you're arguing that even though we now know there were connections between iraq and al queda, that since the NIE, which was based on virtually non-existent inteligence, said he posed no threat, bush lied and was wrong to take us to war. never mind what has subsequently been revealed, about both the connections and our intelligence capabilities at the time, bush went against his intel so he lied. it's truly mind-boggling that you can look at what's been revealed above, yet still focus on what bush knew, or what we thought he knew, based on a report that itself has been proving incorrect.
Argh. First of all, apples and oranges. While, yes, he was wrong to bring us to war, and no, I don't believe that any substantial operative realtionship between AQ and Saddam have been established, both are beyond the point we were discussing, and I think you know it. The point I was making was that our intel said exactly the opposite of what Bush told us it said when selling us the argument to war. Also, that you agree that our intel was virtually non-existant, if so, that would prove another lie (by definition of miselading) we used totry and persuade the UN, US population, and world to go to war, when we were trumpeting the solidity of our intel, and reacting with disdain and disbelief when others pointed out its limitations.
the bottom line is we now know bush was right and the intel was wrong. if you want to focus on whether bush used the wrong reasons to launch the right war, by all means, knock yourself out. but there is no doubt any longer that there was a relationship bewteen Iraq and Al queda, between Saddam and Bin Laden. go for it, split hairs all you want- it's the off-season and the rove story has imploded on the democrats as well, so there's not much else for you to do.
A) Yes, there is extreme doubt. B) If you are not concerned when the leader of a 'democratic' nation uses lies to convince his people and the world to go to war...all I can say is that, yes, we worry about different things.
more from mr. hayes... http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/849hgxam.asp?pg=1 -- The DIA and CIA Go MIA It's bad enough that the media doesn't follow the connection between Saddam and Osama. Where's the American intelligence community? by Stephen F. Hayes 07/18/2005 11:50:00 AM ON MARCH 7, 2004, Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial head of the Iraqi National Congress, appeared on 60 Minutes. Lesley Stahl grilled him about claims that the INC provided bad prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. government--something virtually no one these days disputes. In the course of the interview, Stahl raised questions about the intelligence on Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda. Chalabi produced a document which he claimed came from the files of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. On a list of Iraqi Intelligence assets was the name "Osama bin Laden." The document, dated March 28, 1992, described bin Laden as a Saudi businessman "in good contact" with the Iraqi Intelligence section in Syria. STAHL: OK. Let me show everybody. This says "Osama bin Laden"' Now show--how do you know it's an authentic document? How do you know it's real? CHALABI: The people who initialed the document before it goes on--one, two, three, four signatures--we know who these people are, and it's very difficult for anyone to forge the document. STAHL: Are you spinning me? CHALABI: Well, you check it. You have the piece of paper in your hand. You check it. STAHL: We did check it with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which believes the document is authentic but of little significance because it doesn't spell out what the relationship with Osama bin Laden was or what he did, if anything, for the Iraqis. And with that, the issue was effectively dropped. CBS did nothing to follow up on its accidental scoop and with the exception of Fox News, neither did anyone else. One of the enduring mysteries of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is why reporters have shown so little interest in covering it. The secret relationship between America's two most dangerous enemies and the results of their collaboration would seem to have many of the elements journalists look for in a potential story. And for many reporters at mainstream news outlets such as ABC News, Newsweek, and the Associated Press it was a familiar story. Journalists throughout the 1990s covered the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship with some regularity. By early 1999, ABC News was running stories describing the "long relationship" between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. The Associated Press reported that the Iraqi regime had extended to bin Laden an offer of safehaven in Baghdad. The wire service was apparently so sure of its information that attribution was deemed unnecessary. Among the many reasons journalists today don't seem particularly interested in covering the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, three stand out. First, the mainstream press long ago settled on a storyline to describe the case for the Iraq War: the Bush administration lied, or at least exaggerated, to take us to war. Second, the Bush administration is doing little to encourage journalists to write a corrective. Third, intelligence sources, as the DIA example makes clear, have no interest in setting