bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath administration, emphasizing that Saddam could not be trusted. Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother." In Iraq itself Saddam abolished sharia courts, cracked down ruthlessly against any Islamist movement, responding with mass executions and torture whenever he felt threatened by them, liberalized society by promoting Western ideals of society and law (he allegedly bragged to western diplomats that the "national drink" of Iraq was Johnnie Walker Blue Label) and usually kept secular Sunnis and Christians within his government. Ultimately, Saddam's resulting image in the Arab world was not of Islamism, but one of the most secular and anti-Islamist leaders of his generation. Therefore, Saddam had been long viewed unfavorably by Islamists, regardless of their allegiance or political ideology, with the general view of him being a corrupt, dishonest, and self-serving dictator rather than an Islamic Leader, an image he tried to portray in his later years in power (he shocked the Arab world when he had a Quran commissioned to be written in his blood). As such, many analysts found it impossible that Saddam would support radical Islamists such as al-Qaeda after fighting Iran for eight years and suppressing his own Islamist rebellions throughout the 90s. Robert Pape's exhaustive study of suicide terrorism found that "al-Qaeda's transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America's closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers 'state sponsors of terrorism'." Pape notes that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from Iraq. Daniel Byman's study of state sponsorship of terrorism similarly did not list Iraq as a significant state sponsor, and called the al-Qaeda connection "a rationale that before the war was strained and after it seems an ever-weaker reed." The conclusion of counterterrorism experts Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman, and Daniel Benjamin, as well as journalists Peter Bergen and Jason Burke (who have both written extensively on al-Qaeda), has been that there is no evidence that suggests any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That was similar to the conclusion of specific investigations by the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and 9/11 Commission, among others. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the CIA's investigation and concluded that the CIA's conclusion that