IF, as the 9/11 Commission concludes, our "failure of
imagination" left America open to the attacks of September 11, then surely some
imagination is called for in tackling one of the riddles that stumped the commission: Where
exactly did Osama bin Laden get the funding to set up shop in Afghanistan, reach around
the globe, and strike the United States?
So let's do some imagining. Let's even imagine a money trail that connects Saddam Hussein
to al Qaeda.
By 1996, remember, bin Laden had been run out of Sudan, and seems to have been out of
money. He needed a fresh bundle to rent Afghanistan from the Taliban, train recruits,
expand al Qaeda's global network, and launch what eventually became the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, over in Iraq about that same time, Saddam Hussein, after a lean stretch under
United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began
exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief.
Both Saddam and bin Laden were, in their way, seasoned businessmen. Both had a taste for
war. Both hated America. By the late 1990s, Saddam, despite continuing sanctions, was
solidly back in business, socking away his purloined billions in secret accounts, but he
had no way to attack the United States directly. Bin Laden needed millions to fund al
Qaeda, which could then launch a direct strike on the United States. Whatever the
differences between Saddam and bin Laden, their circumstances by the late 1990s had all the makings of a deal. Pocket change for
Saddam, financial security for bin Laden, and satisfaction for both--death to Americans.
Now let's talk facts. In 1996, Sudan kicked out bin Laden. He went to Afghanistan,
arriving there pretty much bankrupt, according to the 9/11 Commission report. His family
inheritance was gone, his allowance had been cut off, and Sudan had confiscated his local
assets. Yet, just two years later, bin Laden was back on his feet, feeling strong enough
to issue a public declaration of war on America. In February 1998, in a London-based
Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, he published his infamous fatwa exhorting Muslims to
"kill the Americans and plunder their money." Six months later, in August 1998,
al Qaeda finally went ahead with its long-planned bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. Bin Laden was back in the saddle, and over the next three years he shaped al
Qaeda into the global monster that finally struck on American soil. His total costs, by
the estimates of the 9/11 Commission report, ran to tens of millions of dollars. Even for
a terrorist beloved of extremist donors, that's a pretty good chunk of change.
The commission report says bin Laden got his money from sources such as a "core group
of financial facilitators" in the Gulf states, especially corrupt charities. But the
report concludes: "To date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the
money used for the 9/11 attack. Al Qaeda had many sources of funding and a pre-9/11 annual
budget estimated at $30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda
could easily have found enough money elsewhere to fund the attack."
Elsewhere? One obvious "elsewhere" that no one seems to have seriously
considered was Saddam's secret geyser of money, gushing from the so-called Oil-for-Food
program. That possibility is not discussed in the 9/11 report, and apparently it was not
included in the investigation. A 9/11 Commission spokesman confirms that the commission
did not request Oil-for-Food documentation from the U.N., and none was offered.
Why look at Oil-for-Food? Well, let's review a little more history. When Saddam invaded
Kuwait in 1990, the U.N. imposed sanctions, which remained in place until 2003, when the
United States and its allies finally toppled Saddam. But in 1996, with the aim of
providing for the people of Iraq while still containing Saddam, the U.N. began running its
Oil-for-Food relief program for Iraq. Under terms agreed to by the U.N., Saddam got to
sell oil to buy such humanitarian supplies as food and medicine, to be rationed to the
Iraqi population. But the terms were hugely in Saddam's favor. The U.N. let Saddam choose
his own business partners, kept the details of his deals confidential, and while watching
for weapons-related goods did not, as it turns out, exercise much serious financial
oversight. Saddam turned this setup to his own advantage, fiddling prices on contracts
with his hand-picked partners, and smuggling out oil pumped under U.N. supervision with
U.N.-approved new equipment. Thus did we arrive at the recent General Accounting Office
estimate that under Oil-for-Food, despite sanctions, Saddam managed to skim and smuggle
for himself more than $10 billion out of oil sales meant for relief.
And the timing gets interesting, especially the year 1998. Not only was that the year in
which bin Laden signaled his big comeback in Afghanistan. It was also the year in which
Oil-for-Food jelled into a reliable vehicle for Saddam's scams, a source of enormous,
illicit income.
Oil-for-Food was set up as a limited and temporary measure, starting operations in late
1996 with somewhat ad hoc administration by the U.N., and a mandate that had to be renewed
by the Security Council every six months or so. Less than a year into the program,
however, on October 15, 1997, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan consolidated Oil-for-Food
into what was effectively a permanent U.N. department--the Office of the Iraq Programme
(OIP)--headed by a long-serving U.N. official, Benon Sevan. The Security Council still had
to renew the mandate twice a year, but the process became routine.
Saddam began pushing the envelope, and it was quickly clear he could get away with a lot.
Just two weeks after Annan set up the OIP, Saddam imposed conditions on the U.N. weapons
inspectors that made it impossible for them to operate. Instead of shutting down
Oil-for-Food, Annan on February 1, 1998, urged the Security Council to more than double
the amount of oil Saddam was allowed to sell, a prelude to letting Iraq import oil
equipment to increase production. Annan then flew to Baghdad to reason with Saddam, and on
February 23, 1998 (having met in one of those palaces built under sanctions), Annan and
Saddam reached an agreement that for at least a while allowed the weapons inspectors to
return.