the story straight. We know from a variety of reporting--including the Joint Congressional Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee--that the U.S intelligence community had no firsthand credible reporting on the leadership of al Qaeda or the Iraqi regime. One IC analyst explained the intelligence community's view of Iraq and terrorism in an interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee: "I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks." There are, of course, numerous other ways the Iraqi regime was involved in terrorism. We know that the regime funded a number of radical Islamic terrorist groups from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to Algerian Islamic Group, to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. (The last of these was for years run by Ayman al Zawahiri, now the top deputy to bin Laden.) We know that the regime used Oil-for-Food money to support other regional terrorists. We know that Hussein trained terrorists in Iraq. In March 2002, Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter with the New Yorker, interviewed several prisoners in a Kurdish jail in northern Iraq. The Kurds gave him access to the prisoners because, they said, the CIA had shown little interest in interrogating them. Goldberg wrote: The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought. More than six months later, the CIA still had not followed up on the reporting. According to an article that appeared September 10, 2002, in the Washington Post: The Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Hussein group in northern Iraq, says it has jailed 15 to 20 al Qaeda members and was surprised that no one from the U.S. government has come to interrogate them. One senior counterterrorism official confirmed that the CIA knew of the detentions and that U.S. officials have not interrogated the prisoners. "We really don't know whether they are under al Qaeda or Saddam's control," the official said. "Ansar trained in Afghan camps. They used Afghanistan as their headquarters. It's tough to nail down the other details. It's not implausible that they are working with Saddam. His intel links into northern Iraq are very strong." It was only tough to nail down those other details because the CIA didn't try. Still, the intelligence community seems to have understood that Saddam Hussein was not out of the terrorism business. But they were nonetheless not focused on Iraqi support for terrorism because of the assumption that the Iraqi Intelligence service would not conduct attacks. That's hardly comforting. If the response of the DIA to Lesley Stahl in any indication, it appears that little has changed. The DIA believes the Iraqi Intelligence document listing Osama bin Laden as an asset is "authentic but of little significance because it doesn't spell out what the relationship with Osama bin Laden was or what he did, if anything, for the Iraqis." Again, that's not comforting. If the DIA were serious about understanding the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, such a document might provoke any number of questions. How did the Iraqis get bin Laden's name? Did bin Laden know that he was considered an Iraqi Intelligence asset? Who were the Iraqi Intelligence officials in Syria who had good relations with bin Laden? Did they stay in touch after 1992? The list goes on. It is bad enough that the U.S. intelligence community took so little interest in the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship while it was developing. It is inexcusable that the lack of interest persists. Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection (HarperCollins).
An definitive operative connection still hasn't been shown. All this indicates is that it was worth looking into.
Do you still believe that the "intelligence" that Chalabi provided is accurate? You are aware that he has been linked to Irani intelligence and may have been used to provide said intelligence to cause the US to invade Iraq, right?
Why indeed? http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/919kltpp.asp?pg=1 -- The Algerian Connection Why did Saddam financially support an al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria? by Thomas Joscelyn LATE LAST MONTH an Algerian-born terrorist named Ahmed Ressam received a commuted sentence of 22 years (prosecutors had recommended 35 years) in prison for his role in planning to blow up the Los Angeles airport. His sentence infuriated many since his involvement in the plot against LAX was immediately transparent. After all, he was captured in December 1999 after driving off a ferry from British Columbia in a vehicle laden with bomb-making explosives. Ressam received a commuted sentence after providing investigators with good intelligence about the al Qaeda network which spawned the plot. (Ressam has since stopped cooperating.) Indeed, Ressam's failed attempt against LAX was part of a series of al Qaeda-related attacks against targets around the world (in Jordan, Australia, and elsewhere) at the turn of the new millennium. There is still much about these planned attacks we do not know. Ressam's story, like that of so many other al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, contains an endless list of murky connections to a host of nefarious people and groups. The most troubling of these ties is to al Qaeda's Algerian affiliates, the Armed Islamic Group (aka the "GIA") and its descendant, the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (the "GSPC"). The history of the GIA is an especially violent one and Ressam is just one of many terrorists to have operated under its auspices. Indeed, the Algerian tentacle of the vast terror network executed scores of lethal attacks spanning more than a decade. IT IS A CURIOUS FACT, then, that Saddam Hussein provided financial assistance to the GIA when it was in its earliest stages of germination. There is still much we do not know about Saddam's relationship with al Qaeda's Algerian affiliate. But, Iraq's relationship with the GIA warrants further investigation given its tortuous history. THE ROOTS OF SADDAM'S RELATIONSHIP with the GIA trace back to the 1991 Gulf War. The group's early history is particularly useful in understanding why Saddam would offer the GIA his support. As the war approached, Saddam sought and received support from a conspicuous group of Islamist radicals. Among them was the Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi and an Algerian Islamist named Abbas Madani, both of whom traveled to Baghdad in the months prior to the war and declared their support for Saddam. Madani was then the leader of Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front (the "FIS"), which was a consortium of four Islamist parties formed to obtain democratically-elected political power. Madani was somewhat more tempered in his support for Saddam than his cohort, Ali Benhadj, because he feared (correctly) that support for Saddam would end Saudi financial support for the FIS. Benhadj overcame Madani's reticence, however, and moved the FIS firmly into Saddam's camp. According to Gilles Keppel (Jihad, The Trail of Political Islam), Benhadj--who was accompanied by "a detachment of Afghan-garbed jihadists fresh from Peshawar"--took to the streets and "delivered a harangue in front of the [Algerian] Ministry of Defense in which he demanded the formation of a corps of volunteers to join the forces of Saddam Hussein." Writing in Al Qaeda's Armies, Middle East expert Jonathan Schanzer explains that as the Gulf War neared the "FIS became increasingly pro-Iraq and anti-U.S., as seen through their slogans, protests, and even training camps for volunteers to fight for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The U.S. conflict with Iraq was a powerful symbol of FIS's soaring popularity." INDEED, the FIS leadership leveraged popular support for Saddam within Algeria to the point that it was on the verge of taking power in 1992. To avoid a takeover by the Islamists, however, the ruling Algerian government and army cancelled the final round of elections. Martial law was imposed, Madani and Benhadj were thrown in jail, and the more radical elements within the FIS, including many former Arab Afghans, left its ranks to join the burgeoning GIA. The "Arab Afghans" were among the earliest leaders of the GIA. Bin Laden's patronage of the group proved especially beneficial as hundreds of former veterans from the war in Afghanistan were soon redeployed to Algeria to swell the GIA's ranks. By some accounts, bin Laden is said to have personally arranged for the financing and necessary travel documents to be provided to upwards of 1,000 or more "Arab Afghans" who returned or relocated to Algerian soil. Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, is also said to have played a vital role in the group's formation. Bin Laden did not just finance the building of the GIA with money from his own pockets or his wealthy benefactors, however. He also received help from Saddam Hussein: At least one former CIA official has confirmed that some of the money bin Laden funneled to the GIA came from Saddam's Iraq. In a USA Today article from December 2001, Stanley Bedlington, a senior analyst in the CIA's counterterrorism center until he retired in 1994, explained, "We were convinced that money from Iraq was going to bin Laden, who was then sending it to places that Iraq wanted it to go." He added, "There certainly is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had pretty strong ties to bin Laden while he was in Sudan, whether it was directly or through (Sudanese) intermediaries. We traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq." [emphasis added] Later, in an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Stephen Hayes, Bedlington elaborated on the relationship. "Osama bin Laden had established contact with the GIA," Bedlington explained, "Saddam was using bin Laden to ship funds to his own contacts through the GIA." THE EXTENT of this financial arrangement is not clear. Declassifying the evidence of Saddam's financial relationship with bin Laden collected by the CIA in the early 1990s, as cited by Bedlington, would be a good start to answering these questions. It is likely, however, that we will never know the true extent of Saddam's support for the GIA. This is particularly troublesome since the GIA went on to become one of al Qaeda's most prolific affiliates; a brief review of the terrorist dossier compiled by the GIA and its descendant, the GSPC, demonstrates that further investigation of Saddam's support for the group is warranted. Upon its inception in the early 1990s the GIA declared a "jihad" against the Algerian government and a civil war ensued. That war has ended at least 100,000 lives, including many foreigners operating on Algerian soil. The GIA's