Posted on 02/11/2003 11:15:38 AM PST by Dog
Tape is real.....they will play it later.
In other words...Dan reported that 'people' are admitting that there IS a link between Saddam and AQ?
No, I hadn't heard, but I'm not surprised. It is an echo of the talking point about North Korea being so darn mad that they were included in the Axis of Evil that they just up and started up their nuclear program and it's all Bush's fault.
As with that idea (I'm sure we can all guess just who came up with THAT talking point), the facts will put the lie to it.
In fact, Powell said they have intelligence showing contact between bin Laden and Iraq from--the nineties
CIA's New Old Iraq File
(snip) More damaging to their (those who have expressed doubts that Iraq has engaged in international terrorism or trained others to do so) case than the accumulating new evidence to the contrary is "old" information long available in CIA files: Iraqi intelligence officers meeting in Khartoum and Kandahar with Osama bin Laden, the nonaggression pact Saddam and Osama reached in 1993, training in Baghdad for international terrorism and the multiple trips to Prague made by Mohamed Atta, the head of the Sept. 11 suicide squads, are all there. These specific reports and much more have been explained away and minimized rather than thoroughly investigated.
To translate for you, the author is saying that the people who say Iraq doesn't have ties to al Qaeda are not only disproven by the increasing volumes of new evidence to the contrary, but also are disproven by the old information that has long been on file.
The Czechoslavakians have indeed confirmed the info and stand by it to this day.
Hilal said that on the tape, bin Laden urged Muslims not to cooperate with the U.S against Iraq, saying any Muslim who cooperates with America against another Muslim is an apostate.
(turning up 'hearing aid' REALLY 'loud'..) EH ? What's that? UH, I hear NO voices of 'protest' coming from the islame communities in the USA.
The silence is sooooo deafening I don't NEED no steenkin' hearing aid.
Usama is basically a man without a country. He never "dreamed" we would invade Afghanistan. Usama's crazies are "traveling" folks..picking a target, planning, waiting, warning, attacking.
Think about the anthrax attack. Usama disowned it. Iraq said nothing. Usama would not take credit for it because he was only the mailman but you can bet Saddam was smiling from ear to ear at being able to test his chemical technology within the borders of the US and make a few bucks on the side.
I agree 100%.
I recall seeing Radish's name last week on a thread, perhaps about Powell's UN appearance. Thank you for this report---appalling as it is.
I am in agreement with you. Did you mean to address your comments to The Federal Farmer, perhaps?
One of Hitler's objectives in trying to take Stalingrad was to cut off the traffic up the Volga, which included the oil from Baku and other neighboring fields.
However, going for Stalingrad in fact interfered with the Germans' simultaneous grab for the Caucasus and its oilfields. The armies involved were badly overextended. Military historians usually say Hitler should have tried for one or the other, either the oilfields or Stalingrad, and that trying for both ensured defeat.
I couldn't come up with a scenario regarding the Anthrax Letters right after 9-11 which would satisfy collaboration without any "loss of power" to either of these two egomanics. It's pretty clear now how it had to work.
No such thing has been proven, indeed, Iraq DID import those tubes, they admitted doing so. They even claimed that those tubes were for rockets, which was an obvious lie.
Let's take them at their word and say they were for those rockets. Guess what? They are then in violation of their committments on rockets and on smuggling in goods forbidden under the oil for food program. Either way, they have violated the terms of the cease fire, and thus have prolongued the war. They have had it within their powera t all times to come clean- as other nations have done- and they had every incentive to do it. At least, if they were sincere when they signed the cease fire.
But Powell wasn't lying, the Iraqis admit they snuck in the tubes and admitted they were for a weapons program. Powell said the tolerances they ordered were well in excess of what would be justified by rocket design. (Not to mention the type of material was itself better than what the Iraqis were claiming they needed- they didn't need corrosive resistant tubing for rockets or bicycles or anything else.) Superfine tolerances increase the costs of such items exponentially; you don't order that stuff just because you like fine craftsmenship- you only order such things if nothing else will do. Iraq wasn't even satisfied with the initital superfine tolerances and ordered tubing that was made to even tougher specifications.
and the supposedly dangerous chemical weapons lab that just a few days ago Bush declined to attack because it wasn't deemed a threat.
