I have often seen people here comment that the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection "has proved to be false", or saying that "there is no evidence of a link", or something along those lines. I have presented evidence of such a link before, but it is always brushed aside. I suspect that many here simply do not want such a connection to exist, because it would further justify our actions in Iraq... Here is a good compilation of the evidence of just such a link. Hopefully, this one will be harder to brush aside... Probably just get ignored. The Iraq -- Al Qaeda Connections By Richard Miniter Every day it seems another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts. Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours. What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths. That is why is important to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight. Indeed, many of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record -- from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers -- attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam going back to 1994. Those who try to whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just ignore it. So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public record for months or years: * Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary. * Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003. * Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum. * Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell. * An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. * In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported. * In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man. (Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.") * As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. * Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports. * An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'" * In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. *The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989. * Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network. * In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell. * That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq. * Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq. *Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post. * Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq." * Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations. * Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine. * Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad. * Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad." * After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq. Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden. In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam. The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor. Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion. So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources." The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station. Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery) which is now on the New York Times' bestseller list. http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html
The author of this high quality "journalism": Maybe if you would post something wasn't right wing propaganda we could take you seriously. Tech Central Station? Please try harder.
Good read TREE....and glad to see the old "Attack the source" rather then refute the article tactic being used again. Who cares who wrote it? As long as it is factual?... DD
ho hum, conjecture and rumor from some dude (much of which is based on Ahmed Chalabi-Iraqi National Congress sources, I don't know if you saw the headline, but the DoD just realeased an evaluation along the lines of saying the INC guys were useless and not credibl) vs. the NIE Yeah, better go with the conjecture and rumor. As long as it is "factual", even though it's speculation. By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A01 In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda. A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said. "There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views." Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements. Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said. The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the United States posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to go to war. The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also investigating the issue. Bush has defended his handling of intelligence before the war, calling his critics "revisionist historians." "The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons, and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. He vowed to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes." Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a 28-page "white paper" on Iraq distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4. In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein. These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech. While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said. The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said. As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed. "We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives. The CIA briefed congressional committees about the National Intelligence Estimate but did not deliver the classified version until the evening of Oct. 1, just before a Senate intelligence committee hearing the next day, congressional sources said. At that closed-door session, several senators raised questions about qualifying statements made in the report, which was circulated only among senior national security officials. On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the intelligence report as a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda links. The members wanted a public document to which they could refer during floor debates on the Iraq war resolution. The white paper did contain passages that hinted at the intelligence community's lack of certitude about Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda ties, but it omitted some qualifiers contained in the classified version. It also did not include qualifiers made at the Oct. 2 hearing by an unidentified senior intelligence official who, during his testimony, challenged some of the administration's public statements on Iraq. "Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy," said Bob Filippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war resolution. When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public. On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda. Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was "low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses" weapons of mass destruction. On Oct. 9, the CIA sent a letter to Graham and Levin informing them that no additional portions of the intelligence report would be made public.
Right wing propaganda? Nice try. Oh, and nice job in not refuting a single piece of evidence, or making any counter-argument whatsoever. Although I will say that the "attack the source" method is much better than the "Head-in-the-sand-it's-not-happening" method... At least you showed up. Although, your presentation does have a lot in common with the latter, since you didn't actually address the issue.
You've never even read the NIE. I made this challenge to MacBeth and he failed, you can try it if you'd like... But I can tell you've never read it, because if you had you wouldn't be using it to support your "argument" (whatever it is, can't really figure that one out). BTW, that "some dude" you're talking about would be Colin Powell. But you're right, a Washington Post staffer is much more credible than the Secretary of State. You didn't even read the article.
