Posted on 09/18/2004 10:35:55 AM PDT by Pikamax
You bet!
I was talkin to my mom last night and she told about an incident recently, where she ran into an old friend of hers, who she doesnt see much these days. Now this ex-friend is intelligent, an ex-teacher, and is an avid Catholic church going person. When she met my mom, she had a glare in her eye, a quiet rage I suppose, and she told mom how she was busy these days reading books on politics. Then, she added, "I dont suppose they would be of any interest to YOU !" in a smart, sarcastic, mocking manner. ( She knows my mom is for Bush). Now what does that tell you about the polarization in this country, its unlike anything Ive ever seen. Where are we gonna go as a country after this election?
"It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.
Even before the`9/11 report came out:````````````````````````````````````````````
from the news.telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr114.xml
12/14/2003
"However, the tantalising detail provided in the intelligence document uncovered by Iraq's interim government suggests that Atta's involvement with Iraqi intelligence may well have been far deeper than has hitherto been acknowledged.
Written in the neat, precise hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and one of the few named in the US government's pack of cards of most-wanted Iraqis not to have been apprehended, the personal memo to Saddam is signed by Habbush in distinctive green ink.
Headed simply "Intelligence Items", and dated July 1, 2001, it is addressed: "To the President of the Ba'ath Revolution Party and President of the Republic, may God protect you."
The first paragraph states that "Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision.
"We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."
There is nothing in the document that provides any clue to the identity of the "targets", although Iraqi officials say it is a coded reference to the September 11 attacks.
The second item contains a report of how Iraqi intelligence, helped by "a small team from the al-Qaeda organisation", arranged for an (unspecified) shipment from Niger to reach Baghdad by way of Libya and Syria.
Iraqi officials believe this is a reference to the controversial shipments of uranium ore Iraq acquired from Niger to aid Saddam in his efforts to develop an atom bomb, although there is no explicit reference in the document to this.
Habbush writes that the successful completion of the shipment was "the fruit of your excellent secret meeting with Bashir al-Asad (the Syrian president) on the Iraqi-Syrian border", and concludes: "May God protect you and save you to all Arab nations."
While it is almost impossible to ascertain whether or not the document is legitimate or a clever fake, Iraqi officials working for the interim government are convinced of its authenticity, even though they decline to reveal where and how they obtained it. "It is not important how we found it," said a senior Iraqi security official. "The important thing is that we did find it and the information it contains."
A leading member of Iraq's governing council, who asked not to be named, said he was convinced of the document's authenticity.
"There are people who are working with us who used to work with Habbush who are convinced that it is his handwriting and signature. We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's dealings with al-Qaeda, and this document shows the extent of the old regime's involvement with the international terrorist network."
This is the second document published by this newspaper that appears to highlight Saddam's links with al-Qaeda. Earlier this year the Telegraph published details of another Iraqi intelligence document that indicated Saddam's regime was attempting to set up a meeting with Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, who was then based in Sudan.
Intelligence experts point out that a memo such as that written by Habbush would of necessity be vague and short. "Trained intelligence officers hate putting anything down in writing," said one former CIA officer. "You never know where it might turn up."
Certainly the memo's detail concerning Mohammed Atta and Abu Nidal fits in with the known movements of the two terrorists in the summer of 2001. Abu Nidal, the renegade Palestinian terrorist responsible for a wave of outrages in the 1980s, such as the 1985 bomb attacks on Rome and Vienna airports, was based in Baghdad, under Saddam's personal protection, for most of his career.
Having briefly relocated to Libya, Abu Nidal returned to Baghdad at some point in early 2001. At the time it was assumed that Saddam had lured the Palestinian terrorist back to help the Iraqi leader plan a number of terrorist attacks aimed at destabilising American plans to remove him.
In particular, Saddam wanted Abu Nidal to revive his network of "sleeper cells" in Europe and the Middle East to carry out a new wave of attacks. During 2001 Abu Nidal lived in a number of houses in the Baghdad area, including a spacious home in the al-Dora district where he is reported to have met Atta.
The relationship between Abu Nidal and Saddam, however, quickly turned sour, mainly because - as the Telegraph reported at the time - the ageing Palestinian leader was reluctant to accede to Saddam's request to train al-Qaeda fighters in sophisticated terrorist techniques.
Abu Nidal was murdered in August 2001, although the Iraqis tried to claim that he had committed suicide. Habbush appeared at a hastily arranged press conference in Baghdad in an attempt to persuade the sceptical Arab media that Abu Nidal had taken his own life after Iraqi investigators had uncovered a plot to assassinate Saddam.
Although Western intelligence agencies have attempted to trace Atta's movements in the months preceding September 11, there remain several periods during which his precise whereabouts are unknown. Having moved to Florida from Hamburg in 2000, Atta is known to have made at least two trips from the US to Europe in 2001.
