Clinton Administration Asserted Iraq/Al Qaeda Links Long Before 911
by Charles D. Ganske

On June 24th,Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech at Georgetown University. The bulk of Gore’s address attacked the Bush Administration for continuing to insist that Saddam Hussein’s regime had ties to Al-Qaeda. The United Nations, the CIA, and even the Pentagon—all were cited by Gore as dissenting voices hushed in the Bush Administration’s rush to war. The preliminary findings of the bipartisan Commission appointed by Congress to investigate the September 11th attacks, according to Gore and the New York Times, have proven that any such claims were and remain baseless.There are several problems with this—besides the fact that both the leading Republican and Democratic commissioners disclaimed that the report had made sweeping conclusions about any relationship, beyond declaring that they had no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11.

For partisans like Gore, any cooperation between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda was and remains a figment of warmongering imaginations in this Administration, and along with weapons of mass destruction was one of the “big lies” that frightened the American people into supporting the war. Yet the Bush Administration was not the first to assert dangerous ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Perhaps then-Vice President Gore missed a prominent feature in the fourth paragraph of the Department of Justice’s November 4, 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden: “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.”

This section of the indictment was based on intelligence the Clinton Administration had gathered about a pharmaceutical plant at Al-Shifa in Sudan. A consortium of Sudan’s National Islamic Front that included Osama bin Laden owned the Al-Shifa plant. After President Clinton ordered the destruction of the factory with cruise missiles in August 1998, the Administration came under fire for allegedly “wagging the dog”—engaging in adventurism abroad to distract the American public from Clinton’s scandals at home. Criticism of the attack, which killed one night watchman, came both from conservative Republicans and left-wingers like MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.

The Clinton Administration vigorously defended the strike, arguing that far from being an innocent aspirin factory, the Bin Laden-owned plant was producing VX nerve gas for Al-Qaeda. Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke said as much to the Washington Post on January 23,1999: “While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is ‘sure’ that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.“Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa’s current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts (my emphasis) and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

Richard Clarke went on to accuse the Bush Administration, in his recently published book Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, of imagining ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda where none existed. In response to questions about Clarke’s 1999 statements, which seem to suggest Al-Qaeda collaborating with Iraqi operatives, Clarke’s former colleague from the Clinton Administration Daniel Benjamin wrote, “I believe that the al-Qaida-Iraq connection probably remained indirect—that Baghdad had little knowledge of Bin Laden’s investment in the Sudanese chemical weapons production.”

Yet President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in his recent testimony before the 9/11 Commission, insisted that “the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program.” For the Iraqis not to have known that Osama bin Laden was a major investor in the Al-Shifa plant, in my humble opinion, seems to be quite a stretch.

The question of Iraq’s ties to Al-Qaeda has often been confused with the question of whether or not Iraq was directly involved in 9/11. Critics of the Administration insist that it is the President and Vice President who have sown this confusion, while the Vice President claims that lazy or ideologically driven reporters have constantly muddled the two separate issues. Regardless, given these disturbing reports from the 1990s, it is either ignorant or dishonest to insist that the idea of dangerous ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda was the sole creation of the Bush Administration.

The Administration’s critics may insist that none of the evidence out there (and much of it remains frustratingly inconclusive) justified or will ever justify the bitter costs of the Iraq war. This is a serious, coherent position. What is not a serious or honest position is denying that any ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda ever existed, or were entirely fabricated by a warmongering “neocon” cabal.

–From the June 2004 Austin Review