But none of this was interesting enough for any of the major television networks to cover it. Nor was it deemed sufficiently newsworthy to merit a mention in either the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, probably felt obliged to run a story, since the "Summary of Evidence" was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP itself. But after briefly describing the documents, the AP article downplayed its own scoop with a sentence almost as amusing as it is inane: "There is no indication the Iraqi's alleged terror-related activities were on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government, other than the brief mention of him traveling to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi intelligence." That sentence minimizing the importance of the findings was enough, apparently, to convince most newspaper editors around the country not to run the AP story.

It's possible, of course, that the evidence presented by military prosecutors is exaggerated, maybe even wrong. The evidence required to designate a detainee an "enemy combatant" is lower than the "reasonable doubt" standard of U.S. criminal prosecutions. So there is much we don't know.

Indeed, more than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.

We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

All of this is new--information obtained since the fall of the Hussein regime. And yet critics of the Iraq war and many in the media refuse to see it. Just two weeks ago, President Bush gave a prime-time speech on Iraq. Among his key points: Iraq is a central front in the global war on terror that began on September 11. Bush spoke in very general terms. He did not mention any of this new information on Iraqi support for terrorism to make his case. That didn't matter to many journalists and critics of the war.

CNN anchor Carol Costello claimed "there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda." The charitable explanation is ignorance. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knows better. Before the war he pointed to Zarqawi's presence in Iraq as a "substantial connection between Iraq and al Qaeda." And yet he, too, now insists that Saddam Hussein's regime "had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing to do with al Qaeda."

Such comments reveal far more about politics in America than they do about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.

* * *

"Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al Qaeda."

Senate Intelligence Committee report, July 7, 2004

UNTIL SHORTLY BEFORE THE IRAQ WAR, the consensus view within the U.S. intelligence community was simple: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were natural enemies who, despite their common interests, would not work together. Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration, summarized this view in a New York Times op-ed on September 30, 2002. He wrote: "Saddam Hussein has long recognized that al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime. Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their common enemy, the United States. This was the understanding of American intelligence in the 1990s."

Benjamin later elaborated in an interview with Mother Jones. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link [between] al Qaeda and Iraq. We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact."

Judith Yaphe, a longtime CIA analyst on the Middle East and Iraq, was only slightly less categorical in testimony before the House Armed Service Committee on April 21, 2004. "I know that there's a small number of people who say that Saddam was working cooperatively with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. I do not believe that. I know the intelligence is not there."

Yaphe was right about one thing: The intelligence was not there. The CIA's collection against the Iraqi target was abysmal. According to former CIA director George Tenet, the U.S. intelligence community never penetrated the senior ranks of the former Iraqi regime. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post explored this subject in his book on the Iraq war, Plan of Attack. Woodward interviewed "Saul," the chief of the Iraqi Operations Group, at the CIA.

Saul was discovering that the CIA reporting sources inside Iraq were pretty thin. What was thin? "I can count them on one hand," Saul said, pausing for effect, "and I can still pick my nose." There were four. And those sources were in Iraqi ministries such as foreign affairs and oil that were on the periphery of any penetration of Saddam's inner circle.

Woodward reports that the Iraqi Operations Group was known inside the CIA's Near East Division as "The House of Broken Toys." "It was largely populated with new, green [Directorate of Operations] officers and problem officers, or old boys waiting for retirement. . . . Past operations read almost like a handbook for failed and stupid covert action. It was a catalogue of doomed work--too little, too late, too seat-of-the-pants, too little planning, too little realism. The comic mixed with the frightening."

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee did not find it so amusing. The committee's bipartisan report was released last summer. Most of the attention at the time focused on the report's assessment of flaws in intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The lengthy section on "Iraq's Links to Terrorism" received considerably less attention. What emerges in the 66 pages of the report is a picture of an intelligence community with a woefully inadequate collection capability on the Iraqi target. In some ways more disturbing, though, was the lack of interest. In a stunning moment of candor, an "IC analyst" provided this characterization of the collection effort on Iraq: "I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."

