WASHINGTON,
August 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In what seems to be the
latest U.S. justification for striking Iraq, the Washington Post on
Wednesday, August 21, quoted U.S. intelligence officials as claiming
that at least a handful of ranking members of Al-Qaeda network have
taken refuge in Iraq.
The
latest claim “give[s] the Bush administration another rationale for
possible military action against the Iraqi government,” the paper
said.
The
information about an alleged Al-Qaeda presence in the
12-year-sanction-hit Iraq comes at a time the U.S. is facing increasing
criticism from the international community for its intent on attacking
Iraq without having any evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass
destruction or is linked in any way to Al-Qaeda network.
CIA
officials said they allegedly discovered “the number and senior rank
of the Al-Qaeda members who have been mentioned in recent classified
intelligence reports as being in Iraq,” said the Post.
"There
are some names you'd recognize," one defense official said.
Alluding
to these reports, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday,
August 20, repeated earlier allegations about Al-Qaeda's presence in
Iraq, but he declined to elaborate on the evidence, the daily said.
"I
suppose that, at some moment, it may make sense to discuss that
publicly," he said at a news conference. "It doesn't today.
But what I have said is a fact, that there are Al-Qaeda in a number of
locations in Iraq."
Now
the CIA has dug out the needed evidence.
The
reports of a more significant Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq come amid
Pentagon planning for a possible invasion of the country and would
appear to back President Bush's arguments for toppling President Saddam
Hussein, the paper added.
“Eager
to bolster the case for military action, administration hawks have
pressed for months for whatever evidence can be uncovered about any
links between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist
network,” it said.
One
of the most tantalizing claims, involving a Czech report of a meeting in
Prague in April 2001 between September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an
Iraqi intelligence agent, has yet to be corroborated. But U.S. officials
continue to probe this and other possible connections.
As
fresh evidence of Hussein's so-called “links to terrorism”, White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer pointed Tuesday to the death this week of
Abu Nidal, a dissident of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah
resistance movement in Baghdad, where he had been living for the past
four years. "The fact that only Iraq would give safe haven to Abu
Nidal demonstrates the Iraqi regime's complicity with global
terror," Fleischer said.
The
U.S. has dubbed as “terrorist” all Palestinian movements battling
against Israeli occupation, including Fatah.
Though
a senior U.S. intelligence official admitted there is no evidence that
the Iraqi President has "welcomed in or sheltered" Al-Qaeda
fugitives, said the Post, another official claimed "they aren't the
official guests of the government," describing them largely as
still "on the run."
But
Rumsfeld, eager to go ahead with the plans to bomb Iraq, scoffed at the
notion that Al-Qaeda members are hiding in Iraq without the full
knowledge of the government or its protection.
"In
a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near-total control
over its population, it's very hard to imagine that the government is
not aware of what's taking place in the country," the Pentagon
leader said.
Tariq
Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, said Tuesday in an interview with
CBS News, that members of Al-Qaeda are operating in Iraq, but in the
northern part of the country under the control of Kurdish opposition
leader Jallal Tallabani, "an ally of Mr. Rumsfeld."
"It
is not under the control of the government," Aziz said.
The
Bush administration has been working with Tallabani and the leaders of
other Iraqi opposition groups to build a united front against Hussein.
At
one point in Tuesdays news conference, Rumsfeld expressed a measure of
frustration with the intense public attention that the administration's
deliberations about Iraq have received in recent weeks. He said news
organizations are mistaken "to focus excessively on this one
subject and particularize everything to it," calling the debate
"a little out of balance."
"I
don't know what one can do about that, except that I've found that from
time to time, I'll give an interview and never mention the word Iraq,
and I find that the whole interview is cast around Iraq," he said
.
