J. Iraq's Relationship with al-Qaida
(U) The CIA assessed that:
Regarding the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship, reporting from sources of varying reliability points to a number of contacts, incidents of training, and discussions of Iraqi safehaven for Usama bin Ladin and his organization dating from the early 1990s....
Iraq's interaction with al-Qaida is impelled by mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family and by bin Ladin's interest in unconventional weapons and relocation sites. In contrast to the patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates, the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other - their mutual suspicion suborned by al-Qaida's interest in Iraqi assistance, and Baghdad's interest in al-Qaida's anti-U.S. attacks . . . .
The Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike, but continues to pursue all leads.
( ) In Iraqi Support for Terrorism, the CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida leadership. Further, with respect to the information that was available, the CIA specifically noted that the information was from sources of "varying reliability." To address this issue, the CIA included a great deal of source information describing the varying degrees of reliability among the supporting intelligence reporting. A CTC analyst specified that:
- It says this is what we have. In some cases it characterizes the reporting. This is the quality of it. These are the things we don't like about it. But here's what it says. Because we wanted to make sure we included everything.
Due to the limited amount and questionable quality of reporting on the leadership intentions of Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Ladin, the CIA was unable to make conclusive assessments in Iraqi Support for Terrorism regarding Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida. The CIA stated in the Scope Note:
Our knowledge of Iraq's ties to terrorism is evolving DELETED. . . .
This paper's conclusions-especially regarding the difficult and elusive question of the exact nature of Iraq's relations with al-Qaida-are based on currently available information that is at times contradictory and derived from sources with varying degrees of reliability. . . . While our understanding of Iraq's overall connections to al-Qaida has grown considerably, our appreciation of these links is still emerging.
(U) The CIA relied on intelligence reporting on four additional subjects which they believed would provide circumstantial insight into that relationship. Therefore, Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida is subcategorized in the five following areas:
- Leadership,
- Contacts,
- Training,
- Safehaven, and
- Operational Cooperation.
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