So on the one hand we know that there was virtually no human intelligence on Iraq and terrorism. Yet the intelligence community, if this analyst is to be believed, was so confident in its assessment that Iraqi Intelligence was not in the terrorism business that collecting on that target was tantamount to cramming for a test.

The Senate report's conclusions were devastating:

Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al Qaeda. . . . The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism.

It was not just reporting on Iraq that was inadequate. "The CIA had no [redacted] credible reporting on the leadership of either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda, which would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship, if any did in fact exist."

This left policymakers in a bind. There was reporting on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, but much of it was secondhand. This reporting was supplemented by widespread coverage of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in "open sources," including the amnesiac American press. And contrary to the assessments coming from many analysts in the intelligence community, much of this reporting seemed to indicate a significant relationship.

The difference between most intelligence community analysts and Bush administration policymakers can be found in how they interpret the gaps. The analysts seemed to assume, despite the history of poor collection, that the many Iraq-al Qaeda contacts reported in intelligence products and open sources were anomalous. To them, the gaps in reporting simply reflected a lack of activity. Policymakers (and a small number of analysts) took a different view. The gaps in reporting on Iraq and al Qaeda were just that: gaps in reporting. To this group, the many reports of contacts, training, and offers of safe haven were indicative of a relationship that ran much deeper.

After September 11, the mere existence of a long relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda had to be considered an urgent threat.

* * *

"Attack them our beloved people. You are the glory of our nation. Attack them. . . . The Mother of all Battles is not the past."

Saddam Hussein, January 17, 1993

THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY was apparently not much concerned by Iraqi support for terrorism in the 13 years between the Gulf war and the Iraq war. To students of Iraq-U.S. relations that might seem bizarre. Saddam Hussein had used such asymmetric warfare for decades, against enemies foreign and domestic, real and imagined. What's more, he had demonstrated his willingness to use terrorism and terrorist surrogates against his enemies when confronted by superior conventional military forces during the Gulf war. By some accounts, more than 1,400 terrorists made their way to Baghdad in the final months of 1990 as he prepared to face the coalition assembled by the United States to oust him from Kuwait. He dispatched others to attack U.S. interests around the world. On January 18, 1991, one day after the Gulf war began, an Iraqi terrorist posing as a day laborer managed to plant 26 sticks of TNT in a flower box below a window of the U.S. ambassador's residence in Jakarta, Indonesia. The dynamite wasn't completely buried, and a gardener found it before the bomb exploded. The following day in the Philippines, two Iraqis blew themselves up in a plot known to CIA veterans as Operation Dogmeat, a botched attempt to bomb the U.S. Information Service headquarters at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center in Manila. The failed attack on the U.S. government-run center received the active support of the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines.

Saddam Hussein openly encouraged these attacks. "It remains for us to tell all Arabs, all militant believers . . . wherever they may be that it is your duty to embark on holy war. You should target their interests wherever they may be," he said on January 20, 1991.

Iraq's use of terrorism was so widespread, in fact, that it became an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, when Al Gore accused the first Bush administration of a "blatant disregard for brutal terrorism" practiced by Hussein and ignoring Iraq's "extensive terrorism activities."

Many Islamic radicals voiced opposition to Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait. Sudan's Hasan al-Turabi was not one of them. Turabi's willingness to back Hussein gave the Iraqi dictator the Islamist street credibility he would exploit for years to come. In the debate over the former Iraqi regime's relationship with al Qaeda, it is often said that Saddam's secular Baathist regime could never work with Osama bin Laden's radical Islamist organization. It is a curious argument since Turabi, one of Saddam's staunchest allies, also happened to be one of the most influential Islamists of the past two decades. One of the principal architects of Sudan's Islamist revolution in 1989, Turabi was also the longtime mentor, friend, and host of Osama bin Laden during his stay in Sudan from 1992 until 1996.

