Well, DUH! Don't insult my intelligence, okay.
You didn't answer my question.
Posted on 08/28/2005 1:49:07 PM PDT by RWR8189
clinton didn't set up the commission. Bush did....
Well, DUH! Don't insult my intelligence, okay.
You didn't answer my question.
The charitable thought would be: "Picking their noses, scratching their asses, with their minds in Georgia (or New Jersey or wherever)".
This oped reinforces the observation that the Rats and their Rino friends would do anything to make the Saddam Iraqi's appear to be innocent of 9/11 along with supposedly no WMDs and the buried attack on the WTC during the Clintoon administration.
Why would the Rats, their pet mediots and pet Rinos be so protective of the mass murderers of Iraq before 9/11 up to today?
There are two probable reasons:
1. The money they got from the Oil from Food Scandal and Opecker Thugs to keep Iraq out of the picture before 9/11 and after the first attacks on the WTC during the Clintoons rule of horror.
2. Their absolute hated of GW, which has controlled them since 2000.
GW and a few of his trusted cabinet members probably got an very top secret intel dump from a key ally after 9/11 implicating Saddam and other mass murdering Iraqis in both attacks on the WTC. GW and his admin can't disclose this data anymore than Roosevelt could disclose the code cracking data on the Japanese pre and post Pearl Harbor.
BUMP!!!!
Just what the hell do think could have been done about the Clinton pardons? Raise a stink so the Traitor media could wave it all away as "just politics" and surrender his moral authority? Not smart.
Deroy Murdock
National Review Online
June 3, 2004
Additional records further illuminate Iraqi complicity in the September 11 massacre. As a May 27 Wall Street Journal editorial reported, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir's name appears on three different rosters of the late Uday Hussein's prestigious paramilitary group, the Saddam Fedayeen. A government source told the Journal that the papers identify Shakir as a lieutenant colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen.
Shakir worked as a VIP airport greeter and facilitator for Malaysian Airlines at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, a position reputedly arranged by intelligence officers at Iraq's Malaysian embassy. On January 5, 2000, Shakir allegedly welcomed Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi to Kuala Lampur and escorted them through immigration and on to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel. That's where these September 11 hijackers met with 9/11 conspirators Ramzi bin al Shibh and Tawfiz al Atash. Five days later, according to The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes (he is also author of the new book The Connection), Shakir vanished.
On January 15, al Midhar and al Hamzi quietly flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Nearly eight months later, they very loudly smashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Saddam Fedayeen Lieutenant Colonel Shakir resurfaced on September 17, 2001, in Qatari handcuffs. His pockets and apartment yielded, among other things, phone numbers for the contacts and safe houses of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Shakir also possessed information on "Operation Bojinka," al Qaeda's 1995 conspiracy to explode 12 passenger jets simultaneously over the Pacific. Shakir passed from Qatari to Jordanian custody before being released after three months of Iraqi pressure. He reportedly returned to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.
Papers pulled from the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters indicate that Saddam Hussein's intelligence operatives have known Mohamed Atta's former boss for years.
bump for later
marking
bttt
BTTT
Part of the problem with the media's ignoring of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection via Ansar Al Islam is that they sloppily report Ansar as having been a "Kurdish resistance group in territory beyond Saddam's control." That is baloney.
Ansar was co-headed by one of Saddam's top intelligence generals, a man whose name now escapes me, and the group was used regularly to attack anti-Saddam Kurdish forces. It is highly doubtful that Ansar consisted of Kurds at all. It is likely that they were mostly the foreign fighters who escaped from Afghanistan that you make reference to using the cover of being some sort of Kurdish resistance group to shield themselves from US scrutiny. They were also likely the vanguard force of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement in Iraq headed by Zarqawi.
