#3 Late Edition with Wolf BlitzerBLITZER: Let me go -- Director Woolsey, wrap up this segment for us. There's an article in the Weekly Standard that came out, referring to a memo that Doug Feith wrote, a top Pentagon official, to the chairman and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggesting that the linkage, the evidence, the intelligence evidence involving al Qaeda's relationship with Saddam Hussein, goes back more than a decade.
Are you convinced that there has been a close relationship between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime throughout the '90s?
WOOLSEY: Oh, definitely. It had been all along. George Tenet wrote a year ago October to the Congress and told them that, said there'd been a relationship going back a decade. Training in -- by Iraqi intelligence of al Qaeda in, quote, "poisons, gases and explosives."
This memo expands on that. It's a different question whether Iraqi intelligence had something to do with 9/11. That is certainly arguable. It is a different issue.
But a relationship between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda, this memo -- and I've seen this on the Web -- puts flesh on the bones of what George Tenet wrote a year ago.
And I would say, after reading this piece in the Weekly Standard, anybody who says there is no working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence going back to the early '90s, they can only say that if they're illiterate. This is a slam dunk. |