By Stephen F. Hayes
In the wake of 9/11 no one knew when the next attack would come, or where it would come from. America's enemies seemed gathered on all sides, and for several nerve-racking months, we lived in fear that the perpetrators might be plotting another action or, worse, that our most dangerous enemies -- al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's murderous regime in Iraq -- could be banding together against us.
The Bush administration and CIA director George Tenet warned against complacency and pointed to growing indications that al Qaeda and Iraq were in league. But their case was undercut by unnamed intelligence officials, skeptical politicians, and a compliant media. So America relaxed. A comforting consensus settled in: Osama bin Laden was an impassioned fundamentalist, Saddam a secular autocrat. The two would never, could never, work together. ABC News reported that there was no connection between them, and the New York Times said so too, and pretty soon just about everyone agreed.
Just about everyone was wrong.
In The Connection, Stephen Hayes draws on CIA debriefings, top-secret memos from our national intelligence agencies, and interviews with Iraqi military leaders and Washington insiders to demonstrate that Saddam and bin Laden not only could work together, they did -- a curious relationship that stretches back more than a decade and may include collaboration on terrorist acts, chemical-weapons training, and sheltering some of the world's most wanted radicals.
Stephen Hayes's bombshell Weekly Standard piece on this topic was cited by Vice President Cheney as the "best source of information" about the Saddam-al Qaeda connections. Now Hayes delves even deeper, exposing the inner workings of America's deadliest opponents and providing a clear-eyed corrective to reams of underreported, politicized, and just plain wrong information.
The Connection is both a gripping snapshot of the War on Terror and a case study in how bureaucratic assumptions and media arrogance can put us all at risk.
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By Yossef Bodansky
In his book two years before the major terror attack on the U.S., terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky, the man the U.S. Congress turns to for advice on the matter, revealed the relationship between bin Laden and Hussein � naming names, dates and times of strategic meetings between Iraq and al-Qaida. -Joseph Farah
Who is Osama bin Laden -- the only terrorist leader ever to have declared a holy war against America? What drives him and those he leads to hate a West that helped enrich and arm them? Bin Laden's name has been linked to a number of incidents that have cost American lives, including the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and the destruction of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Now, he is linked to the recent catastropic assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Here is a comprehensive account of the rise of bin Laden. In meticulous detail, world-renowned terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky uncovers the events in bin Laden's life that turned the once-promising engineering student into a cold-blooded leader of radical Islam. In the process, Bodansky reveals a chilling story that is as current as today's headlines but as ancient as the Crusades -- a story that transcends bin Laden and any other single man. This book is a sobering wakeup call.
Bodansky, an internationally renowned military and threat analyst, is the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. In addition, he is the director of reseearch of the International Strategic Studies Association and senior editor for the Defense & Foreign Affairs group of publications. The author of eight books on international terrorism and global crises and a former senior consultant to the U.S. departments of State and Defense, Bodansky actively participates in international forums and conference in the United States and abroad.
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