But this doesn't fit with the pre-conceived story line developed by the MSM on Ansar Al Islam, the same kind of story-line thinking Hayes makes reference to in his piece. The MSM just took in the bull that Ansar Al Islam was an anti-Saddam Kurdish resistance force, despite being headed up by one of Saddam's intelligence generals, and never again bothered to examine what Ansar really was all about. Saddam likely sent his general to keep an eye on Zarqawi who was the co-head of the group and to help direct Ansar's activities.
And if Ansar which was co-lead by Al Zarqawi was an anti-Saddam resistance force, why was he treated in an elite Baghdad hospital reserved for Baathist party officials and then allowed to freely return to Ansar's camps afterwards? Saddam was not known to be this magnanimous to his enemies.
bump
Exactly! In fact, I just got done posting this snip from an article Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1996 detailing this failure...and its implications on the problem we face today:
"...Perhaps most damaging was the pretense that nothing serious needed to be done to bring the feuding Kurdish factions together. In 1992 Secretary of State James Baker brought the Kurdish factions together as part of an Arab-Kurdish coalition, a coalition that was intact when its representatives met the following year with Vice President Al Gore and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who assured them that the U.S. would protect Iraq's Shiites and Kurds and would make no deals with Saddam.
Yet in 1995, when the Kurdish factions began to show serious divisions, the administration failed to lead. According to press reports, the administration even disowned promises of military support for a successful operation against Iraqi forces (this was further confirmed by the CIA). The most serious mistake was the failure to address the root of the conflict among the factions, their desperate need for resources. The administration never moved to provide an exception from the U.N. sanctions--which were supposed to be aimed at Saddam--for the liberated north of Iraq, which was being strangled far more seriously.
Desperate Kurdish factions began fighting over the limited resources available. And when the democratic Iraqi opposition negotiated a peace agreement between the two main Kurdish factions, the administration couldn't even come up with $4 million for a monitoring force to supervise the accord. Little wonder the Kurdish factions began to look elsewhere for support..."
What's important to note because of Clinton's lack of support, is that some of these Kurdish factions DID look for support from other sources. One of those sources just happened to be Zarqawi and AQ, who began funding a small group of fighters know as Jund al-Islam...who later turned into Ansar al-Islam. The objectives of this group quickly turned from one of supporting an independent Kurdish state to one of becoming an affiliate of Al Qaeda...as Afghan fighters soon began infiltrating the region.
Even Human Rights Watch noted that other Kurds were reporting the influx of foreign fighters, who were raping and razing villages, and assassinating political opponents.
While liberals have often tried to distance Saddam from the Kurds and problems in N. Iraq, he was smack-dab in the middle of it. As one Kurdish commander (Qada) reported, Ansar al-Islam has ties to agents of Saddam Hussein operating in northern Iraq. "We have picked up conversations on our radios between Iraqis and [Ansar] al-Islam."
While Saddam may not have wanted an independent Kurdish state within Iraq, these other Arabs and Kurds had different objectives that interested Saddam. Not only were they doing his bidding by fighting the real Kurdish seperatists, they were a perfect cover for him to continue his war against America. Just the fact that Saddam would've allowed Zarqawi to be treated in a Baghdad hospital...and than released unharmed, to return to Ansar, kind of puts this claim to rest.
Of course not. I'm sure it's understood to be common practice in the espionage field to invite as many uninvolved people as you can to any of your meetings. (For example, can't you easily picture Richard Clarke inviting all kinds of extraneous, unnecessary persons - perhaps even a few curious individuals from the Iraqi Embassy - to attend his strategy sessions?)
I'm sure Shakir was only catering their lunch.
Thanks for the information. Here's more from the London Telegraph...
Saddam's agents launch bloodbath against West's allies
By Wendell Steavenson in Halabja
(Filed: 23/12/2002)
Bitter fighting is raging in the mountains of northern Iraq between Islamic militants accused of links to al-Qa'eda and one of the West's key allies in a troubling diversion in the countdown to a possible war with Saddam Hussein.
For more than a year about 600 fighters of Ansar al-Islam have faced a Kurdish peshmerga force of 5,000, from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, lobbing mortar shells at their positions, mounting ambushes and sending terrorist cells into Kurdish cities.