Oh, and here's a link to the NIE. I suggest you read it before using it as "evidence" for your arguments. http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=28&num=6210
If it were only so simple. Unfortunately, terrorists are in every country. Look in the U.S. We train Central American terrorists at Fort Bragg, then give them asylum in the U.S. I bet techcentral.welovebush.net won't write about that. Just for grins, I went to the web site you posted and looked at other articles. Like this one: http://www.techcentralstation.com/092903A.html Bleeding hearts, it talks about. Why helping the poor, is, um, bad, 'm'kay? Why it doesn't work. A well-written article. Seemingly well-thought-out. And yet, it uses and possibly manipulates facts that few of us will really go bother and check. The article/information you cite is interesting, and yet, why isn't the Bush administration using the info to back up its case? He goes on TV and finally says, Uh, no, Saddam wasn't tied to 9/11. Not that we know of. You would think this sort of information would get to him. Now, Powell used it. But he hasn't cited it since, even when the administration finds itself pummeled left and right over Iraq. Maybe they used discredited information. Maybe they're double-checking that info before they promote it again. Maybe Colin Powell is so out of favor, and tired of trying to be the nice guy of this administration ("nice" compared to Cheney and Bush, I guess) that he's laying low until Bush and Cheney can kick him out. If this intel is reliable, they should cite it. They're in power. They mostly control the media (although the media is starting to take a few swings, now that the war, if not the incessant aftershock of it, is over.) But they don't talk about it. I wouldn't doubt too much that some Al Qaeda members are from/operate out of Iraq. But Saddam the secular dictator and Osama the fanatical Wahhabi would not cede power to one another. They might have some of the same goals, but would have no reason to trust one another. Would Saddam turn a blind eye to Al Qaeda in his country? Maybe; I'm sure he'd have no problem with someone else attacking the U.S. so that he could vicariously exact his revenge. But that would leave a very powerful entity that could take him down as well (he led the Sunni minority in power over the Shi'a Muslims, the majority; Osama, being a Wahhabi Muslim, might take a fancy to promoting the Shi'a clerics, who the U.S. don't want to assume power because, hey!, the Iranians are Shi'a), and as we know, Saddam was/is paranoid of his hold on power. As many dictators (and presidents?) are. Of course, Osama would probably prefer to leave Saddam in place because he would threaten his own standing in the Middle East if he took down one of its leaders and one who, if secular and repugnant, did at least stand up to the Great Satan. Now, thanks to our bludgeoning methods of dealing with perceived threats, Al Qaeda has a great base of operations. Not that they can run terrorist camps with U.S. marines looking on. But there's nothing like a great reason to hate the U.S. as a way to breed even more terrorism. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia keeps laughing, if a little more cautiously. Osama played the game pretty well. A great bunch of recruits to draw from; a way of taking a swipe at his country, which he warned about the impending Iraq invasion of Kuwait but which not only did nothing but actually allowed the U.S. on its soil to fight against Iraq; and yet Osama always knowing that Saudi Arabia's close relations to the U.S. would keep the P.R. damage he was inflicting on the country from becoming so great that it would affect his greatest source of money. It's all kinda complicated, I guess. A little more complicated than Bush with his sword standing over the Gordian knot would admit: "F*** unraveling it! I'll do it MY WAY!"
Neither have you, it hasn't been declassified yet. I guess we can't believe him though because he works for the Washington Post, which is known to be evil because its not the Washington Times. No, the dude I was talking about was Robert Miniter; I'm surprised he didn't blame Clinton in that article. I'm not sure if you want to lean on Powell, is this the party line Powell, the "This is Bullsh-t!" Powell, or the Powell who said that Iraq didn't have WMD's last year? I don't feel like digging it up, but many firsthand sources specifically deny such a connection. Why is it you trust the word of the terrorists in Guantanamo, that they were surprised at Bush's reaction in the other thread, and you don't trust them when the two top men that we have say this? Forgive me treeman if I don't take your intelligence analysis seriously. I remember you vehemently arguing in favor of the veracity of the Czech intelligence service in the past, so I think you are at least as guilty as us, if not more so, in being selective as to what you choose to believe.
That's only the declassified portion. Nice try. You let me know when Czech intelligence turns up anything more interesting OK?
Yes, the declassified portion that fails to support your arguments. Or those of a Washington Post staffer. And yet supports quite a few of mine, incidentally... When they declassify the rest of it in 30 years, I'll keep you informed. Please, dig away. I wasn't aware that you were speaking with former Iraqi regime members and Gitmo prisoners. I'd like to hear what they have to say, since you apparently have the inside track, and they have apparently been giving you information that contradicts what has been published. So please, dig. I want to hear this. I've never heard this one. Please post the article on this one? Or is this more of your first-hand account? Forgive me if I don't take seriously your refusal to address a single piece of evidence that has been given in this article. I mean, you could pick any one and start from there... Just one. Why do the Czechs still stand by their story? I wonder... Curious: when it comes to anything that helps make our case against Iraq in the WMD arena, you guys say that all of our information was flawed. Our evidence on the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection was also flawed. But we were right on about Mohammed Atta meeting an Iraqi agent in Prague (an man we now have in custody), and the Czechs were wrong about something that happened in their own country? Fine. Have your cake and eat it too.
