Commentary : President Bush's Eagerness To Connect The Dots Between Osama Bin Laden And Saddam Hussein

Weekend Edition Sunday: February 16, 2003

DANIEL SCHORR:

President Bush likes to talk about tyrants and terrorists as though Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are cut from the same violent cloth.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

SCHORR: The president has an interest in that being so. An Iraqi connection with the authors of the September 11th attacks would bolster the argument for invasion and regime change. And so soon after September 11th, administration sources spread word of a meeting weeks before the attack between leading hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The intelligence community was dubious about such a meeting, and so while the president was saying, `There are al-Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq,' Secretary of State Colin Powell was saying more cautiously, `There are some indications that there were contacts between the Iraqi regime and some al-Qaeda members.'

By the start of this year, intelligence agencies were in almost open disagreement with the White House and the Pentagon. Some FBI officers let it be known that they were baffled by the administration's insistence on asserting such a connection. The New York Times cited some CIA officers as complaining of exaggerated conclusions from sketchy intelligence reports.

The argument was apparently resolved at a very high level when it came time for Secretary Powell to make his dramatic intelligence report to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th. Powell told of a terrorist network headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi described as an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden operating a training center in poisons and explosives at a camp in northeastern Iraq.

And now Osama bin Laden, or someone sounding a lot like him, has weighed in with an audiotape voicing support for the people of Iraq but denouncing the Saddam Hussein infidels who have lost their legitimacy, which did not keep Secretary Powell from testifying before Congress that the terrorists were in some sort of partnership with Iraq.

If there has been a real operating connection between the tyrant and the terrorists, it remains to be established. For now, it's established to the satisfaction of those planning to bring down the Iraqi regime. This is Daniel Schorr.

WERTHEIMER: It's 22 minutes before the hour.

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