of al-Qaeda out. I assume the original terror meeting overture came from Sudan though, since the terrorists must have felt the heat and figured the U.S. would descend on Sudan in force. They may have been wanting to get out as soon as they bombed our two embassies in Africa. Here's what happened on our end first though:

A further change took place in Sudanese thinking in April 1997. The government dropped its demand that Washington lift sanctions in exchange for terrorism cooperation. Sudan's president, in a letter that Ijaz delivered to U.S. authorities, offered FBI and CIA counter-terrorism units unfettered and unconditional access to Khartoum's intelligence.

Sudan's policy shift sparked a debate at the State Department, where foreign service officers believed the United States should reengage Khartoum. By the end of summer 1997, they persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. A formal announcement was made in late September.

Two individuals, however, disagreed. NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary of State for African affairs, persuaded Berger, then national security adviser, to overrule Albright. The new policy was reversed after two days. Overturning a months-long interagency process undermined U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

In a final attempt to find a way of cooperating with U.S. authorities, Sudan's intelligence chief repeated the unconditional offer to share terrorism data with the FBI in a [practically gushing, 5th] February, 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams. But the White House and Susan Rice objected.

Documents discovered in Baghdad reveal Saddam connected with Sudanese al-Qaeda two weeks later:

One paper is marked "Top Secret and Urgent". It is signed "MDA", a codename believed to be the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat, and dated February 19, 1998. It refers to the planned trip from Sudan by bin Laden's unnamed envoy and refers to the arrangements for his visit.

A letter with this document says the envoy is a trusted confidant of bin Laden. It adds: "According to the above, we suggest permission to call the Khartoum station [Iraq's intelligence office in Sudan] to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden."

The letter refers to al-Qa'eda's leader as an opponent of the Saudi Arabian regime and says that the message to convey to him through the envoy "would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

. . .The other documents then confirm that the envoy travelled from Khartoum to Baghdad in March 1998, staying at al-Mansour Melia, a first-class hotel. It mentions that his visit was extended by a week. In the notes in a margin, a name "Mohammed F. Mohammed Ahmed" is mentioned, but it is not clear whether this is the the envoy or an agent.

Intriguingly, the Iraqis talk about sending back an oral message to bin Laden, perhaps aware of the risk of a written message being intercepted. However, the documents do not mention if any meeting took place between bin Laden and Iraqi officials.

Just four days after that letter:

on February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued his blood- curdling fatwa from his hideout in Afghanistan, calling on all Muslims to kill Americans and Jews, adding that civilians were now to be regarded as targets.

From that same link, we go back to the U.S. non-response to the Sudanese:

David Williams did not reply to al-Mahdi's letter for another four months. "Unfortunately," he wrote on June 24 "I am not currently in a position to accept your kind invitation." He hoped "future circumstances" might allow it, but for now the offer had to be rejected. Six weeks after that, bin Laden's al-Qaeda network succeeded in exploding two pick- up trucks at the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. They were reduced to piles of bloody rubble in which 224 people lay dead or dying.

Two weeks later, Bill Clinton thanked the Sudanese for their kind offers of intelligence by destroying Sudan's main pharmaceutical plant for show. He said the innocent owner was a terrorist who was producing chemical weapons. That was an invention, since we really had no clue what was going on inside Sudan. Because he had no real evidence except a supposed soil sample the CIA obtained for him, Clinton also ignored the advice of his astonished generals and failed to consult the FBI first. Then, even after the Sudanese lost their medicine factory:

A few months later, in yet another attempt to induce a thaw, the Mukhabarat chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, invited McElligott (another go-between like Ijaz) to Khartoum. He gave her a hand-written note, which she delivered to the office of the then F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh. It related the circumstances of the two [Pakistani] suspects' arrest and the offer to send them to America, adding, "The bombardment of the pharmaceutical factory blew up the link we established with the F.B.I. and the co-operation that developed on the situation." However, their interrogation had revealed "some information," and, as McEIligott reminded the F.B.I., the Mukha-barat al-Qaeda files still awaited inspection.

