Al Qaeda-Iraqi relationship proven beyond any doubt.

ABC World News Now | 4/27/2004

[Beckwith]

ABC World News Now. April 27, 2004

In an interview broadcast by ABC's World News Now, the leader of the Al Qaeda cell organizing the explosive and chemical attack on the Jordanian security headquarters and the American Embassy in Jordan stated that he received his training from Al-Zawahiri in Iraq, prior to the fall of Afghanistan.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

*ping*

[JohnGalt]

There exists a threat, where have I stated what you are saying?

9 million Mexican invaders, a disarmed citizenry, and a Chinese state hostile to American interests buying up US debt to pay for rebuilding Iraq and free drugs for old people--those are real threats indeed!

I offer for the purposes of civil exchange, that your prioritizing of threats is incorrect.

[b4its2late]

It's not just the libs, there are plenty on this site who are doing the spewing

True. But I don't have enough space to list them all, so "libs" encompasses a majority....

[JohnGalt]

Hence, you believe Chalabi instead of your own government. You are welcome, of course, to such freedoms, I am merely pointing it out.

[WOSG]

"That an al Qaeda member trained in Iraq in WMD has not escaped notice. Keep discounting is."

We've had intelligence that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in the mid-1990s in bombmaking (think embassy bombings), hijacking (think 9/11) and some chemical weapons stuff (think this plot).

but the danger of such training is hard to gauge until it becomes 'actionable'.

"The press wrote over 100 articles about the growing relationship between Saddam and bin Laden in the 90's. "

The press did report that ... oh back before our invasion of Iraq. Since then, the absense of such reports and lack of follow through from the documents seized after april 2003, excepting of course the Weekly Standard's continued reporting, is as curious as the scrubbed-clean missing chemical warhead shells in Iraq.

I think the press WILL NOT REPORT ON ANYTHING FAVORABLE TO BUSH UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION. We are in the election 'spin zone', and boy is the wind blowing hard.

[Peach]

You are so full of it, you don't know what you are talking about.

[Peach]

Good post.

The wind is blowing here too. Bunch of hot air coming from freepers who can't admit when they are wrong. Dead wrong.

[7.62 x 51mm]

Sadly, a *direct demonstration* is what it's going to take to wake-up those masses.

[muskogee]

Imagine yourself as the president. What would you have done after the first WTC bombing to prevent the second? I submit to you that unless it was bold, conspiratorial,controversial, unprecedented, unauthorized by the U.N. or the French, involved Marines and a lot of funding it wouldn't have prevented anything. If you agree, then the question is did the President's bold strike to Iraq prevent future death to Americans on American soil? If you disagree, the question is how does a "conservative" president know what is regional terrorism and what is global terrorism?

[An.American.Expatriate]

The Kurdish autonomous region, established after the 1991 Gulf War, is protected by U.S.-British air patrols. It is governed by The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the east, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the west.

This would be the no fly zone. I know that they had some amount of autonomy, but I do not believe that they were so independant that they could do as they pleased - otherwise they would not have been under sanctions and could have sold thier oil via Turkey, Iran, etc...

There were Iraqi troops in the north - the Kurds fought against them in the war (as did we) - I specifically recall this from the Situation Room threads, but do not have the time to look for the references.

I'm not saying that there was no autonomy and I am not saying that the kurds bear no responsibility - but to state that Iraq had nothing to do with the northern areas is simply not true.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Don't you just love these folks who insist the entire case against Saddam Hussein lives and dies with Chalabi?

Like the DU'ers, these folks have more hatred in their heart for him than they ever had for Saddam.

Don't let it get to you. You're right, here. And you know you're right.

[Peach]

Thanks.

I don't let it get to me; I actually enjoy it some days because the more you debate, the more foolish their argument becomes.

Gotta run.

Be back later.

[WOSG]

"The Weekly Standard and National Review are not magazines I would consider part of the media. But if you want to accept press releases from the PNAC as factual evidence that's your business.."

Actually prior to the war, the New Yorker ran an article about the Saddam / Al Qaeda links and what we in the US knew about it. Good journalism. But the New Yorker hates Bush and so will now run only anti-Bush hate pieces that deny the very evidence this liberal magazine once ran.

The fact that only some conservative magazines will present thse facts is a fine example of how solid the wall of liberal media bias is in America.

Curiously, the article was written IN 2002 BEFORE BUSH MADE A CASE FOR WAR. I read it; it is very interesting. But I cant find a link --- it's been scrubbed! ...
http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/Archives/Archive_05/wwwboard/messages/193.html

See also the guts of this article, mentioning again the New Yorker 2002 article.
http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_04/7235.html

Here is what was written in the New Yorker in Feb 2003:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030210fa_fact

"In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda operative—a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi—was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi's mission was successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists. (Training in hijacking techniques was also provided to foreign Islamist radicals inside Iraq, according to two Iraqi defectors quoted in a report in the Times in November of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda operative, the Iraqi-born Mamdouh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liaison in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intelligence. Salim, according to a recent book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," by the former N.S.C. officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden's chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons development in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and was extradited to the United States. He is awaiting trial in New York on charges related to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings; he was convicted last April of stabbing a Manhattan prison guard in the eye with a sharpened comb.

Intelligence officials told me that the agency also takes seriously reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, whose real name is Saadoun Mahmoud Abdulatif al-Ani, is the liaison of Saddam's intelligence service to a radical Muslim group called Ansar al-Islam, which controls a small enclave in northern Iraq; the group is believed by American and Kurdish intelligence officials to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad."

etc.

[WOSG]

See also :

http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_04/7235.html

[MizSterious]

I think the main thing about their "arguments" we must remember is that they read into any report, quote, or other evidence whatever they want, and call it "reading between the lines."

[Peach]

Some of the links I provided on a previous page included the NYT, Newsweek, and in one link there were all sorts of mainstream headlines written in the 90's about the growing relationship between OBL and Saddam.

Facts are pesky things the naysayers don't want to deal with. They just change the goalposts and the rules of engagement.

So many naysayers. So little time.

NOW I am heading out...

[cgk]

Document Links Saddam, Bin Laden - 6/25/03(snip...)

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.''

The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein. The story of how the document came about is as follows.

Saddam gave Uday authority to control all press and media outlets in Iraq. Uday was the publisher of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper.

On the front page of the paper's four-page edition for Nov. 14, 2002, there was a picture of Osama bin Laden speaking, next to which was a picture of Saddam and his ''Revolutionary Council,'' together with stories about Israeli tanks attacking a group of Palestinians.

(end snip...)

---

Case Closed

4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.

---

The Iraq-Al Qaeda Connections

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.

[MizSterious]

Good stuff! Even "reading between the lines," it's hard to deny!

[WOSG]

"I agree with the Administration's assessment of the relationship"


Then you agree with this:

"Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for Al Qaeda - perhaps even for Mohamed Atta - according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum"

http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_03/6260.html

Cheney said on Sunday "It‘s not surprising" the public would believe Saddam was involved in the attacks, blamed on the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, who has repeatedly praised the attacks.

"We don‘t know," Cheney said. "We‘ve learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the 90;s."

Bush said Cheney was right about suspicions of an Iraq-al Qaeda link, citing the case of Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, a leader of an Islamic group in northern Iraq called Ansar al-Islam believed to have links to al Qaeda."
http://www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages_03/5584.html

I am glad you agree with this administration assessments that there is clear evidence of Saddam-Al Qaeda links.

[cake_crumb]

There never was any doubt, except in the twisted minds of leftist loonies...and pretended by their DNC puppet masters.