Verdict Iraq and 9/11

PV Vivekanand

IN a strange twist of American justice, a federal judge in New York has found Iraq partly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and awarded over $100 million to the families of two people who died in the aerial assault against the World Trade Center towers.
However, and despite contradictions, the ruling could be used by successive US administrations to keep Iraq under indefinite pressure if the current process in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq leads to a dilution of the American grip on the country.
The verdict is expected to trigger hundreds of claims to be filed with US lawcourts claiming compensation from Iraq for victims of the attacks, and that would essentially mean that the Bush administration caught in its own trap of charges it made implicating Iraq and Saddam Hussein as sources of international terrorism with little substantiation.
The ruling was strange because the evidence cited by lawyers for  the families of George Smith andTimothy Soulas, two of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks in New York and Washington, was based on public statements made by senior US officials. These officials included former CIA director James Woolsey and from author Laurie Mylroie who have claimed that Iraq "provided material support" to the Al Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden. Also cited was a statement by US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN where he asserted that Iraq supported "Islamist terrorism."
The lawyers conceded that the evidence "barely" established a link
between Al Qaeda and Iraq was enough for a "reasonable jury," according to a report in the USA Today newspaper.
The whole episode has an air of superficiality when seen against the track record of the American judiciary.
Despite the public claims made by American officials, no tangible evidence has been found to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq except unsubstatiated reports that a senior Iraqi intelligence official had met with the purported leader of the Sept.11 assault team, Mohammed Atta, in Eastern Europe in April 2001, and a claim that was later found to be hollow by an Iraqi defector that Osama Bin Laden had visited Baghdad in 1998.
Documents said to have been found in the office of the Iraqi intelligence ministry in post-war Baghdad indicated that an unidentified Al Qaeda operative had visited the Iraqi capital in early 1998, but that could be hardly be evidence -- in any sense of the word in a court of law -- that Saddam Hussein had any role in the attacks in the US that occurred more than three years later.
Indeed, intelligence findings deliberately suppressed by the American and British government say that there could not have been any link between Saddam and Bin Laden if only because of their ideological differences.
Bin Laden, who followed a puritanical form of Islam, has never concealed his distaste for Saddam, whom he had accused of using the faith for political purposes and consolidate his grip on power. Bin Laden also publicly blamed Saddam for having given the Americans a pretext to military intervene in the Gulf and stay on in the region by invading Kuwait in 1991.
And, indeed, if Al Qaedd is behind the post-war bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, then one could bet that they were carried out not because of any sense for revenge for Saddam's ouster but in retaliation for the overall American approach to the Middle East and what many perceive as American hostility towards Islam.
However, that does not change the reality that the ruling has been made by a US court implicating Iraq in the attacks and Iraq is hardly in a position to defend itself.
The ruling also found Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime partly responsible for the attacks -- again a case where no defence could be put up.
The verdict has to be seen against the backdrop of a heavy dose of what could be nothing but American spin that has led to more than half of Americans believing that Saddam was behind the Sept.11 attacks as indicated in opinion polls prior to the US war that toppled him in April this year.
While the American judicial system could not accused of being politically influenced, the court ruling strengthens the argument that George W Bush is bent upon somehow proving to American voters ahead of 2004 elections that he was right in invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. The argument gathers more credibility, given that the US occupiers of Iraq have yet to produce any evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction -- the prime reason that Bush cited for his decision to wage war against Iraq and oust the Saddam regime from power.
How are the families which have been awarded the claim going to collect?
That may yet prove to be another landmark turning.
Bush has at his disposal billions of dollars in frozen Iraqi assets transferred to him, but the funds are earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction. The US president could hardly be expected to permit those funds to be used to settle the claims, particularly that hundreds of similar lawsuits are being prepared and sent to US lawcourts.
Ironically, Bush would have gladly used the funds to settle the claims had the verdict came before he launched the war and ousted Saddam. Now he and his people could be expected to fight tooth and nail against any attempt to touch the booty assigned to rebuild Iraq as a matter of American priority.
Could the US-endorsed regime that would take power in Iraq be expected to be held responsible for settling the claim?
Again the answer could not but be no. Washington has a vested interest in protecting the regime it would install in post-war Iraq and it is hardly likely that Bush would allow it to be exposed to a torrent of claims that could run into tens of billions of dollars.
If anything, the US is pressing other countries to write off even the legitimate debts that Iraq incurred during the Saddam regime's existence in power. Against that backdrop, the question could all but be ruled out whether Washington would care much for Sept.11 compensation since it should know well that Saddam could not have had any role in the attacks.
Indeed, the Bush administration has left a vulnerable flank in its haste to implicate Iraq in the attacks when it set up a separate fund for compensation for Sept.11 attacks and allowed recipients to file claims against Al Qaeda as well as Iraq.
One of the obvious explanations of the scenario after the court verdict is that the US administration could use the Sept.11-linked claims on Iraq as potential leverage and pressure on the country for decades, given that at some point Washington would have to loosen its military grip on Iraqis.