Americas

Bush: Iraq at center of terror fight

(AP)
Updated: 2007-05-24 08:35

Bush said another suspected al-Qaida operative, Ali Salih al-Mari, was training in poisoning at a camp in Afghanistan and dispatched to the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks to "serve as a sleeper agent ready for follow-on attacks."

Bush said bin Laden attempted to send a new commander to Iraq, an Iraqi-born terrorist named Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. Al-Iraqi, who was al-Qaida's top commander in Afghanistan, was captured last year and recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Democrats and other critics have accused Bush of selectively declassifying intelligence, including portions of a sensitive National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, to justify the US-led invasion on grounds that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. That assertion proved false.

Rand Beers, national security adviser to John Kerry's 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, contended Wednesday that the Bush administration was releasing intelligence to buttress the argument that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism while a number of intelligence sources say the most recent attacks or planned attacks against the US and its allies have originated in Pakistan instead.

"Bin Laden is using Iraq to kill and demonize the United States while remaining secure and planning further operations in Pakistan," Beers said.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said new details about the plots were declassified because the intelligence community had tracked all leads from the information and the players were either dead or in US custody.

In May 2005, al-Libi was captured. Several months later, in December 2005, al-Rabia was killed in Pakistan. In June of 2006, al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq in a US airstrike.

Actually, making the new information public earlier might have allowed Bush to use it to his political advantage, Townsend said. "This is kind of late to be able to bring this to the game," she said, adding that intelligence officials needed time to exploit the information.