Free Republic

In a recent Washington Post Op-Ed former DIA analyst Christina Shelton discussed her intelligence work analyzing links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq and countered some of the conventional wisdom on the subject while taking issue with the way her background and work were depicted in former CIA director George Tenet's recent book "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA."Responding to Tenet's charge that she claimed the debate over Iraq - al Qaeda links was "open-and-shut" and in no need of further analysis Shelton wrote: I said the covert nature of the relationship between Iraq...

Lt. General Michael DeLong discusses intelligence behind U.S. concern over Ansar al-Islam terror/poison camp in Northern IraqA recent conversation Lt. General Michael DeLong revealed new information on prewar intelligence on Iraq that has received little, if any, public attention thus far. General DeLong was the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was directly involved with the pre-invasion preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom. He offered the observation that Bush administration officials appear to have been reluctant thus far in explaining the prewar intelligence and evidence tying members of Saddam Hussein’s regime to the...

Newly elected Pennsylvania Congressman, Democrat Chris Carney, a former Senior Terrorism and Intelligence Advisor at the Pentagon, has recently been quoted in a number of publications discussing his knowledge of and role in prewar Iraq intelligence, particularly on the issue Saddam Hussein’s links to al Qaeda. His views on the subject are a stark contrast to many in his party, particularly Senator Carl Levin, who has long expressed his belief that any link between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda was a manufacture of the Bush administration. Carney's comments and experience on the issue may even put him in the...

US Vice-President Dick Cheney repeated assertions on Sunday on links between the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda despite a recent Senate intelligence committee report that concluded otherwise. In defending the decision to invade Iraq despite its lack of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Cheney said the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda. “If we had to do [it] over again, we would do exactly the same thing,”...

The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out?Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests." Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows...

The Bush administration is preparing to release never-before-seen documents captured when U.S. forces liberated Baghdad that chronicle the extensive training of thousands of radical Islamic terrorists by Saddam Hussein's regime. "The secret training took place primarily at three camps in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak," reports the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who adds that the operations began two years before the 9/11 attacks and were "directed by elite Iraqi military units." The existence of these documents, and the nature of what they describe, has been confirmed to the Standard by eleven U.S. government officials, Hayes says. If true, the documents...

Baghdad, 23 May - The number two of the al-Qaeda network, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Iraq under a false name in September 1999 to take part in the ninth Popular Islamic Congress, former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi has revealed to pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. In an interview, Allawi made public information discovered by the Iraqi secret service in the archives of the Saddam Hussein regime, which sheds light on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorist network. He also said that both al-Zawahiri and Jordanian militant al-Zarqawi probably entered Iraq in the same period. "Al-Zawahiri was summoned by Izza Ibrahim...

Here's an interesting summarized timeline showing several important points that I've suggested earlier. 1) Saddam and UBL had a relationship 2) The claims of that relationship stemmed not from a BUSHLIED conspiracy theory or an OSP neocon crap, but from the Clinton Administration 3) Operation Desert Fox emboldened Saddam and UBL, and proved to both: a) America wasn't serious about fighting either one of them b) If there was to be a drastic change in US policy re Iraq (which both UBL and Saddam wanted), then drastic action would be needed 4) The Desert Fox bombing campaign was so weak...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden has said in a full Internet broadcast of a video, partly aired by Al Jazeera last week, that George W. Bush had dragged the United States into a quagmire in Iraq and warned of retaliation for Iraqi deaths. In the video posted on websites often used by Islamists, as results from the U.S. presidential election were being announced on Wednesday, bin Laden said Bush had ignored advice against "an unjustified war on Iraq for which there would be no end". The video appeared to be bin Laden's first direct threat against the United States...

The Connection, The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda. From the June 7, 2004 issue: by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and...

Saddam's Files New evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Thursday, May 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT One thing we've learned about Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein is that the former dictator was a diligent record keeper. Coalition forces have found--literally--millions of documents. These papers are still being sorted, translated and absorbed, but they are already turning up new facts about Saddam's links to terrorism. We realize that even raising this subject now is politically incorrect. It is an article of faith among war opponents that there were no links whatsoever--that "secular" Saddam and fundamentalist Islamic...

