iraq and al queda connection

[dairygirl4u2c]

I remember pro-war people and the president saying that Iraq and Al-Quieda were directly connected. I post or ask people for proof, but they never give any. Threads go on without much response. Or, people point to how both are terrorists, so in that sense they're related.
Of course that doesn't say how Iraq and Al-Queda got together for 911 as was the words, lies perhaps, being told. Even when someone at least points out how al quieda had communicated in the early ninties, that's very week evidence for what was being conveyed to the public.
[url="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842"]http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842[/url]

Edited February 8, 2006 by dairygirl4u2c

[ironmonk]

I do not recall anyone claiming a connection.

Saddam did pay $25,000 to all suicide bombers families when their kids blew themselves up. Saddam support all terrorist groups. He had no known direct connection to al quesadillia.

[photosynthesis]

hahaha... al quesadilla.... i am eating a quesadilla now and it is yummy

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' date='Feb 7 2006, 11:07 PM']I remember pro-war people and the president saying that Iraq and Al-Quieda were directly connected. I post or ask people for proof, but they never give any. Threads go on without much response. Or, people point to how both are terrorists, so in that sense they're related.
Of course that doesn't say how Iraq and Al-Queda got together for 911 as was the words, lies perhaps, being told. Even when someone at least points out how al quieda had communicated in the early ninties, that's very week evidence for what was being conveyed to the public.
[url="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842"]http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842[/url]
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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 Ladens 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 Saddams record dont dispute this evidence; they just ignore it. So lets 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, Saddams 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 Saddams 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 Saddams 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 Iraqs 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 Janes Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Janes reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaedas 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, Iraqs 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," Londons 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 Ladens fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddams 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: Youll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Ladens group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq."

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddams 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. Zawahiris 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 Qaedas 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. Zarqawis 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 Zarqawis 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 Qaedas 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 Saddams 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 Londons 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. Krekars group was funded by "Saddam Husseins regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islams 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 Qaedas avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harms 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 Ladens personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Ladens 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 Saddams 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."

Edited February 9, 2006 by KnightofChrist

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' date='Feb 7 2006, 11:07 PM']I remember pro-war people and the president saying that Iraq and Al-Quieda were directly connected. I post or ask people for proof, but they never give any. Threads go on without much response. Or, people point to how both are terrorists, so in that sense they're related.
Of course that doesn't say how Iraq and Al-Queda got together for 911 as was the words, lies perhaps, being told. Even when someone at least points out how al quieda had communicated in the early ninties, that's very week evidence for what was being conveyed to the public.
[url="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842"]http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842[/url]
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PS, The President NEVER said "Iraq and Al-Qaeda were [color=red]directly[/color] connected." Longstanding ties or communication is not "very week evidence", (when you look at the evidence) the only weak thing in the 90's was Clinton. Thanks to oh Billy, Osama bin Laden is free.

In your link is this the same Gen. Clark that now defends and is a lawer for the Mass Murderer of Iraqis, Saddam?

[Jaime]

[quote name='KnightofChrist' date='Feb 8 2006, 09:05 PM']PS, The President NEVER said "Iraq and Al-Qaeda were [color=red]directly[/color] connected."  Longstanding ties or communication is not "very week evidence", (when you look at the evidence) the only weak thing in the 90's was Clinton.  Thanks to oh Billy, Osama bin Laden is free.

In your link is this the same Gen. Clark that now defends and is a  lawer for the Mass Murderer of Iraqis, Saddam?
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State of the Union address

[quote]And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaida. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. [/quote]

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Feb 8 2006, 08:13 PM']State of the Union address
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Thats nice, and you've proven my point, thank you. Bush does not say "[color=red]directly[/color]".

[Jaime]

[quote name='KnightofChrist' date='Feb 8 2006, 09:31 PM']Thats nice, and you've proven my point, thank you.  Bush does not say "[color=red]directly[/color]".
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Probably because he can't speak in colors

He also can't say nuclear

Edited February 9, 2006 by jaime

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Feb 8 2006, 08:37 PM']Probably because he can't speak in colors

He also can't say nuclear
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So he has a speach problem, so do I. You only lower yourself by insluting ppl like that. Can you say WMD found in Iraq?

Found: 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium

Found: 1,500 gallons of chemical weapons

Found: Roadside bomb loaded with sarin gas

Found: 1,000 radioactive materials--ideal for radioactive dirty bombs

Found: 17 chemical warheads--some containing cyclosarin

[Jaime]

And you lower yourself when you argue semantics. He didn't use the word "directly"

please


He drew a direct line between 9/11 and Iraq. He stated in the State of the Union that Saddam protected Al Qaida.


And you're arguing semantics

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Feb 8 2006, 08:56 PM']And you lower yourself when you argue semantics.  He didn't use the word "directly"

please
He drew a direct line between 9/11 and Iraq.  He stated in the State of the Union that Saddam protected Al Qaida.
And you're arguing semantics
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He did not say Iraq partook in the 9/11 attacks, it would have been a direct line had he said Iraq helped in the 9/11 attacks but he didnt. Bush was pointing out we must learn from the lessons of 9/11. That we could not allow Iraq to futher help out Al Qaida in anyway.

[Jaime]

The connection is that he used 9/11 to generate fear. Then he stated that Saddam's support of Al Qaida would create another if he wasn't contained.


But at least you're admitting to the fact that Bush said there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaida

Small steps Ellie... small steps

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Feb 8 2006, 09:13 PM']The connection is that he used 9/11 to generate fear.  Then he stated that Saddam's support of Al Qaida would create another if he wasn't contained.
But at least you're admitting to the fact that Bush said there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaida

Small steps Ellie... small steps
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Wow a wacko lib you all do exist! Generate fear? Humm... I cant really respond to a wacko response with anything sane so... I wont. Yes of course Saddam could have very well support another 9/11, but thanks to Republicans and The US Army thats notta gonna happen. I never said I or Bush didnt believe there was a connection, I said Bush never said there was a "direct connection" or a direct connection between 9/11 and Saddam.

Again no sane response to this Ellie person. Perhaps she is one of the voices in your head? What does Ellie tell you to do, is she here now?

Edited February 9, 2006 by KnightofChrist

[Jaime]

[quote] I never said I or Bush didnt believe there was a connection, I said Bush never said there was a "direct connection" [/quote]

Somebody's been taking lessons from Clinton on how to define words like direct.
How many tap dance lessons did you take?

And thank you for admitting that you just can't respond sanely.

And why is it that conservatives never get obscure Jodie Foster bad scifi film references?

Edited February 9, 2006 by jaime

[KnightofChrist]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Feb 8 2006, 09:51 PM']Somebody's been taking lessons from Clinton on how to define words like direct.
How many tap dance lessons did you take? 

And thank you for admitting that you just can't respond sanely. 

And why is it that conservatives never get obscure Jodie Foster bad scifi film references?
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No sorry you misunderstand, there was no direct link between Saddam and 9/11 and Bush never said there was. Why because there was no direct link between Saddam and 9/11. Speaking of Clinton he had three times he could have killed or captured Osama bin Laden, but Clinton let him go free. I've never had tap dancing lessons but ol' BIlly probably has had a few lap dances.

Oh I responed sanely just sarcasticly to a sarcastic response. And I dont really watch Jodie Foster films... not after Contact.

Edited February 9, 2006 by KnightofChrist