Immediately after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden approached the Saudi regime and offered to lead Muslim forces in driving Saddam out of Kuwait. Many who downplay the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda point to this as an example of the hostility between Hussein and bin Laden. But Osama's spurned offer is only part of the story. While bin Laden's first instinct may have been to oppose the secular tyrant, his soon-to-be host in Sudan did not share these sentiments. According to an interview at the time with Turabi's cousin, Mudawi Turabi, the Sudanese leader met twice with Saddam Hussein before the Gulf war and "had appeared to be designing his own Islamic empire even then."

In October 1990, Turabi led a delegation of Islamists to Jordan to meet with Iraqi government officials. Bin Laden sent emissaries to this meeting as well. While it is not clear what bin Laden's emissaries or bin Laden himself thought of the meeting, it is clear that Turabi threw his full support behind Saddam. In a press conference after the meeting, Turabi warned "there is going to be all forms of jihad all over the world because it is an issue of foreign troops on sacred soil."

Turabi continued in his self-designated role as pan-Islamic leader by convening terrorist confabs in Khartoum known euphemistically as the Popular Arab Islamic Conference. Encouraged by Turabi, Saddam began hosting his own Popular Islamic Conference in Baghdad. The conferences shared a central purpose: to bring together Islamic and secular radicals from around the world to oppose U.S. involvement in the Gulf war and the continued presence of American troops on Saudi soil.

The Baghdad conferences, which were held annually until the regime fell, were filled with the rhetoric of jihad. A statement issued at the closing ceremony of the 1992 conference was a call to arms. The 500 Islamists in attendance affirmed "that maintaining and defending the unity of Iraq's land, people and sovereignty is an Islamic duty that must be performed because Iraq is the fortress of Islamic jihad targeted by the atheist forces." The statement called on Islamic groups "to meet and discuss the establishment [of] a free world front to confront the U.S. hegemony and its new world order."

Newsweek reporter Christopher Dickey attended a Popular Islamic Conference at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel and later recalled: "If that was not a fledgling al Qaeda at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it."

We do not yet know how many future al Qaeda leaders attended the conferences. (We do know that the conferences were carried on Iraqi state-run television and that the attendees signed the closing statements. A comparison of those lists with known al Qaeda terrorists would be an interesting and potentially productive undertaking, as would a careful review of any photographic evidence from the session.) By this time, however, it appears that Hussein had already forged relationships with the two men who would later lead al Qaeda.

An internal Iraqi Intelligence memo dated March 28, 1992, lists individuals Hussein's regime considered assets of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Osama bin Laden is listed on page 14. The Iraqis describe him as a Saudi businessman who "is in good relationship with our section in Syria."

At the same time, the Iraqis were cultivating a relationship with Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the current top deputy to bin Laden. According to Qassem Hussein Mohammed, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi Intelligence, Zawahiri visited Baghdad in 1992 for a meeting with Hussein. In a 2002 interview with the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg from a Kurdish prison in northeastern Iraq, the IIS veteran described his duties as a bodyguard for Zawahiri during his visit. This was not Zawahiri's only meeting with top Iraqi officials. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official, Zawahiri met with Iraqi Intelligence officials in Sudan several times from 1992 to 1995. A foreign intelligence service has corroborated that report, adding that at one of those meetings Zawahiri received blank Yemeni passports from an Iraqi Intelligence official.

In 1993, at Turabi's urging, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam Hussein that the al Qaeda leader and his followers would not engage in any anti-Hussein activities. The Clinton administration later included this development in its sealed indictment of bin Laden in 1998. According to the indictment: "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."

* * *

"Abdul Rahman Yasin, a fugitive of the [1993 World Trade Center] attack, is of Iraqi descent, and in 1993, he fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance."

Senate Intelligence Committee report

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, a powerful bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. The attack killed six and injured more than 1,000. It could have been much worse. The bombers hoped to topple one tower into the other. The men responsible for the attack aimed to kill tens of thousands of Americans.

