Opinion

William Safire: Al-Qaida smoking gun

In the town of Kalar, about 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga. That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a “clear link” between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and with other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to al-Qaida the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements. The Kurds turned him over to Americans for further interrogation, which is proving fruitful. Dexter Filkins, the New York Times reporter in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. The author of the lengthy Ansar-to-Qaida electronic message is suspected of being the most wanted terror operative in the world today: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, long familiar to readers of this space as “the man with the limp,” who personifies the link of Ansar and al-Qaida. On Sept. 24, 2001, Kurdish sources led me to report: “The clear link between the terrorist in hiding (Osama) and the terrorist in power (Saddam) can be found in Kurdistan. “The Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of al-Qaida mullahs and terrorists. “Some 400 ‘Arab Afghan’ mercenaries … have already murdered a high Kurdish official as well as a Muslim scholar who dared to interpret the Quran humanely.” The CIA blew off that report. Our National Security Council did not learn of subsequent warfare against the Kurds by the al-Qaida affiliate doing Saddam’s bidding until its members read it in The Times. On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said, “Some al-Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year.” The leader whose leg was treated in Baghdad was identified here in January 2003 as al-Zarqawi (twice, after one misspelling). In his U.N. speech the following month, Colin Powell publicly identified the Palestinian, born in Jordan, as one who oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan three years before: “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden.” Now we have documentary evidence of Ansar’s current operation: employing suicide bombers to foment a civil war in Iraq that would reinstate safe haven for terrorists. Of the liberation’s three casus belli, one was to stop mass murder, bloodier than in Kosovo; we are finding horrific mass graves in Iraq. Another was informed suspicion that a clear link existed between world terror and Saddam; this terrorist plea for Qaida reinforcements to kill Iraqi democracy is the smoking gun proving that. The third was a reasoned judgment that Saddam had a bioweapon that could wipe out a city; in time, we are likely to find a buried suitcase containing that, too.