Part 1 of "The Proven Allies, Al Qaeda & Saddam"
Proven Allies, al Qaeda & Saddam
I am posting two articles on this.
FIRST: There two types of people:
Those who believe what they want to believe in spite of the facts.
And those who believe what the facts prove.
Those against our actons to remove the psycho Saddam from power, to eliminate the Al Qaeda link with him and to free the Iraq people are among the former.
The uninformed say that since there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the U.S. has no business going into Iraq and liberating the Iraqi's.
As there is more than sufficient evidence proving Al Qaeda was in league with Iraq since 1994, which was long before the war, those who say we should not be there, are either ignorant of the facts OR they are just too dumb to comprehend the facts.
And of course, those of us with sufficent knowledge of the facts, know the US had more than enough justification to remove Saddam's regime id there had actually never been any Al Qaeda connection at all.
--------------------------
Wrong Again
By Richard Minite
June 18, 2004
Every day, it seems as if 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 by 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 and from government reports as well as congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers, all attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam Hussan 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 who detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years.
He fled to IRAQ. And U.S. forces have recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, which show Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden himself met at least EIGHT times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization!
(Which was a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay.)
Bin Laden also met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, it's external intelligence service, according to information made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, while speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* Sudanese intelligence officials told me 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, a British newspaper, The Guardian 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 was "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.
* According to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter reported that in October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities.
Jane's reported 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 reported FBI investigators cited a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, in which the "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 & Al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* The London's Independent reports.that documents which Spanish investigators seized from a Yusuf Galan (who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks) showed that he had been invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.
And the invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre,"
* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London 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 a vast compound which 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, & Major Ali Hawas. I noticed a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are from Osama bin Laden's group, the PKK and Mojahedine 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 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 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 (whose specialty was poisons) oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002.
When Zarqawi recovered from his wounds, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq.
Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an offical of the United States Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan.
The captured assassin (Whose accomplice escaped into Iraq.) confessed he received orders & funds from Zarqawi's cell in 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, who was 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 the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons.
"Where did they go, where did they look?" said secretary Powell, "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-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000.
He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
* Documents found in the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show 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 & Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper 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.
(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 both 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 non-Muslims should not 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 the terror network was always desperate for cash.
Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (as the Egyptians earned 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, and not of a global terror conglomerate.
Forbes has 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 reported to 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 (or was) now on the New York Times' bestseller list
Proven Allies, al Qaeda & Saddam
I am posting two articles on this.
FIRST: There two types of people:
Those who believe what they want to believe in spite of the facts.
And those who believe what the facts prove.
Those against our actons to remove the psycho Saddam from power, to eliminate the Al Qaeda link with him and to free the Iraq people are among the former.
The uninformed say that since there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the U.S. has no business going into Iraq and liberating the Iraqi's.
As there is more than sufficient evidence proving Al Qaeda was in league with Iraq since 1994, which was long before the war, those who say we should not be there, are either ignorant of the facts OR they are just too dumb to comprehend the facts.
And of course, those of us with sufficent knowledge of the facts, know the US had more than enough justification to remove Saddam's regime id there had actually never been any Al Qaeda connection at all.
--------------------------
Wrong Again
By Richard Minite
June 18, 2004
Every day, it seems as if 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 by 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 and from government reports as well as congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers, all attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam Hussan 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 who detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years.
He fled to IRAQ. And U.S. forces have recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, which show Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden himself met at least EIGHT times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization!
(Which was a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay.)
Bin Laden also met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, it's external intelligence service, according to information made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, while speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* Sudanese intelligence officials told me 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, a British newspaper, The Guardian 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 was "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.
* According to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter reported that in October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities.
Jane's reported 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 reported FBI investigators cited a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, in which the "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 & Al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* The London's Independent reports.that documents which Spanish investigators seized from a Yusuf Galan (who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks) showed that he had been invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.
And the invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre,"
* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London 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 a vast compound which 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, & Major Ali Hawas. I noticed a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are from Osama bin Laden's group, the PKK and Mojahedine 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 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 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 (whose specialty was poisons) oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002.
When Zarqawi recovered from his wounds, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq.
Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an offical of the United States Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan.
The captured assassin (Whose accomplice escaped into Iraq.) confessed he received orders & funds from Zarqawi's cell in 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, who was 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 the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons.
"Where did they go, where did they look?" said secretary Powell, "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-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000.
He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
* Documents found in the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show 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 & Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper 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.
(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 both 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 non-Muslims should not 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 the terror network was always desperate for cash.
Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (as the Egyptians earned 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, and not of a global terror conglomerate.
Forbes has 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 reported to 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 (or was) now on the New York Times' bestseller list
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