One of those men was Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who had come to the United States six months before the attack. In the days after the attack, Yasin was detained twice by the FBI. Although he admitted his role in the bombing and offered investigators details of the plot, he was inexplicably released. Twice. The second time the FBI even drove him home. According to the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, Yasin promptly "fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance." His travel was arranged by the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan. In 1994, a reporter for ABC News went to the home of Yasin's father in Baghdad and spoke with neighbors who reported that Yasin was free to come and go as he pleased and was "working for the government."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the Iraqi regime denied any relationship with Yasin and any knowledge of his whereabouts. In an interview with PBS's Frontline that aired on October 29, 2001, Iraq's U.N. ambassador denied that Yasin was even in Iraq. "To my knowledge he is not, and there is not any relation with him." Pressed, the Iraqi diplomat went further. "Absolutely. I know that there is no relation with that guy. . . . We have no relations with these kind of guys, with all persons who are involved in terrorism."

Eight months later, on June 2, 2002, the Iraqi government abruptly changed its story. Tariq Aziz, for years the face of the Iraqi regime in the Western media, appeared on 60 Minutes and assured Lesley Stahl that Yasin had been imprisoned since his return to Iraq. Aziz claimed that the Iraqi regime held Yasin prisoner because they worried that the United States would blame Iraq for the attack if he was returned to America to face trial. Yasin himself appeared. He admitted to mixing the chemicals for the bomb. He showed viewers a scar on his leg that he claimed to have gotten preparing chemicals for the attack. He even apologized. Stahl did not ask about the Frontline interview or previous media reports that Yasin was living freely in Baghdad.

We now know more about Yasin's stay in Baghdad. "We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in '93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of '93," Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert in a September 14, 2003, appearance on Meet the Press. "And we've learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven. Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in '93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact."

Those documents are now in possession of the FBI. Despite requests for declassification of the documents from both Cheney's office and the Pentagon, the FBI refuses to release them. In March, The Weekly Standard requested an interview with FBI officials to discuss the Iraqi intelligence documents and the status of the Yasin case. The request was denied last week. An FBI spokeswoman said FBI officials refuse to discuss Yasin. Yasin remains on the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list and is believed to be still in Iraq. If there is a good reason to keep these historical documents classified, the FBI declined to provide it.

Just two months after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the Iraqi Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. The IIS recruited a male nurse from Najaf as a suicide bomber to kill the former president on a trip to Kuwait. The plot was foiled when Kuwaiti police, thinking they had broken up a smuggling ring, learned of the Iraqi plans. The Clinton administration responded by bombing an empty Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters at night.

* * *

"Cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

Internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on Iraq-al Qaeda cooperation, June 25, 2004, New York Times

THE RELATIONSHIP CONTINUED with high-level meetings throughout 1994 and 1995. The 9/11 Commission staff report that made headlines last year by declaring that such meetings between Iraq and al Qaeda "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship" also reported that the Sudanese government arranged for "contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda." The staff report continued: "A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

That senior Iraqi intelligence officer was Faruq Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence and longtime regime liaison to al Qaeda. According to several Bush administration officials with access to his debriefings, as well as a top secret Pentagon summary of intelligence on Iraq and al Qaeda known as the Feith Memo, Hijazi described a face-to-face meeting with bin Laden that took place in 1994. The language in the Feith Memo corresponds closely to that in the 9/11 Commission staff report. "During a May 2003 custodial interview with Faruq Hijazi, he said in a 1994 meeting with bin Laden in the Sudan, bin Laden requested that Iraq assist al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured antiship limpet mines. Bin Laden thought that Iraq should be able to procure the mines through third-country intermediaries for ultimate delivery to al Qaeda. Hijazi said he was under orders from Saddam only to listen to bin Laden's requests and then report back to him. Bin Laden also requested the establishment of al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq."

An internal Iraqi Intelligence document obtained by the New York Times provides a window into the state of the relationship during the mid-1990s. A team of Pentagon analysts concluded that the document "appears authentic." The memo reports that a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 1994 and reported that Bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan. As a consequence, according to the Iraqi document, bin Laden was "approached by our side" after "presidential approval" for the liaison was given. The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995. The document further states that bin Laden "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative."

