I’m not sure why Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest superb piece in the New Yorker hasn’t made more of a splash. yes, he has some mini-scoops on Saddam’s links with al Qaeda. But its real merit is in helping us understand what levels of empirical evidence are required in the matter of espionage and intelligence. Or to put it another way: the question to be asked of Saddam and al Qaeda is not do we have clear evidence of their connections; but why wouldn’t they be connected? You can look at intelligence entirely inferentially, looking through the myriads of signals and signs and hints and guesses to find hard evidence of, say, a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. Or you can use your common sense, assume such a link and then go back to the intelligence data to see if such an assumption is backed up or disproven.
CONNECTING THE DOTS: This is not the same as making stuff up. It’s simply recognizing the nature of the information available. Here’s a sample of what you get:
In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda operative – a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi-was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi’s mission was successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists. (Training in hijacking techniques was also provided to foreign Islamist radicals inside Iraq, according to two Iraqi defectors quoted in a report in the Times in November of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda operative, the Iraqi-born Mamdouh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liaison in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intelligence. Salim, according to a recent book, “The Age of Sacred Terror,” by the former N.S.C. officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden’s chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons development in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and was extradited to the United States.
This is what is called a proof of principle. It has happened; therefore it can happen. If the consequence of that is a biological or chemical attack on the West, then Western governments have a duty to act sooner rather than later. Given the new risks, containment isn’t an option.
THE PROS GET IT: Goldberg also talks to Robert Gates, former CIA director:
Gates, who was C.I.A. director under George H. W. Bush, said that the evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaeda is not irrefutable, but he noted that ambiguous evidence is an occupational hazard in intelligence work. Gates suggested that the current debate over Iraq’s ties to terrorism is reminiscent of a debate about the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Then, he said, “you had analysts in the C.I.A. who said, ‘Absolutely not, it would be contrary to their interests to support unpredictable, uncontrollable groups.’ There were other analysts who said, ‘Baloney.’ They had a lot of good history, and circumstantial reporting on their side, but they didn’t have good evidence. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and we got hold of the East German Stasi records, we learned, of course, that both the East Germans and the Soviets were supporting Baader-Meinhof and other terrorist groups.” Gates continued, “I have always argued, in light of my fairly detailed knowledge of the shortcomings of our intelligence capabilities, that the fact that we don’t have reliable human intelligence that proves something conclusively is happening is no proof at all that nothing is happening. In these situations, the evidence will almost always be ambiguous. On capabilities, it’s not ambiguous. Can Saddam produce these weapons of mass destruction? Yes.”
If he can produce them, our enemies will get them. And what we found out on September 11 was that if our enemies get them, they will use them. Unless we get them first. Is that really so hard to understand?
The Dish 