Several thousand illegal Iraqi immigrants are at large in the US, and are being sought by the FBI to determine if they are a threat to our national security, according to Walter Pincus writing in the February 4th Washington Post. This effort is welcome, but is about 10 years overdue. These immigrants were allowed to come to the US as part of a program to increase diversity, and without necessary “intrusive” and “insensitive” security checks, during the “Global Village” period of the Clinton-Gore Administration. The Bush Administration, based upon the unexplained disappearance of many of these refugees, believes they could be serving Saddam Hussein as sleeper agents who were sent here to do massive harm, when so ordered. Some of these agents may have assisted McVeigh and Nichols, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombers. McVeigh had Iraqi telephone numbers on his person when arrested, according to the New American Magazine; and Jayna Davis, who covered the Murrah Building bombing for the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City, has interviews with several eyewitnesses who saw “Middle Eastern” men at the explosion site. Clinton-Reno may have closed the bombing case prematurely to avoid dealing with the Saddam connection, so that blame would fall on the ”vast right-wing conspiracy.” At least two court cases are pending that could shed light on the situation, if the US government cooperates.

Secretary of State Powell eloquently explained evidence of the al-Qaeda/Iraqi connection during his February 5th speech at the UN. It may have been news to most Americans, but it was not news to Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In an October 2002 letter, CIA Director Tenet wrote to Graham, telling him that Iraq has “provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs,” according to Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker Magazine. In the same letter, Tenet mentioned an Iraqi unit sent to Afghanistan to train al-Qaeda, and predicted an increase in links between Saddam¹s intelligence service and Osama¹s terrorists. Perhaps this explains Senator Graham¹s early support for the Bush Administration¹s hard line on Iraq. In the Washington Times of February 4th, former Defense Department official Frank Gaffney reports another “smoking gun” in the form of a former Saddam confidant, known as the “Gatekeeper,” who has disclosed to his Israeli captors that Saddam has maintained an underground chemical and biological weapons facility, and an assembly area for scud missiles imported from North Korea. All of the weapons in these facilities are prohibited by agreement, and at least some of the chemical and biological weapons could be in the hands of those “missing” Iraqis somewhere in the US--the ones that Clinton-Gore allowed to immigrate without bothersome security checks. Walter Pincus also disclosed in his February 4th Washington Post column that during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraqi intelligence unsuccessfully attempted to carry out terrorist strikes against US embassies. Perhaps Saddam reasoned that it would be better to infiltrate operatives into the US for future attacks on our homeland.

Terrorist cells were recently discovered in London and Paris. The London cell, and possibly the Paris bunch, had in its possession the powerful agent Ricin. In 1997 Iraq had produced and weaponized at least 10 liters of Ricin, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in a New York speech. He said this is enough to kill more than a million persons. The FBI now reportedly believes that al-Qaeda has aligned itself with other terrorist groups to attack the US and our interests abroad. Saddam’s and bin Laden’s apologists will say that the attacks are in “retaliation” for efforts to unseat Hussein as Iraq’s dictator. In reality, such attempts were inevitable, and have probably been in the planning by both Iraqi and al-Qaeda operatives since the end of the first Persian Gulf war--taking advantage of lax security in the Clinton era to infiltrate the US--but not to enhance diversity.