The Iraq -- Al Qaeda Connections

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The Iraq -- Al Qaeda Connections
By Richard Miniter _Published_ _09/25/2003_
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Every day it seems another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts. Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours. What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.

That is why is important to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight. Indeed, many of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record -- from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers -- attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam going back to 1994.

Those who try to whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just ignore it. So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public record for months or years:


* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")


* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.
 
All this is interesting...except for the fact that Colin Powell recently admitted that there was no evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Someone's lying...who?
 
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Originally posted by acludem
All this is interesting...except for the fact that Colin Powell recently admitted that there was no evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Someone's lying...who?


Here's the deal. If they get behind this data closer to election-time, the opposition will have less time to refute it. They're just waiting. Patiently. For victory.

That's my guess. You better start facing it, and spinning. For YOUR sake.:D
 
most of the american people (who AREN'T rabid partisans) would not take kindly to having this info strung out as an 'election prop'.
 
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Originally posted by DKSuddeth
most of the american people (who AREN'T rabid partisans) would not take kindly to having this info strung out as an 'election prop'.

The american people also don't like candidates who play politics with national security.

The Iraqi Invasion was both justifiable and well-executed. Reams of evidence exist to support both of these assertions. Continuing to deny this evidence is such a brazen act of politically motivated intellectual dishonesty, that it's laughable that dems don't realize how transparent their false angry screeds (i.e." this was an illegal, immoral, and unjust war" repeated ad infinutm ) are. Sadly this is where the main constinuency the dems are these days, young idiots, brainwashed by liberal academics, who actually thinks our nation or any other semi to fully civilized nation has not relied upon war to defeat tyranny, and yes protect it's access to resources. It's called reality. Look into it.
 
Heres your reality. Numerous times in the months before invading Iraq the american people must have heard about WMD's over 100 times. There should be ZERO doubt that this was stressed time and again in order to whip up a frenzy of fear to support this invasion. Despite all the other reasons, justifiable they may be, the majority of the populace of this country were swayed by the WMD argument. Anything coming out now, like liberation or UN violations, is secondary justification because there have been no WMD's found.

You could have piles and reams of evidence about anything else, the fact remains that WMD's were used as a primary reason to scare the people for support.
 
I don't think you quite understood or listened to what acludem said, so here it is in all caps to get your attention:

COLIN POWELL SAID THAT THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL-QUEDA.

The american people also don't like candidates who play politics with national security.

The Iraqi Invasion was both justifiable and well-executed. Reams of evidence exist to support both of these assertions. Continuing to deny this evidence is such a brazen act of politically motivated intellectual dishonesty, that it's laughable that dems don't realize how transparent their false angry screeds (i.e." this was an illegal, immoral, and unjust war" repeated ad infinutm ) are. Sadly this is where the main constinuency the dems are these days, young idiots, brainwashed by liberal academics, who actually thinks our nation or any other semi to fully civilized nation has not relied upon war to defeat tyranny, and yes protect it's access to resources. It's called reality. Look into it.

Instead of basing all your beliefs on what Ann Coulter says, why not try thinking for yourself for a change?
 
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Originally posted by DKSuddeth
Heres your reality. Numerous times in the months before invading Iraq the american people must have heard about WMD's over 100 times. There should be ZERO doubt that this was stressed time and again in order to whip up a frenzy of fear to support this invasion. Despite all the other reasons, justifiable they may be, the majority of the populace of this country were swayed by the WMD argument. Anything coming out now, like liberation or UN violations, is secondary justification because there have been no WMD's found.

You could have piles and reams of evidence about anything else, the fact remains that WMD's were used as a primary reason to scare the people for support.


What an intentionally simplistic and ignorant view. But I guess opinions are like a'holes as they say. This one just smells a little more than others to me. Maybe I just have highly refined sensibilities or something.


:rolleyes:
 
Anything coming out now, like liberation or UN violations, is secondary justification because there have been no WMD's found.

UN violations can't be used as an argument because the US doesn't recognize it as an authority any more.
 
Originally posted by Palestinian Jew
I don't think you quite understood or listened to what acludem said, so here it is in all caps to get your attention:

COLIN POWELL SAID THAT THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL-QUEDA.

He's not saying it now. He'll say it closer to the election. Didn't I already explain that to you?
Instead of basing all your beliefs on what Ann Coulter says, why not try thinking for yourself for a change?

Good one, Archie! Where's jughead?
 
Originally posted by rtwngAvngr
What an intentionally simplistic and ignorant view.


intentionally simplistic and ignorant, you just described almost every news conference, speech, and soundbite given to the american people by Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Powell prior to the invasion.

But I guess opinions are like a'holes as they say. This one just smells a little more than others to me.

then maybe you should shower.

Maybe I just have highly refined sensibilities or something.

and maybe you're just a plain idiot.



:laugh: :laugh:
 
Originally posted by Palestinian Jew
I don't think you quite understood or listened to what acludem said, so here it is in all caps to get your attention:

COLIN POWELL SAID THAT THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL-QUEDA.



Instead of basing all your beliefs on what Ann Coulter says, why not try thinking for yourself for a change?

And why not quote someone properly for a change? What Powell said was "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. 'But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
 
Originally posted by DKSuddeth
intentionally simplistic and ignorant, you just described almost every news conference, speech, and soundbite given to the american people by Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Powell prior to the invasion.



then maybe you should shower.



and maybe you're just a plain idiot.



:laugh: :laugh:

While I will concede those other scenarios are possible, they are quite unlikely.:D
 
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,'

Which means the same thing as there is no connection.


He's not saying it now. He'll say it closer to the election. Didn't I already explain that to you?

So you are also saying the Bush administration is lying? Your logic is totally wrong, how can the dems not have time to refute your "proof" when all they have to do is point to Colin Powell.

Blind partisanship.

:laugh:
 
Which means the same thing as there is no connection.

Oh really? Sounds to me like he is just saying they don't have any proof, yet. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist"

Bottom line, your quote was wrong, he DID NOT say no connection existed, he just said he doesn't have solid proof.
 
Originally posted by Palestinian Jew
UN violations can't be used as an argument because the US doesn't recognize it as an authority any more.

Not true at all. If we didn't recognize the UN, we would not be paynig money to them, we would send ambassadors there to get UN resolutions passed, and we'd take back five city blocks in Manhattan! Your point is completely invalid.
 
Sorry everyone!!!

This thread is completely invalid.

The unamerican administration said "there is no connection" themselves.

You know why? If its a confrimed lie, they cant make the link anymore.
 
Not true at all. If we didn't recognize the UN, we would not be paynig money to them, we would send ambassadors there to get UN resolutions passed, and we'd take back five city blocks in Manhattan! Your point is completely invalid.

I don't think it can be used as a point for going to war with iraq as we ignored the UN's opinion. We can't just say that we'll follow their codes about taking saddam out b/c of violations, then when they say that they are against action, we ignore them. Shouldn't we either ignore everything of the UN or recognize everything they do?
 
originally posted by aclu
Shouldn't we either ignore everything of the UN or recognize everything they do?
________________ _______________
To do either without the other would be feeble minded policy. We're doing both.
 

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