In the past week the fighting has intensified with reports of 100 people on both sides being killed. Some accounts suggested dozens of peshmerga fighters were killed in one battle and that when they tried to take an Ansar al-Islam fighter prisoner he blew himself up.
According to the PUK, one of the two dominant Kurdish political parties, Ansar al-Islam is supplied with weapons and money by the Iraqi Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service, to destabilise the region.
A Mukhabarat agent called Abu Wa-il is said to be among the group. This is confirmed by Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, an ex-Mukhabarat officer now in jail. If true, it means Ansar al-Islam could have a wider global aspect because al-Baghdadi says Saddam sent Abu Wa'il to Afghanistan in 1995 where he formed links with al-Qa'eda.
Al-Baghdadi said he knew this because he was in the bodyguard of Saddam's son-in law at the time and had been in a training camp with some of the agents they sent to Afghanistan.
"Saddam sent agents to Afghanistan to al-Qa'eda," said al Bahgdadi. "But they had their own agenda and orders from Baghdad."
The peshmerga commander of the area, Sheikh Jafar Mustapha, says Ansar al-Islam has killed 130 of his men and 20 local villagers have died in crossfire or by stepping on scattered land mines.
A year ago the peshmerga fighters tried to drive the group out of their mountain strongholds but the Islamists massacred 42 of them by slitting their throats. Mustapha said: "Usually they don't shoot people; they like to use swords and knives.
"When they capture one of our peshmergas they cut him into pieces." The original leader of Ansar al-Islam, Mullah Krekar, is in jail in Holland and the PUK said the group is now led by Abu Abdullah Ashafi, a low-born Kurd who joined the Iraqi army in the 1980s before turning to Islam and spending four years in Afghanistan.
Dug into caves in the mountains, as many as 40 of Ansar al-Islam's fighters are Arabs, Iraqis and others washed up from the Afghan melee.
According to the Kurdish newspaper Hawlati, Ansar al-Islam's leader, Abu Abdallah al-Shafei, was killed in the recent fighting with the PUK but there was no confirmation of the report.
The group's profile seems to be that of a band of itinerant guerillas, fighting their own ideological battles for Islam aided by other groups.
There are some suggestions that Ansar al-Islam, who operate right on the Iranian border, are supplied through Iran, with Iranian complicity.
But in general the Iranian relationship with the Kurdish parties remains cordial - the Iranian-Kurdish border is much more porous than borders with Turkey and Syria and in September they were instrumental in seeing Mullah Krekar caught in Holland.
The old enemies, Iraq and Iran, are on paper strange co-conspirators, but Iran, like Turkey and Syria, remains extremely wary of a strong Kurdish state bordering its own Kurdish populations. The KDP tends to play down PUK's claims that Ansar al-Islam has links to bin Laden.
One senior official of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan or KDP, said: "There are links with al-Qa'eda but I cannot say that Ansar receives orders from al-Qa'eda."
They suspect the connection has been manufactured to encourage American help and involvement. The Americans have conspicuously stayed away.
He said: "I think if the Americans were more convinced of an al-Qa'eda link they would attack them. Possibly the al-Qa'eda link is exaggerated."
A Mukhabarat captain arrested by the KDP for overseeing a sabotage campaign in Erbil that saw several bombs aimed at civilian and UN targets as well as assassination attempts, said the Mukhabarat supplied Ansar al-Islam.
"They co-operated now and then but secretly," he said. "But Ansar does not always carry out the operations the Muk asks them to. Sometimes they take the money and do not deliver."
In relation to that (these were copied a while back; some of the links may no longer be working):
"Israeli intelligence: Iraq financed attacks", 9/12/2001
Iraq recruited Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden and his Islamic allies to carry out the suicide attacks around the United States, according to Israeli intelligence.
Israeli officials and intelligence analysts said the suicide hijackings that downed the World Trade Center and destroyed parts of the Pentagon was too large an operation for any one group. The analysts said the operation was also too big even for a coalition of Islamic terrorists headed by Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden.
"Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey Sees Iraqi Fingerprints", 9/14/2001
Woolsey commended Laurie Mylroie's opinion essay "Bin Laden Isn't Only One to Blame," which appeared in Thursday's editions of the Wall Street Journal, as well as "Getting Serious," the newspaper's accompanying editorial.
"Mossad warned CIA of attacks - report", 9/17/2001
Mossad officials traveled to Washington last month to warn the CIA and the FBI that a cell of up to 200 terrorists was planning a major operation, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph here yesterday.
"An Iraqi Connection?", 9/18/2001
CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports the United States has received an intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the hijacker who is named as the pilot of the first plane to strike the World Trade Centers, met early this year somewhere in Europe with the head of the Iraqi intelligence service.
"Gertz: Bin Laden linked with Iraqi agents days before attack", 9/21/2001
Osama bin Laden was in contact with Iraqi government agents from his base in Afghanistan in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to U.S. intelligence officials... Bin Laden's contacts with the Iraqi government were detected before the attacks, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity...
At a two-day meeting last week of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by hard-liner Richard Perle, eminent conservatives including Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich reached a consensus that U.S. military forces should strike Iraq shortly after an initial blow against Afghanistan in response to the terror attack on New York and Washington, Newsweek reports in the current issue.
"Tariq Aziz-'We are ready for War' (warns of grave consequences)", 10/18/2001
Iraq said yesterday that it expects to be attacked by America and Britain and warned of the 'grave' consequences if any attempt was made to topple Saddam Hussein from power.
"USA, U.K. TO SHOOT MISSILES ON IRAQ?", 10/28/20001
Novosti correspondents Yuri Zinin and Konstantin Maximov) -- The USA and Great Britain are plotting to hit 300 targets in Iraq with a thousand missiles to overthrow President Saddam Hussain, Iraq's Vice-Premier Tariq Aziz said in an interview the British-based Sunday Telegraph carries today.
"Final US ultimate warning to Iraq", 11/5/2001
The Kuwaiti daily al-Seyash issued on Sunday quoted sources at the British house of commons as saying that the British prime minister Tony Blair asked the Jordanian King Abdullah II during his visit to Amman to convey a final warning from the US administration to Iraq on the need of accepting the return back of the UN inspectors to Baghdad within three weeks, otherwise the next station of the war against terrorism after Afghanistan will be Iraq.
"Russia Would Oppose Attack on Iraq", 12/2/2001
Russia would oppose a U.S. military strike against Iraq and believes diplomacy is the only way to solve the arms inspections impasse between Washington and Baghdad, a Russian envoy visiting the Middle East said Sunday.
"Iraq officially threatens Israel", 12/4/2001
For the first time, Iraq has specifically threatened Israel with retaliation for any U.S.-led campaign against the regime of President Saddam Hussein.
"Blair Warns Saddam", 12/4/2001
British troops could take the war against terrorism to Iraq, the Prime Minister has suggested. Tony Blair refused to rule out British involvement in any military action against Baghdad.
"Attack on Iraq 'Off the Table,' Officials Furious at State Dept. ", 12/5/2001
An impeccable, hall of fame Washington Insider close to the State Department has said that they are furious that an attack on Iraq was 'put off the table.'
The source said that there was not enough unimpeachable evidence to make the war stick with the coalition and that the next target may be Indonesia.
Wolfowitz walked out of the decision meeting absolutely furious, which is interesting becuase it is usually the State Department who have been the 'doves' on this issue recently, but in the last few weeks Colin Powell has drastically changed his position to go after Iraq policy wise in the meetings.
"France won't back U.S. attack on Iraq", 2/22/2002
The French ambassador to the United States says Europe will not support any U.S. military action against Iraq without clear evidence that a military response is warranted.
Etc.
Thanks for the indexing and reposting of the connections between Saddam's Irag and 9/11.
Amazing how so much of that has been forgotten or buried by the MSM.
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