? This information has been published for months. Were you too busy investigating mobile weapons labs? Here are several sources, none of them is robert Miniter, but I trust they will suffice: http://www.iht.com/pdfs/dstar/DS05-26_07.pdf http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/09/sprj.irq.alqaeda/ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/10/iraq/main557822.shtml . Certainly, a little later I will. If, by "stand by their story" you mean "retract" then you are right. You really haven't been paying too much attention to the news, have you? This story has been debunked by the Czechs as well as by the FBI and CIA: Oh, before you get in a tizzy, Newsmax and the Torygraph are right wing news sources, so no luck there. Maybe you can cling to the fact that "cabinet level officials" have not retracted the story yet, that's what righties were claiming last week. Yeah, just the President and the intel service, but no cabinet minister means it must have happened.
Tree and the VP have similar views on this matter. _____________________ Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney By Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writers Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A01 In making the case for war against Iraq, Vice President Cheney has continued to suggest that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks, even as the story was falling apart under scrutiny by the FBI, CIA and the foreign government that first made the allegation. The alleged meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was the single thread the administration has pointed to that might tie Iraq to the attacks. But as the Czech government distanced itself from its initial assertion and American investigators determined Atta was probably in the United States at the time of the meeting, other administration officials dropped the incident from their public statements about Iraq. Not Cheney, who was the administration's most vociferous advocate for going to war with Iraq. He brought up the connection between Atta and al-Ani again two weeks ago in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" in which he also suggested links between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. Cheney described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Neither the CIA nor the congressional joint inquiry that investigated the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon found any evidence linking Iraq to the hijackers or the attacks. President Bush corrected Cheney's statement several days later. Cheney's staff also waged a campaign to include the allegation in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations in February in which he made the administration's case for war against Iraq. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, pressed Powell's speechwriters to include the Atta claim and other suspected links between Iraq and terrorism, according to senior and mid-level administration officials involved in crafting the speech. When State Department and CIA officials complained about Libby's proposed language and suggested cutting large sections, Cheney's associates fought back. "Every piece offered . . . they fought tooth and nail to keep it in," said one official involved in putting together the speech. The vice president's role in keeping the alleged meeting in Prague before the public eye is an illustration of the administration's handling of intelligence reports in the run-up to the war, when senior officials sometimes seized on reports that bolstered the case against Iraq despite contradictory evidence provided by the U.S. intelligence community. Cheney's office declined to comment. Mary Matalin, a former senior aide to Cheney who still provides the vice president with advice, said Cheney's job is to focus on "the big picture." His appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, she said, was intended to "remind people that Iraq is part of a bigger war that will require patience and sacrifice." Cheney does not fully vet his speeches or public statements with the CIA or the wider intelligence community for accuracy, according to several administration officials, but usually gives the CIA a list of possible points or facts that might be used in a speech or appearance. Matalin said Cheney "doesn't base his opinion on one piece of data," but has access to information that cannot be declassified because it would harm national security or compromise sources. "His job is to connect the dots in a way to prevent the worst possible case from happening," she said, but in public "he has to tiptoe through landmines of what's sayable and not sayable." The claim that Atta, an Egyptian and Sept. 11 hijacker, had met with al-Ani in early April 2001 has been a constant element of the vice president's case against Iraq. Surveillance cameras at the Radio Free Europe building in Prague had picked up al-Ani, an intelligence officer at the Iraq embassy, surveying the building in April, five months before the Sept. 11 attacks. The tape was made available to Czech intelligence. Al-Ani was expelled at the U.S. government's request soon afterward for conduct incompatible with his diplomatic status. In October 2001, after pictures of Atta had circulated publicly, an Arab student who worked as an informant for BIS, the Czech Security Information Service, told the service he had seen Atta meeting with al-Ani in April. That November, Stanislav Gross, the Czech Republic's interior minister, said publicly that al-Ani and Atta had met in Prague. A short while later, Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman told Powell that the two had discussed targeting the Radio Free Europe building, not the Sept. 11 targets. On Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney said on "Meet The Press" that "it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." But that same month, Czech President Vaclav Havel was retreating from the more definitive accounts provided by his government, saying there was "a 70 percent" chance the meeting took place. Indeed, while Czech officials never officially backed away from their initial stance, officials at various agencies say that, privately, the Czechs have discredited the accuracy of the untested informant who came to them with the information. According to one report, Havel quietly informed the White House in 2002 there was no evidence to confirm the meeting. The Czechs had reviewed records using Atta's name and his seven known aliases provided by the CIA and found nothing to confirm the April 2001 trip. Meanwhile, CIA and FBI officials were running down thousands of leads on Atta and the other 18 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 plot. U.S. records showed Atta living in Virginia Beach in April 2001, and they could find no indication he had left