It was a busy time for al Qaeda as well. That same day, February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden
published his "Kill the Americans" fatwa. An intriguing feature of this fatwa
was its prominent mention of Iraq, not just once, but four times. Analysts at the CIA and
elsewhere have long propounded the theory that secular Saddam and religious Osama would
not have wanted to work together. But Saddam's secular style seemed to bother bin Laden
not a whit.
His fatwa presented three basic complaints. Mainly, he
deplored the infidel presence in Saudi Arabia (i.e., the U.S. troops stationed there
during and after the Gulf War). He also cited grievances about Jerusalem, while not even
bothering to mention the Palestinians by name. The rest of his attention, bin Laden
devoted to Iraq and "the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi
people" as well as "the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the
crusader-Zionist alliance" and--here is the specific reference to U.S.-led
sanctions--"the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war."
Two paragraphs later, bin Laden picked up this theme again, calling Iraq the
"strongest neighboring Arab state" of Saudi Arabia, and then citing Iraq, yet
again, as first on a list of four states threatened by America--the other three being
Saudi Arabia (bin Laden's old home and a big source of terrorist funding), Egypt
(birthplace of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood and of bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman
al Zawahiri, who also signed the fatwa), and Sudan (bin Laden's former base).
UNTIL 1998, Iraq had not loomed large in bin Laden's rants. Why, then, such stress on
Iraq, at that particular moment, in declaring war on America? It is certainly possible
that bin Laden simply figured Iraq had become another good selling point, a handy way to
whip up anger at the United States. But it is at least intriguing that the month after bin
Laden's fatwa, in March 1998, as the 9/11 Commission reports, two al Qaeda members visited
Baghdad. And in July 1998, "an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first
with the Taliban and then with bin Laden."
Later in 1998, Saddam kicked out the
weapons inspectors, and he would keep them out for the following four years. The U.N. in
1999 lifted the ceiling entirely on Saddam's oil exports and expanded the range of goods
he could buy. It would keep his deals confidential to the end, and it let Saddam do
business with scores of companies in such graft-friendly climes as Russia and Nigeria, as
well as such terrorist-sponsoring places as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Sudan, and such
financial hideouts as Liechtenstein, Panama, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
Much of Saddam's illicit Oil-for-Food money has yet to be traced. There are now at least
eight official investigations into various aspects of Oil-for-Food, but none so far that
combines adequate staffing and access with a focus on Oil-for-Food itself as the little
black book of Saddam's possible terrorist links. The same kind of bureaucratic walls that
once blocked our own intelligence community from nabbing al Qaeda are here compounded by
the problem that Oil-for-Food was not a U.S. program, but on U.N. turf. And though the
U.N. is the keeper of many of the records, Kofi Annan has displayed no interest in
investigating the possibility that Oil-for-Food might have funded terrorists. Nor has the
Bush administration pursued the matter with the speed and terrorist-tracking expertise it
deserves. Millions of documents believed to contain details of Saddam's Oil-for-Food
deals, quite likely including leads to his illicit side deals, are reportedly locked up in
Baghdad, socked away there by Paul Bremer this past spring, awaiting an audit from Ernst
& Young that is just now getting underway--and not necessarily focused on possible
terrorist ties. The U.N.'s own investigation, led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul
Volcker, seems interested mainly in the U.N. itself. Various congressional investigators
who, unlike the 9/11 Commission, are looking at Oil-for-Food, have had a hard time prying
even the most basic documents out of the U.N.
The U.S. Treasury Department, in its hunt for Saddam's assets, is not looking specifically
at Oil-for-Food, but has provided some of the most telling snippets of information. In
April of this year, Treasury released a list of Saddam front companies its investigation
has so far uncovered, including a major Oil-for-Food contractor in the UAE, Dubai-based Al
Wasel & Babel. Along with trying to procure a sophisticated surface-to-air missile
system for Saddam, Al Wasel & Babel did hundreds of millions' worth of business with
Baghdad under Oil-for-Food, and was just one of some 75 contractors authorized by the U.N.
to deal with Saddam out of the UAE. (As it happens, the 9/11 Commission found that some of
the hijackers' funding flowed through the UAE, but working backward from the al Qaeda end,
the trail eventually vanishes.)
But enough of facts. Let's return to the realm of possibility. Imagine:
From about 1998 on, Oil-for-Food became Saddam's financial network, a system he gamed to
produce huge amounts of illicit income, in partnership with folks who helped him hide and
spend it. If some of that money was going to al Qaeda while Saddam was in power, it may
still be serving as a terrorist resource today. Amid all the consternation over missed
signals and poor coordination leading up to September 11, is it too much to ask that
someone versed in terrorist finances, and able to access both the U.N. Oil-for-Food
records and the documents squirreled away in Baghdad, take a look--an urgent, detailed,
systematic look--at whether Saddam via his Oil-for-Food scams sent money to al Qaeda?
For such a deal, both Saddam and bin Laden had motive and opportunity. And if you read bin
Laden's 1998 fatwa with just a little bit of imagination, those mentions of Iraq, at that
particular moment, in those particular ways, carry a strong whiff of what is known in our
own society as product placement: a message from a sponsor.
An Oil-for-Food Connection? From the August 9, 2004 issue: On whether any of Saddam's loot
made its way into Osama's pockets. by Claudia Rosett 08/09/2004, Volume 009, Issue 45
Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies and a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
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