Reports are emerging that Sadam Hussein of Iraq gave money and assistance to Bin Laden and his terrorist network to attack the World Trade Centers (WTC) and Pentagon on 9/11/2001 using hijacker pilots flying out of Boston’s Logan airport and other US airports. Prior to the WTC attack the USG has stated that Bin Laden was involved in the bombings of Kobar Towers (Saudi Arabia apartments for US soldiers), Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies and the USS Cole. Recently, Israeli government officials and Lorie Mylroie, an expert on Hussein and Iraq, have given interviews published in several articles implicating Hussein and ...

<p>November 12, 2001 -- The CIA has evidence that two more hijackers, besides terror leader Mohamed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence officials earlier this year - bolstering arguments for a Baghdad role in the attacks, it was reported yesterday.</p> <p>The two other skyjackers were Atta's friends and co-conspirators, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, who were believed to have been at the controls of two of the pirated jets on Sept. 11.</p>

Some dismiss it as being akin to Elvis sightings, but a few top Defense officials think Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was an Iraqi agent. The theory stems from a never-before-reported allegation that McVeigh had allegedly collected Iraqi telephone numbers. Why haven't we heard this before about the case of the executed McVeigh? Conspiracy theorists in the Pentagon think it's part of a coverup.

As it becomes increasingly clear that al-Qaida was responsible for the horrific attacks in Madrid, one question keeps popping up: If there's no link between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, why did al-Qaida blow up those trains? Critics of the Iraq war have been saying for more than two years that there was never any al-Qaida-Saddam link. After all, they'd say, Saddam is secular and bin Laden is a religious fanatic. When Howard Dean was trotted out for last Sunday's "Meet the Press" to square off against Condoleezza Rice, the former Vermont governor rehashed the familiar complaint.

An Iraqi prisoner details Saddam's links to Osama bin Laden's terror network. A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who...

Months before the Iraq war of 2003, The New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times published reports about Ansar al-Islam ("Partisans of Islam"), a brutal band of al-Qa‘ida guerrillas based in a Kurdish area of northern Iraq near the Iranian border. U.S. officials pointed to Ansar al-Islam as the "missing link" between al-Qa‘ida and Saddam Hussein. When Secretary of State Colin Powell made the U.S. case for war against Saddam at the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he cited Ansar al-Islam as a key reason for invasion. Powell drew links among the group, al-Qa‘ida, and Saddam,...

The investigator picked by the CIA to replace David Kay as head of the U.S. team in Iraq hunting for weapons of mass destruction has told British reporters that he saw terrorists training near Baghdad in airplane hijack techniques resembling those used in the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 account to the London Observer, Charles Duelfer, the former No. 2 United Nations weapons inspector who was appointed Thursday to head the U.S.'s Iraq Survey Group, corroborated the testimony of Iraqi military defectors who said they helped train radical Muslim recruits to hijack U.S. airliners aboard a Boeing 707 fuselage...

"Many critics of the war in Iraq belittle claims of Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorism. In fact, for years, he was militant Islam’s Benefactor-in-Chief." “I never believed in the link between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and Islamist terrorism,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flatly declared in an October 21 essay published in Australia’s Melbourne Herald Sun.[1] “Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one,” said Senator Ted Kennedy (D–Massachusetts) on October 16. “We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from al Qaeda. It was not.”[2] As President Bush continues to...

Iraqi Officers: Al Qaida Operatives Were Trained For War Near Baghdad (Trained For 911 By Iraq - Take That Rats!!) Saudi nationals helped Saddam Hussein recruit and finance Al Qaida insurgents as part of preparations to confront U.S. troops in Iraq. Iraqi officers who have been interrogated by the United States and coalition officials reported the Saudi role in recruiting and training of Al Qaida units in Iraq. The officers said Saddam, through Saudi contacts, had invited Al Qaida insurgents to form suicide and other units to stop the U.S. military in March. Saddam's contacts with Al Qaida, the officers...