Abu Musab Zarqawi is a despicable terrorist who is thought to be behind a series of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq where he apparently now leads a network called Tawid and Jihad. He has also been linked to deadly and indiscriminate suicide bombings throughout Iraq and to attacks last year in Casablanca and Istanbul.
Zarqawi is currently believed to be in Fallujah, a city of several hundred thousand in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle" that remains under the control of insurgents. He was the intended target of a series of American airstrikes on Fallujah in June of this year. (Apparently, those airstrikes missed.)
According to Vice President Dick Cheney, however, Zarqawi is not in Fallujah, but in Baghdad. Here's what Cheney had to say about him during last night's vice-presidential debate:
But let’s look at what we know about Mr. Zarqawi. We know he was running a terrorist camp, training terrorists in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. We know that when we went into Afghanistan that he then migrated to Baghdad. He set up shop in Baghdad where he oversaw the poisons facility up at Khurmal, where the terrorists were developing ricin and other deadly substances to use. We know he’s still in Baghdad today. … He was in fact in Baghdad before the war and he’s in Baghdad now after the war.
If he's in Baghdad now, it's no wonder that our airstrikes on Fallujah missed him.
Cheney is not the first to suggest that Zarqawi was behind the poison facility/terrorist training camp in Khurmal. He is, however, the first that I have heard suggest that Zarqawi was running this camp from an office in Baghdad. It's an odd suggestion — Khurmal was a remote settlement in northern Iraq, hundreds of miles from Baghdad.
More to the point, Khurmal was located in the northern no-fly zone — an area in which Saddam Hussein's regime had almost no authority and where Iraqi Kurds had established a kind of autonomy.
Which brings us back to a still-unanswered question that I first raised in February of 2003: Why was a terrorist training camp and poison facility allowed to function unmolested in the no-fly zone?
Here, again, is an excerpt from Greg Miller's report in The Los Angeles Times from Feb. 2, 2003:
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where Al Qaeda affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.
But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?
Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the United States has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the Al Qaeda terror network.
The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration to explain its decision to leave the facility, which it has known about for months, unharmed.
"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.
"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said. …
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence committee, said she and other members have been frustrated in their attempts to get an explanation from administration officials in closed-door briefings.
"We've been asking this question and have not been given an answer," Feinstein said. Officials have replied that "they'll have to get back to us."
A White House spokesman said Thursday he had no comment on the matter.
The administration's handling of the issue has emerged as one of the more curious recent elements of the war on terrorism. Failing to intervene appears to be at odds with President Bush's stated policy of preempting terrorist threats, and the facility is in an area where the United States already has a considerable presence.
U.S. intelligence agents are said to be operating among the Kurdish population nearby, and U.S. and British warplanes patrol much of northern Iraq as part of their enforcement of a "no-fly" zone.
The only answer — still, a year and a half later — seems to be that suggested to Miller by an unnamed intelligence official:
Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested that the administration has refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.
"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."
If Vice President Cheney really wants to convince the American people that he and his boss are serious about fighting terrorists — and that they did not grossly undermine that effort by shifting their attention to the war in Iraq — then he really shouldn't mention "Mr. Zarqawi" or Khurmal.
Doing so only serves to remind us that they had the chance to stop Zarqawi 20 months ago, but they didn't because they preferred to keep him around as "evidence" for Colin Powell's United Nations speech.
Every car bombing, every kidnapping and beheading, every attack on American troops carried out by Zarqawi since then is a direct result of that cynical decision.
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