That wasn't debunked, either, if you refer to the one a bunch of journalists, who wouldn't know the first thing about looking for evidence of tampering and modifications of a site, "inspected," then that article was posted here a while back and was soundly thrashed. The journalists aren't exactly unbiased, nor did they go into all buildings and facilities in the site, nor would they even know if they did, because they were taken on a tour, not set loose to look whjerever they may with whatever equipment would be suitable. They didn't even have the knowledge it takes to find anything hidden on site even assuming the Iraqis left it, and to be blunt I doubt the reporters had any GPS with them to insure that they actually visited the correct site. They just accepted the word of the Iraqis that it was the same site, just as others before them really thought Potempkin villages were real. Maybe it was the right site, maybe it wasn't, but let's assume that it was. The Iraqis had ample time to clear away the site before they arrived, seeing as how we had put a large satellite photo up and they knew what we were talking about and were cleaining up before Powell had even ceased talking. It wouldn't be the first time a guy like Hussein fooled some useful idiots.
Potempkin villages and hidden materials are par for the course, just as the films of US POWS in Vietnamese hands where they said they were being treated humanely while blinking morse code that said "torture." Leftists chose to believe the coerced statements rather than the code. If Jane Fonda said it, it must be true, right? Hey, and Jimmy Carter went down to Cuba to "prove" their lab there was not a bioweapons lab, promising he would gain entry. Why, he even got his picture taken in front of the building, so that's proof there was nothing suspicious about that site, right? Wrong! They Cubans said it produces animal feed but we didn't see animal feed in Jimmy's photo op, either. That's because jimmy never made it into the site. The Cubans let him see what they wanted him to see, promised he would get to see it all, and then didn't deliver because, well, Fidel Castro's speech went a little long and it got late.
The mere fact they go to ridiculous extremes to prevent the inspectors from completing their jobs is sufficient proof that they are violating the agreements; heck, it's a violation of their obligations as it is. The additional information on their smuggled goods and activities and so forth is just whipped cream on an issue that is already sufficient to call for action.
Do you think some liberal arts grads-turned journalists with no experience and no detection equipment are going to be smart enough to take soil samples, test them, and understand the results, or look for any other clues when given carefully chaperones tours of Iraqi sites? The ones who wrote the article on the lab site didn't seem like they looked closely at anything, but only assumed. I remember that article being thrashed pretty good on this site already- the reporters concluded that because the buildings they did see- and they by no means saw everything- were shabby, that it couldn't have been used for WMD. That was silly logic. The reporter did admit that there was some surprising expensive computer and communications equipment in one building they looked which indicated that there was something unusual about the site and that the stuff appeared very out of place. What was tellig was that He didn't even ask the Iraqis what it was for or why it would be there. Also, not once did they mention going underground at that site. I doubt they even looked for underground facilities, or even for indications that there were any. I doubt he would know one if he was standing over it.
If we're going to send 100,000 troops to that region,
We already did. They are there already, plus some, well over 125,000 now so I hear. Folks like my brother are already in, and I mean IN. won't find out about it all until later, just as we didn't until later in part one of this war. Back in Desert shield they were inside Iraq and Kuwait weeks before the press had a clue. And after, long after the press lost interest and thought it was over.
I want them in Pakistan hunting down and killing al-Qaida members,
We are in Pakistan already, but not all the people we are looking for are there. Focusing only on Pakistan would be like trying to take on the Nazis by targetting Mexico City. Confining ourselves only to what amounts to law enforcement duties in Pakistan would be inefficient since not all al Qaeda members are in Pakistan, and al Qaeda is not some isolated group totally unrelated to other groups, but is a network of individual groups. Did you even bother to read Osama bin Laden's Fatwa? Did you notice all the signatories on that? Al Qaeda was not alone, even by their own admission they had a nice list of allies.
