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FRIDAY NOVEMBER 09 2001 Saddam's terror training camp teaches hijacking BY RICHARD BEESTON, DIPLOMATIC EDITOR IRAQ has been running a secret terrorist training camp where commandos, including foreigners, are instructed on how to hijack civilian aircraft, according to an Iraqi defector who worked at the base. Sabah Khodada, a former special forces officer who sought political asylum in the US earlier this year, said he trained Iraqis to take over a civilian airliner using a real Boeing 707 at the base in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. He said that Arab fighters, probably from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, were ...

Starting in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein forged alliances with Muslim radicals from Saudi Arabia who practiced the same brand of militant Islam as Osama bin Laden, Saudi dissidents in London revealed last week. In a development that experts call astonishing, the Sunni dictator made common cause with radical Wahhabists in a bid to keep Iraq's Shiite majority at bay. "Saddam invited Muslim scholars and preachers to Iraq for his own survival," Saad Fagih, a London-based dissident, told the Associated Press. "He convinced them that Shiites are the danger." Wahhabism began trickling into Iraq nearly a decade ago, with radical Muslims...

INSURGENTS attacked buses carrying Iraqi police from the southern city of Basra to Baghdad today and several police officers were killed, a senior police source said. The source said the police were ambushed near the town of Salman Pak, about 30km south-east of Baghdad, and said a number were dead. "The street is littered with bodies," he said. "Fighting is still going on." Iraq's Interior Ministry had no immediate information on any attack.

Why do you talking heads that get on television (I'm watching CNN now) completely let it go by when Bush haters claim that there "were not links" between Saddam and Al-Qaeda? Get your facts straight please! And hammer them. Learn about Salam Pak! Bring it up! And when they try to tell you that Rumsfeld says their are no links... Please explain to them that they are twisting his words just like the newspaper headlines in the MSM do on a daily basis. Here's the list of what Rumsfeld carries in his pocket to clarify what the CIA believes...

Now that John Kerry has decided (well, for the moment), that the invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," it's worth revisiting the underlying rationale for the war — in a slightly unorthodox way. Rather than taking at face value what George W. Bush has said about his decision-making, let's premise here that there are certain realities an American president must tacitly acknowledge but cannot fully articulate since the articulation itself would further jeopardize national security. The underlying rationale for the war in Iraq — apart from whether Saddam possessed weapons...

State Department and CIA officials have quietly told reporters they accept Saddam Hussein's explanation that radical Islamists who trained in Iraq before 9/11 to hijack airplanes using small knives were engaged in counter-terrorism training. Speaking on condition of anonymity to the Knight Ridder news service, the officials challenged the credibility of two White House reports issued last year, which had raised questions about whether activities at the notorious terrorist training camp Salman Pak were linked to the 9/11 attacks. One unnamed U.S. official cited a CIA assessment first supplied to the White House in January 2003 in response to the...

WASHINGTON - The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday that Osama bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found "no credible evidence" of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States. In a report based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader's secular regime. A senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to...

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

In light of Thursday's Wall Street Journal report detailing new evidence tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, it's worth noting that the only time the question of an Iraq-9/11 connection has been legally tested, the verdict was affirmative. In a woefully underreported decision on May 8, 2003, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of two 9/11 victim families who had sued Iraq and others claiming they were culpable in the attacks. The court awarded plaintiffs $104 million based on the Baer's findings. The ruling by Judge Baer - a Carter appointee, by the way - was...

Newly uncovered files examined by US military investigators in Baghdad show what is being described as 'a direct link' between Saddam Hussein's elite Fedayeen military unit and the terrorist attacks on America September 11, 2001.Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who attended a 2000 Al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where the 9/11 attacks were planned, is listed among the officers on three Fedayeen rosters reviewed by US probers, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.'Our government sources, who have seen the translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lt. Colonel,' the paper said.Saddam's Fedayeen has been identified...

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.

FORT WORTH, Texas - He's not just any former resident of Iraq. We talk with a man who spent time working at a camp where he says Saddam Hussein is training terrorists. Sabah Khodada told us he grabbed his family and ran because he opposed Saddam Hussein. And, he brought with him chilling accounts of what soldiers are being trained to do, training that includes the hijacking of planes. Saddam Hussein’s possible link to this attack is a mystery, but Sabah Khodada believes Iraq played a role. Today he watches Arabic satellite tv to keep up with his country. But, ...

Rush promised an interview with the Vice President coming up at 1PM. I didn't see another thread covering this, so I'll launch it.

Did the CIA and FBI do everything they could have done to prevent September 11? Was Iraq behind the attacks? Did Saddam Hussein possess weapons of mass destruction? Middle East expert Laurie Mylroie tackled these and other heated questions at a luncheon held on February 11 by Accuracy in Media. Mylroie also discussed her book Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror (Regan Books, 2003). Much of the discussion dealt with the policies of former President Bill Clinton, for whom Mylroie served as an advisor on Iraq during the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 12 — The four police officers were squeezed into a small pickup truck, screaming down the highway from Baghdad at 90 miles an hour toward a bomb sighting, and they were happy. They thrive on busy days, and today, the third call of the morning for the Baghdad police bomb squad had come in minutes before, at 11:20, with the usual sketchy information: possible explosives on the road south to Salman Pak. For every bomb that kills Iraqis and coalition soldiers, many more are defused every day by the ordnance experts of the Baghdad police. The squad...

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...

10 Signs You Might be A Liberal/Leftist (Opposed to The War on Terror) 1. You saw what happened on September 11th, and think America caused it. Convieninently, you forget how many have died at the hands of terrorists outside this country, with no ties what so ever to America, and that some people are just evil. 2. You think its unfair that America has such a great military, that like Madeline Albright has said, needs be turned over to a UN - comprised of countries, many of which are run by tyrants - to enforce America's safety from terror; and...

A NEWSWEEK article by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball about the memo linking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dismisses a recent WEEKLY STANDARD report as "hype" and concludes, the "tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-al Qaeda complicity is far from closed." While it's refreshing to see the establishment media pick up the story, the Newsweek article is less than authoritative. The authors write: "The Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees--including such notables as Khalid...

The Memo and the Link Between Saddam and OsamaBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2003 "OSAMA BIN LADEN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003,” reports the November 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, “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….” This 16-page memo, dated last October 27, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense...

<p>For a free e-mail subscription to Best of the Web Today, click .</p> <p>Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.</p>