But the absence of a formal relationship hardly precludes cooperation, as the document makes clear. Bin Laden requested that Iraq's state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda; the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this. The al Qaeda leader also proposed "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. There is no response provided in the documents. When bin Laden leaves Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis seek "other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location." The IIS memo directs that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

There are other reports of varying reliability of Iraqi support for al Qaeda during the mid-1990s. One senior al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody since 1995, Wali Khan Amin Shah, told FBI interrogators that an al Qaeda leader named Abu Hajer al Iraqi maintained a good relationship with Iraqi Intelligence. Abu Hajer al Iraqi ran al Qaeda's WMD procurement operation until his capture in 1998 and was described by another al Qaeda member as Osama bin Laden's "best friend." According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Wali Khan testified that he had knowledge of two "direct meetings" between the leadership of Iraqi Intelligence and Abu Hajer al Iraqi.

According to the presentation at the United Nations Security Council by Colin Powell on February 5, 2003, an al Qaeda member named Abu Abdullah al Iraqi received training in chemical and biological weapons in Iraq beginning in 1997. The information comes from another high-ranking al Qaeda detainee named Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, who ran bin Laden's notorious Khalden Camp outside of Kandahar. Said Powell: "The support that [al-Libi] describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates, beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdullah al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as 'successful.'" Al-Libi's reporting also formed the basis of several statements from CIA Director George Tenet.

Al-Libi has since recanted some of the information he provided. The debate about whether to give more credence to his original statement or his retraction continues. But the Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that the terrorism section of Powell's speech "was carefully vetted by both terrorism and regional analysts" and that it did not differ "in any significant way" from earlier published CIA assessments.

* * *

"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 Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

Internal Iraqi Intelligence memo describing the goal of meetings with an al Qaeda envoy, February 19, 1998

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda intensified in 1998. The Iraqis were growing more obdurate in their confrontation with the U.N. weapons inspectors, at times simply refusing to grant access to suspected weapons sites. The United States was losing patience--both with Iraq and with U.N. fecklessness. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, had found a home in Afghanistan and was turning out terrorists from its camps by the thousands.

On February 3, 1998, Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, came to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi leaders. The visit came as Islamic radicals gathered once again in the Iraqi capital for another installation of Hussein's Popular Islamic Conferences. Iraqi vice president Taha Yasin Ramadan welcomed them on February 9 with the language of jihad:

The Islamic nation's ulema, advocates and preachers, are called upon to carry out a jihad that God wants them to carry out through honest words in order to expose the U.S. and Zionist regimes to the world peoples, to explain facts, and to say what is right and to call for it. This is their religious duty. The Muslim ulema are called upon before Almighty God to act among the Muslim ranks to confront the infidel U.S. moves and to raise their voices against the U.S.-Zionist evil.

We do not have reporting on when, exactly, Zawahiri left Baghdad. But we do know from an interrogation of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official that he did not leave empty-handed. As first reported in U.S. News & World Report, the Iraqi regime gave Zawahiri $300,000 during or shortly after his trip to Baghdad.

On February 17, 1998, Bill Clinton traveled the short distance from the White House to the Pentagon to prepare the nation for a confrontation with Iraq. The symbolism was obvious, the rhetoric belligerent. Clinton explained why "meeting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is important to our security in the new era we are entering." He warned about the threats from the "predators of the 21st century," rogue states working with terrorist groups. "There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq." War seemed imminent.

Two days later, on February 19, the Iraqi Intelligence Service finalized plans to bring a "trusted confidant" of bin Laden's to Baghdad in early March. The revelation came in documents discovered after the Iraq war by journalists Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star and Inigo Gilmore of the Sunday Telegraph. The U.S. intelligence community is now in possession of these documents and has assessed that they are authentic. The documents--a series of communiqués between Iraqi Intelligence divisions--provide another window into the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. The following comes from the Telegraph's translations of the documents.

The envoy is a trusted confidant and known by them. According to the above mediation we request official permission to call Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel expenses 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 Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.