In early January he flew to Madrid for a few days. His next confirmed trip was to Zurich in early July. In between, American investigators have concluded from a detailed examination of Atta's credit cards and phone records, that he spent most of the spring and early summer of 2001 in Florida, interspersed by occasional domestic trips. The only confirmed sighting of Atta during this period, however, was on April 26 when he was pulled over for a traffic violation in Florida.
This traffic offence, taken with other evidence collated by FBI agents, is one of the reasons that CIA officials have discounted the report that Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague earlier in the month (the Czech authorities claim Atta was in Prague on April 8). Yesterday the New York Times reported that Ani, who was taken into US custody last July, had told American interrogators that he had not met Atta in Prague.
"The Prague meeting does not appear very convincing," said Lorenzo Vidino, a terrorism analyst at The Investigative Project, a non-profit organisation that investigates international terrorism, in Washington. "But even if that meeting did not take place you have to remember that Atta used a large number of aliases when he travelled. It is not inconceivable that Atta slipped out of the US undetected sometime in the first half of 2001."
The US Congressional report into the September 11 attacks states that Atta used 16 to 17 known aliases, although American intelligence experts concede that there may have been others.
It is entirely conceivable, then, that Atta secretly made his way to Baghdad to undertake training with Abu Nidal a few months before the September 11 attacks. But as long as Saddam and his senior intelligence operatives remain at large, it is impossible to assess just how much they knew about, and were involved in, the planning and execution of the September 11 atrocities."
•Con Coughlin is the author of Saddam: The Secret Life (Macmillan)
this is just one tantalizing clue. Many have been found, approved or disproved...we will some day see a direct link from Saddam to 9/11 if only thru his minions. Meanwhile, the belief that the MSM scoff at, that 42% believe a direct connection, isbased on OUR GUT INSTINCTS that these bastards want to kill us, and are all in it together.
First the NY Times fabricates a lie that "finding stockpiles of WMDs" was a stated reason for the war, and now they bitch about the Old Media not attacking that "stated" reason.
'A Pew Research Center survey published in June found that the credibility of all news sources is low, in some cases falling precipitously since the start of the Bush administration: major newspapers, the broadcast networks, the cable news networks and PBS alike.'
Duh.
After seeing what happened after the 2000 election, there are very few intelligent people that believe the Democrats will not try ANYTHING it can to reverse the trend towards conservatism.
Very few believe the Old Media anymore. And Rich is a great example of why it should not be trusted.
Personally, I find the fact that Tucker Carlson is supposed to represent the "right" on Crossfire, even thought he recently wrote that he's not voting for Bush because W didn't rush back to DC on 9/11, much more odious. Tucker's been representing the Republican side for three years since he decided he won't vote to re-elect Bush! That's the real outrage.
Besides, they were absolutely right about New York magazine. When I heard about the plans to do a photo spread on New York Republicans, I knew it was a bad idea. A few months ago, New York magazine had a picture of Rush Limbaugh on the cover regarding celebrity scandals, and they picked a 10-year-old, fat, unflattering picture of him, while all the rest of the celebs on the cover had good pictures of them.
Anyhow, the Repubs were justifiably outraged about the pics New York magazine took. They were so unflattering they looked like mug shots, for goodness sakes. New York magazine never prints unflattering photographs of anyone unless they are Republicans. If that isn't bias, I don't know what is.
>>60 Minutes was the foundation of investigative TV and has 30 years of distinguished journalism behind it.
That's debatable. 60 Minutes almost destroyed Audi in the U.S. with their "Unintended Acceleration" story, blaming same on the vehicle, rather than operator error, the true problem.
It is just like Lefties to blame an inanimate object, rather than the human. There are distinct parallels with how the lamesteam media and the Left regard firearms.
The odd factoid that I have on Dowd is that she is dating the druggie producer of the West Wing that has been a democratic shill machine for years. I can't remember his name, but I recall that he was caught with a suitcase full of mushrooms in between rehab visits.
If it were only true....unfortunately we have to listen to liberal drivel from Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, and Juan Williams while we are trying to hear the truth from Hannity, Brit Hume, et. al..
So now we're sure the New Yawk Slimes is not a timepiece, broken or otherwise.
Wow, he's a windy old commie, isn't he?
"...Though the best-selling "Unfit for Command" was the work of a longtime Kerry antagonist and a writer best known for his anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic comments on a right-wing Web forum, its facts were challenged on TV at a far slower pace than the books of Seymour Hersh and Kitty Kelley, whose reporting was targeted in advance by administration talking points handed out before the books could even be read."
Is there ANY reasonable support for these charges of anti-Semitism and -Catholicism against Mr. O'Neill? Otherwise, this is the cheapest shot of the article.
-- Joe
Someone change Rich's diaper. It's full.
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