Abu Sayyaf is a terrorist group that has operated in the southern Philippines since the 1990s. Abu Sayyaf has been linked to kidnappings, bombings and assassinations. One of Abu Sayyaf's stated goals is winning the release of Ramzi Yousef, an affiliate member of Abu Sayyaf who was convicted of being the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. (There is some circumstantial evidence that Ramzi Yousef is himself, actually an Iraqi intelligence agent, but I do not find the evidence adduced thus far convincing.)

It is uncontested that Abu Sayyaf is a close al Qaeda affiliate if not an actual member of the larger al Qaeda organization. . . .

Like al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf has its roots in the 1980s war to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Several future members of both groups--including bin Laden and future Abu Sayyaf leader Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani--fought with Muslim mujahideen forces. Soon after the war, the nascent Abu Sayyaf offered training in combat and terrorist skills at a "university" in Pakistan.

The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing, according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.

In interviews conducted over the past six weeks with uniformed officers on the ground in Iraq, intelligence officials, and senior security strategists, several things became clear. Contrary to the claims of its critics, the Bush administration has consistently underplayed the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Evidence of these links existed before the war.

The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres . . .

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state . . . .