Virginia or traveled outside the United States. Even so, on March 24, 2002, Cheney again told NBC, "We discovered . . . the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague." A few weeks later, in April, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a San Francisco audience, "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts." The FBI, he said, could find no evidence that Atta left or returned to the United States at the time. In May, senior FBI and CIA analysts, having scoured thousands of travel records, concluded "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S.," according to officials at the time. But on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney, again on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center." "What does the CIA say about that?" asked host Tim Russert. "Is it credible?" "It's credible," Cheney replied. "But, you know, I think the way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point." As war loomed closer, the Atta allegation generally began to disappear from the administration's public case against Iraq. Bush did not mention Atta or the Prague meeting in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, when he sought to show Iraq's links to terrorism. But behind the scenes, the Atta meeting remained tantalizing to Cheney and his staff. Libby -- along with deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate -- began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the U.N. Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. "We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, 'Wow! Here we go again,' " said one official who helped draft the speech. "You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again." Libby described the material as a "Chinese menu," simply the broadest range of options, according to several administration officials. "The papers were designed to assist [Powell's] preparation by organizing a lot of materials so that he could choose the order and evidence he found most compelling, although some of it, in the end, could not be declassified," said one administration official. But other officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded. "After one day of hearing screams about who put this together and what are the sources, we essentially threw it out," one official present said. Cheney's staff did not entirely give up. Late into the night before Powell's presentation, Libby called Powell's staff, waiting at the United Nations in New York, to question why certain material was not being included in the terrorism section, according to two State Department officials. Earlier this month, on his most recent "Meet the Press" appearance, Cheney once again used Atta to subtly suggest a connection between Iraq and Sept. 11, 2001. "With respect to 9/11, of course, we've had the story . . . the Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop anymore of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it." Defense and intelligence officials say al-Ani, who was apprehended by U.S. forces earlier this year, has denied meeting with Atta.
There is very little "fact" in here. It's mostly (but not all) conjecture, rumor and innuendo. Being "linked" isn't the same as being "involved." There's no doubt Iraq and al Queda are linked. We're *all* linked, in some way or another. But the article doesn't present a factual case of al Queda being *involved* in Iraq at all. But keep digging. I sincerely hope that Iraq was supporting terrorism -- it would certainly lessen the depravity necessary to invade and occupy that country.
Get yourself a decent source and i'll be happy to discuss your newest piece of irrefutable evidence (whether it is illegal Iraqi missile factories or Al Qaeda links). Nonsense from "Tech Central Station" is not worth the time or the energy-- as are most of your "rolleye" comments.
And yet one of the basic tenets of right-wing talk shows is that conservatives argue from facts and liberals argue from emotion.
Curious how what these Al Qaeda guys say is true, then what our intel people say is false, then it is true... You sure are selective in deciding who to believe. Convenientlly, only the items that support your agenda are true. Well, I'll just throw out something from the CNN story that pretty much describes my feelings on the Al Qaeda prisoners denying a link: "My question about this story is -- so what?" said a senior U.S. official, adding that the detainees are mixing truth and lies in what they are saying to interrogators. Given the compartmentalization of information in al Qaeda, the official said, "They might not know even if it were true" that al Qaeda was cooperating with Iraq. "Bottom line: You can't trust them to know or to tell the truth if they do," the official said. That about says it all on that. On the Atta/Prague meeting: I honestly don't know what to think. The officers who ran the case say that it happened, the politicians backed them up, then the politicians backed off. I'm still inclined to think that it happened, since they have photos of it happening and the case officers stand by it, but their superiors don't... Who knows? At any rate, that is not all that relevant; it is the abundance of evidence, cited here, that should be addressed. Some of it might turn out to not be true. How confident are you that it is all dismissable? Because if it is not, and if at least some of this evidence is accurate, then that link did likely exist. And BTW - you again failed to address the actual evidence. You seem to have a habit of avoiding main points, don't you? GreenVegan: There are quite a few facts in there. More facts than rumor and innuendo. But since you think that there are "few" facts in here, could I ask you: which ones do you think are factual?
It doesn't matter if there is a connection with AlQaeda. There was a connection, but even if you don't believe that it doesn't matter. America needed to remind the rest of the world of it's power with this war. The world needs to fear us. Then maybe there won't be more bombs. In any case, the next step for the realization of a global American Empire is the invasion of North Korea and Iran, then Saudi Arabia.
"Nomar, you are listening to the dark side. ... Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hatred, and hatred le-- AHHHHRRRRH-- (*chop*)!"
treeman, I'm still waiting for definitive proof one way or the other about links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if there had been some sort of contact, even if it was only at a low level, between the two. But I was also wondering, if you have a chance, if you could comment in the thread... "CIA Seeks Probe of White House". I'd be interested in an intelligent comment on the fast growing controversy from someone with your slant on political topics. I'm pretty stunned about the entire thing, if true. Thanks.
