Posted on 06/23/2004 5:51:19 AM PDT by anita
INTERESTING 1999 CNN ARTICLE
on Saddam and Osama:
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.
Then there's this 1999 article from The Guardian
The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq. . . .
Analysts believe that Mr Hijazi offered Mr bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets. Iraqi agents are believed to have made a similar offer to the Saudi maverick leader in the early 1990s when he was based in Sudan.
Nazi UFO underground bases discovered in Antarctica...
related thread.
Excellent find. These articles should be sent to the media and Congress.
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden..."
Asylum!!! Where in Saddam's cell. I don't think asylum can really be offerred by a prisoner, but why fret over details
I KNEW IT!!! damn nazis
Read the dates of the articles. This was before 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
The Clinton Justice Department obtained a federal indictment against Osama bin Laden in 1997. The indictment mentions specifically that OBL and Saddam are colluding.
Additionally, other connections and links between the two can be found here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1127451/posts?page=1
1997 should be 1998. Sorry.
Kudos to Glenn Reynolds at the Instapundit.com!
Ummmmmmmm........................Saddam wasn't in a cell in 1999.
Bookmarking.
Good post! CNN may still cling to their amnesia; but O'Reilly et al at FoxNews should be interested in sharing this.
That was then ... THIS is an election year.
Thank you for posting.
The "mainstream" media is hopeless . . .
I wonder what Wolf Blitzer would say about this.
Perhaps if the headline said 'had' instead of 'has' it would have made more sense. Literal meaning of has implies a current event.:)
Thanks for posting this article. The Dallas Morning News has also posted this info this morning.
Posted on Fri, Jul. 23, 2004
Hussein offered bin Laden safe haven, report says
BY JIM LANDERS
The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In 1999, Saddam Hussein apparently invited Osama bin Laden to move to Iraq. In 2000, Iran reportedly "made a concerted effort to strengthen relations with al Qaeda."
The Sept. 11 Commission Report, which describes both overtures, says bin Laden rebuffed them - more from expedience than conviction. There were other times when he found friends in both places.
The 10 commissioners presented their report Thursday. They found plenty of contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq, and with Iran. They found no evidence directly tying either government to the Sept. 11 attacks.
But after learning that Iran and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah helped several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in their travels, they urged the U.S. government to investigate.
Last month, the commission's staff reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had nothing pointing to a partnership between Iraq and al-Qaida. The conclusion raised a furor because it seemed to undermine one of the Bush administration's arguments for war with Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the finding, and said he "probably" had access to intelligence the commission hadn't seen.
Commission chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said they had the same information as Cheney. In Thursday's final report, they put more of it on the table.
In 1990, bin Laden offered to organize an army of Islamist warriors to drive Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait. Later, he sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan.
This animus faded after bin Laden made Sudan his base of operations. Sudan persuaded the al-Qaida leader to stop supporting activities against the Iraqi regime.
Bin Laden met a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in late 1994 or early 1995. bin Laden wanted weapons and training camps, but nothing apparently came of the requests.
In 1998, after bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan, more contacts were reported. Bin Laden's deputy, Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, reportedly used his own ties with Iraq to arrange a visit to Afghanistan by an Iraqi delegation.
The next year, after four days of U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq, bin Laden was offered a safe haven in Iraq.
That was all the commissioners found.
"(T)o date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship," the commissioners concluded.
Danielle Pletka, a former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now with the American Enterprise Institute, was one of several analysts arguing after Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaida made him a threat.
"What you look for in danger is motive, means and opportunity," she said. "The previous argument (by critics of the Iraq war) was there was no opportunity because there were no ties. That is demonstrably untrue."
Cheney has pointed to a Czech intelligence report of a meeting in Prague on April 9, 2001, between an Iraqi diplomat and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers and the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.
The Sept. 11 commission noted Atta, when he was a student in Hamburg, Germany, scorned Saddam Hussein as an "American stooge" who provided the United States an excuse for stationing military forces in the Middle East.
The commission looked at the Czech report about a meeting in Prague, but concluded the only evidence that it took place was the Czech government's informant. Other evidence placed Atta in Florida both immediately before and after April 9.
"(T)he available evidence does not support the original Czech report," the commission concluded.
Cheney said earlier in July the Czech report hasn't been proven one way or the other.
Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said "the insinuation they were working together on the 9-11 plot is really grasping at straws."
The Sept. 11 commissioners reported they had no evidence indicating Iraq cooperated with al-Qaida "in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."
Osama bin Laden's religious beliefs spurn Shiite Muslims as apostates. But he put those convictions aside to establish cooperative ties with Iranian operatives as early as 1991.
The two sides reached an informal agreement covering training and cooperation in actions against Israel and the United States. Senior al-Qaida figures went to Iran and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon in 1993, the stronghold of the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah.
Bin Laden reportedly was keen to have his fighters learn how to build truck bombs like the one Hezbollah used to kill 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983.
The Sept. 11 Commission concluded this relationship demonstrated that divisions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims "did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations."
Danielle Pletka, a former Senate committee staffer, said that conclusion overturns a widespread assumption.
"The powerful idea that's taken hold of our intelligence community is that Shiite extremists and Sunni extremists don't work together," she said. "Just like Sunni secular dictators (such as Saddam Hussein) don't work with Sunni religious extremists like al-Qaida. It's totally wrong."
The contacts - mostly training and advice - between al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Iran persisted after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan.
The Sept. 11 Commission said al-Qaida might have had a role in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. Air Force members and wounded 372 others. U.S. investigators have blamed the attack on Saudi Hezbollah and Iran.
Tawfiq bin Attash, a captured senior al-Qaida operative involved in several of the organization's attacks on U.S. targets, told U.S. interrogators Iran tried to upgrade the relationship after the Oct. 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Bin Attash, also known as Khallad, said bin Laden put off the Iranians because he didn't want to alienate wealthy Saudis supporters. But bin Laden accepted an Iranian offer to help al-Qaida's Saudi members get in and out of Afghanistan.
The Saudi government was confiscating passports of Saudis with travel stamps showing they'd gone to Afghanistan via Pakistan. Iranian border guards were instructed to let Saudis into Afghanistan without having their passports stamped.
The Sept 11 Commission said as many as 10 of the Saudi hijackers went through Iran to Afghanistan between October 2000 and February 2001. The trips were usually arranged by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Earlier this month, the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported the arrangement was negotiated between a general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. Iran denied the report.
Despite the travel arrangements, the Sept. 11 Commission found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks. "This topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government," the commission concluded.
Brookings foreign policy specialist O'Hanlon agreed.
"Iran's the problem. Iran's the big problem," he said.
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© 2004, The Dallas Morning News.
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