I want them to hunt down al Qaida members wherever they are. The ones in Pakistan aren't more special than the others, after all. What's more, I want them to go after those groups which work with al Qaeda, like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, to which Atta belonged, or al Ansar, or Jumaat ul Fuqra, Abu Nidal, Abu Sayyaf, etc. And Iraq, since Iraqi agents and diplomats have also aided al Qaeda.
not engaging in a war that is best the recruitment tool bin Laden has ever been given,
Don't be silly- there is not going to be a rush of Arabs running to Saddam Hussein's aid, not to bin Laden's. People said the Pakistani "street" would rise up and they would flood into Afghanistan to run to the aid of the Taliban and al Qaeda... where are the street protests now? Where was the great flood of Pakistanis? They were stopped at the border and told to go home. And they did. Heck of a recruitment job, eh?
No one is going to want to join up and take a number for a daisy cutter to come to bin LAden's aid due to anything we do to Saddam Hussain or to Iraq. When we are done there al Qaeda's going to have a very hard time getting the members they have to stay, much less get more.
The biggest recruitment hope they have now are Algerians, who aren't close enough to Afhganistan to be demoralized, and who aren't about to get smeared in Iraq. Even their source for western rich stupid kids is probably not what it was. I don't hear the little squeak of brand new wanna-be jihadists any more, as we did before we hit Afghanistan. Now we hear some people say they want to be human shields, and they aren't even able to get that right.
To get recruits, al Qaeda is going to have to carry out terrorist attacks- successful ones- that appeal to certain demographics. A US war in Iraq won't do that for them- it will do the opposite. No, al Qaeda needs to carry off an attack, and what we do in Iraq will have absolutely no bearing on that one way or another, other than they might be stalling now in order to let us move first, so that they can plead the need for 'revenge.' Even if we never went after Iraq, though- al Qaeda would still need to carry out such an attack in order to keep from looking impotent.
Their impotence won't get them recruits, and our unwillingness to act against Iraq won't get us recruits. Impotence is bad for recruiting no matter who you are. So al Qaeda will try to attack even if we choose not to go after Iraq, simply because they must. They can't go another year without at least another Bali bombing. They really need something bigger, while Iraq needs terrorists like al Qaeda and certain ethnic factions in his country to act as proxies in order to strike without upsetting his western apologists. So long as they can pretend Hussein isn't linked to any attacks, they will continue to fight for him, and his only real hope now is regime change in the U.S. caused by luck, or by targetting our economy and people to cause sufficient panic that people feel the President is a failure; a successful effort to blackmail the US with WMD or some other terrorist acts to scare us off; or salvation via a successful antiwar campaign by his western useful idiots.
Historically he has expressed admiration for the antiwar campaign of the Vietnamese, which succeeded even when the Vietnamese were getting creamed militarily.
and only produces higher poll numbers for Bush.
Bush doesn't give a rat's butt about poll numbers, nor do I. If he did he would have lobbed some missiles on an empty lot in Kabul, called the attack an isolated incident, and called it a day, then sent out some spin doctors to inflate the accomplishment while praying fervently that the terrorists wouldn't get off another shot. That's Clinton's style- it was never the style of Bush 2, just as it was not the style of Reagan. Some people really don't give a rat's butt about polls.
I want dead terrorists, and lots of them.
So you say, but you twist yourself into a pretzel trying to deny some people are even involved in terrorism, and speak of al qaeda as if they were solo when even they admit their association whith a broad range of groups, and even when they ecpress their admiration and support of Iraq here. I doubt your sincerity, quite frankly.
I don't want to waste our military resources and American lives on an invasion and occupation that only strengthens al-Qaida.
In what way would it strengthen al Qaida? Please elaborate, as it is my family that is over there taking the risk, the very same people who said long ago that we need to take out the regime in Iraq, and that we need to engage our enemies of which al qaeda is but one small group.
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