efforts in this war and abroad were directly aided by the core of al Qaeda. In his testimony ("Algeria's Struggle Against Terrorism") before Congress's Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation earlier this year, Lorenzo Vidino explained, The Islamists were not alone in their violent struggle against the secular government. Throughout the 1990s they received financial and logistical support from al Qaeda, as hundreds of Algerian militants trained in al Qaeda training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan. And while battling the secular government at home, the GIA established a strong presence in Europe, where its cells interacted with other Islamist groups and provided the militants fighting in Algeria with money, weapons and false documents. Indeed, the GIA's strong presence in Western Europe played a vital role in al Qaeda's planning and execution of a number attacks. One such incident proved to be an eerie forerunner of the events of September 11, 2001. Four GIA terrorists hijacked an Air France flight leaving Algiers in December 1994. Their goal was to force the pilot to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower. Their plan failed when the plane landed in Marseille and French Special Forces overtook it, killing the hijackers in the process. In addition to the Air France hijacking in 1994, investigations into a series of bombings on French soil throughout 1995 led to the convictions of several GIA terrorists. Another bombing in France in 1996 turned up leads to the GIA; the GIA left its fingerprints on countless other plots throughout the mid-1990s. By 1998, however, support for the group within Algeria began to wane after years of brutal attacks on civilians, so one of the GIA's former leaders reconstituted the group as the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (the "GSPC"). The GSPC subsumed much of the GIA's international network and terrorists operating within the GSPC's sphere continued to assault the western world. Members of the GSPC have been connected to terrorist plots and attacks in Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, several of which are particularly noteworthy. The aforementioned plot on LAX at the turn of the new millennium is thought to have been spawned within the GSPC's Canadian presence, which it inherited from the GIA. According to Lorenzo Vidino, "A GSPC cell in Europe is believed to have planned to kill President Bush at the G8 meeting in Genoa in the summer of 2001." According to Schanzer, two members of the GSPC provided passports to the assassins of bin Laden's main nemesis within Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, just two days prior to September 11, 2001. "Massoud's assassination," Schanzer notes, "was likely designed to weaken the Northern Alliance with the full expectation that the U.S. would require its help in the post-September 11 invasion of Afghanistan." The GSPC has also been an especially vocal supporter of the terrorist assault, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq. It was no surprise, therefore, when Zarqawi's al Qaeda branch claimed responsibility for taking two Algerian diplomats hostage in Iraq late last month. Zarqawi's group explained, according to a translation provided by globalterroralert.com, that the diplomats were taken hostage as direct retribution against the Algerian government for supporting the "Jews, Christians, and every country that wounds the people" of Zarqawi's group. The GSPC lauded the kidnapping and accused the Algerian government of "aiding the apostate Iraqi government and the crusader alliance their battle against the mujahideen." Did Saddam continue to financially support al Qaeda's Algerian affiliate throughout its reign of terror? We do not know. Given the GIA's, and then the GSPC's, long history of terrorism around the world, it deserves further investigation. Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.
Give it up basso. We'll never have a 100% answer to this question: Is the world safer before or after the Iraq war? Many argue Sadaam had links to terrorism. Others argue that the removal of Sadaam from power created a vacume that allowed a far greater level of terrorist activity. Both positions probably have some truth. I'll take the latter side and you can have the former side. Fine. Now get over it.
That article has a very tenous thread. It is grasping at straws. They talk about the 2000 plot and the man involved, and then admit that nothing is known at all about Saddam's connection to that, but then talks about Saddam's connection with GIA. It says that Saddam supported them in their very early stages which was years ago, and the article goes on to say that they disbanded and members from that group formed yet another group. That group went on to form the GSCP, for which, again, there is no proof of Saddam involvement. They are grasping at straws big time with this story.
who gives a **** what people argue...there is no proof that saddam was in bed with the terrorists...he in fact is the opposite of what terrorists stand for...trying to make a connection of Saddam to Terrorists is just silly.
I don't think I have seen anyone deny that Saddam was giving money to the families o Palestinian suicide bombers. There is plaenty of doubt about Saddam's involvement with Al Queda, but I think his support of at least some level of terrorism is basically unchallenged.