Through McElligott, the F.B.I. tentatively suggested a meeting with al-Mahdi in Europe. Before it could take place, the State Department vetoed it. In Sudan, the ongoing U.S. attitude produced bewilderment. "We felt it was an irrational attitude," al-Mahdi says. "We were extending our hand to someone who badly needed help, for our mutual benefit, and it was being rejected." He goes on to echo the claim made by Ambassador Carney: "If [the F.B.I.] had taken up my offer in February 1998, they could have prevented the [embassy] bombings.

They had very little information at that time: they were shooting in the dark. Had they engaged with the Sudan, they could have stopped a lot of things." It is hard to conceive of a more serious allegation, and it appears to stand up to scrutiny.

. . .It was not until May 2000 that the Clinton administration responded to pressure from the US intelligence community and agreed to send a joint F.B.I.- C.I.A. team to Sudan.

Even then its mission was not to examine the Mukhabarat files but to ascertain whether Sudan was really sponsoring terror. In the summer of 2001 the team gave the country a clean bill of health. There were no "training camps" or sanctuaries for murderers after all. Gutbi al-Mahdi, the former Mukhabarat chief, says that a few weeks before September 11 the American team finally asked to examine the Sudanese material on al-Qaeda. Events suggest that by then it was too late.

Where did they all go? Iraq? Possibly. Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan most likely. As Mansoor Ijaz says, "We're still living with the consequences of the U.S. policy and intelligence failure in Sudan. Khartoum offered us the best chance to engage radical Islamists and stop bin Laden early. If the United States is to account for the failures that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, we need to better understand our failures in Sudan." Those failures now include missing an early link to Saddam Hussein.

The last major outrage was that, even after the USS Cole was bombed in Oct 2000, the former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, scuttled the FBI investigation into al-Qaeda operatives there for petty personal and diplomatic reasons. It was headed up by The Man Who Knew that al-Qaeda would soon try to finish the job and finally bring down the Twin Towers. His name was John O'Neill, and he was thrilled about having the hot al-Qaeda leads he had been waiting for his entire career. It's very likely that, had Bodine not locked him out of Yemen, he could have stopped the second WTC attack. Instead, the brilliant visionary was finally hounded out of the FBI, and no one filled his shoes. Information like terrorists training in flight schools just got filed away. In an ironic twist of fate, he died Sept 11th, 2001 when the towers crumbled down on him. It was his first day on the job as WTC Director of Security. A true American hero, single-mindedly dedicated to fighting the bureaucracy and stopping our "second Pearl Harbor."

Career diplomat Barbara Bodine has since remarked to the O'Neill documentary producer that she couldn't believe anyone would want to spend 90 minutes of television on John O'Neill. Then she refused to be interviewed. Nice lady. She's now been assigned to rule over central Iraq out of Baghdad, where she can continue to protect terrorists "State Dept-style."

UPDATE:

It turns out that when Sandy Berger told the Sudan to send bin Laden on his way in 96 he took his key HQ operatives with him:

bin Laden went to Afghanistan, along with "Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for al-Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.”

I added more details on exact dates, and new links with quotes to the second half of the timeline just above the last two paragraphs of the main post. I also want to suggest that NYC somehow uniquely commemorate the life and work of John O'Neill at any Ground Zero memorial. I'm sure the other families would demand it if they only knew of the years he singularly devoted to preventing the attack on their loved ones. We also owe the nation of Sudan a giant thank you and apology. They tried their absolute best since 1996 to, not only avoid harboring terrorists, but to track them down for us. They were simply ignored until we strangely decided to bomb them. They probably assumed the only logical explanation for the treatment was pure racism. Had we engaged the nation as they desired we could have cleaned house all around, and helped them embrace moderation. We would have helped to alleviate famine, and maybe also to free the Christian slaves from southern Sudan that the Left cares so little about.

Well anyhow, this post really took on a life of it's own in bracketing that February 1998 date. I'm sure the extra details will come in handy though, and the post will inspire others as we sift through the millions of documents in Iraq. A George Galloway (the U.K. traitor for $$$) Baghdad document date/activity timeline will be a good one too. Much thanks to Mansoor Ijaz for standing tough against the lies and smears of Clinton cronies. Turns out Clinton's political epitaph may be: "It's the Sudan, Stupid."

UPDATE: Mansoor Ijaz is now on the Baghdad document case.