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Stinger said:>The Bush administration was warned in 2002 that the rumor of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq was false,
Then why has every committe and report since said otherwise?
aps said:Please provide evidence to substantiate that allegation. The 9-11 Commission found NO relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Colin Powell said that by the time he left office, he had not seen evidence of a connection. So I have no idea where you're getting your information, except from the Bush administration or Fox News.
Stinger said:It's not a debatable point. The 9/11 commission DID find ties between Alqaeda and Saddam as did the Senate Intelligence hearings. Post the statement from Powell saying he had seen nothing, nada, zip as far as anything between Saddam and Alqaeda.
This is indeed true as long as one waters down the meaning of the word "ties" to exclude meaningful relationships such as a co operational, collaborative or operational. If one excludes these types of significant connections, then, yes, indeed, there were "ties" that were found. There are also "ties" between the US and aQ, and ties between the US and Hussein.Stinger said:It's not a debatable point. The 9/11 commission DID find ties between Alqaeda and Saddam as did the Senate Intelligence hearings.
Hoot said:Here's something that Powell said in his Security Council speech...
"Going back to the early and mid 1990's, when Bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaeda source tells us that Saddam and Bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad."
There was no connection between these two...simply an agreement not to try and kill eachother. That's as far as any connection went. They cut a deal to leave eachother alone.
aps said:He was on 20/20 in early September 2005. Sorry, Stinger, but I accord more probative value to the Secretary of State's opinion than your interpretation of what the 9-11 Commission concluded.
Powell Says U.N. Speech a 'Blot' on Record
By BARRY SCHWEID
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 8, 2005; 10:21 PM
Simon W. Moon said:This is indeed true as long as one waters down the meaning of the word "ties"
The US Intel Community was saying and is still saying that there was no collaborative nor operational "ties" between Hussein and al-Qaida. Off the top of my head, I can think of no committee report that says otherwise. If you know of one, please share.
Stinger said:It's not a debatable point. The 9/11 commission DID find ties between Alqaeda and Saddam as did the Senate Intelligence hearings. Post the statement from Powell saying he had seen nothing, nada, zip as far as anything between Saddam and Alqaeda.
Nope because all through this forum and all through the entire Internet web one can search and find cites from all the reports which clearly show Saddam and Alqaeda had contact, that Saddam was actively increasing those contacts and the relationship that had already developed. And that's just with Alqaede let alone all the other terrorist groups he was supporting and working with. That's what both of the main investigations confirmed.danarhea said:The reason it is not debatable is because Stinger cant prove his allegation, and therefore says its not debatable.
Stinger said:Nope because all through this forum and all through the entire Internet web one can search and find cites from all the reports which clearly show Saddam and Alqaeda had contact, that Saddam was actively increasing those contacts and the relationship that had already developed. And that's just with Alqaede let alone all the other terrorist groups he was supporting and working with. That's what both of the main investigations confirmed.
Did they carry out a mutal attack anywhere, no. Did they want to work together to carry out such attacks and futher each ones own motives. Without a doubt.
But here are just some of the various contacts and meetings and evidence we have turned up
* 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.
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Richard Miniter various
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Stinger said:No one has to water down anything the reports are chilling enough in describing what was going on.
Can we once and for all stipulate that Saddam and Bin Laden did not mount a combined attack on anyone. Will that finally make you and everyone else happy so you don't have to use that smoke screen anymore. WE ALL KNOW THAT. But that does not discount the many many many contacts and the planning and the training that WAS going on and that was JUST with Alqaeda.
danarhea said:
GySgt said:Maybe he is getting his information the same way people that study the region have gotten their information over the decades...they open their eyes.
Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) FUNDED BY IRAQ, SYRIA, LIBYA
Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG)
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
Al-Queda
Ansar al-Islam (AI)
Armed Islamic Group (GIA)
Asbat al-Ansar
Aum Shinrikyo (Aum)
Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA)
Communist Party of Philippines/New People’s Army (CPP/NPA)
Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA)
Gama’a al-Islamiyya (IG)
HAMAS
Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM)
Hizballah
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM)
Jemaah Islamiya Organization (JI)
Al-Jihad (AJ)
Kahane Chai (Kach)
Kongra-Gel (KGK)
Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LT)
Lashkar i Jhangvi (LJ)
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)
Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)
National Liberation Army (ELN)
Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) FUNDED AND BASED IN IRAQ
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC)
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
Revolutionary Nuclei (RN)
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C)
Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC)
Shining Path (SL)
Tanzim Qa’idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (QJBR)
This is not a "War on Al-Queda." This is a "War on Terror." Every group of terrorists that have come from the Middle East are mere symptoms of decay. The more the Middle East decays and the more the west prospers, the worst it will get. Some of these groups are from Africa. Another place full of oppression and decay. Still there are a couple groups listed here that are from other places, but learned their craft in the Middle East from other terror groups. What is common among them? - Islamic extremism. Al-Queda was nothing. It will get worse and they will continue to blame America for what they have done to themselves.
Maybe you should take some time out from hating and vomiting up your criticisms long enough to do your own studying. You might learn something and allow yourself to look at the big picture, instead of fretting over the mundane details of this war and the inhumane results that all war brings. There is only so much that an Internationally televised American President can say regarding this effort to safe guard your life. This civilization's hardliners have been waging war on us for a loooong time whether we have taken part in it or not. Until this civilization's dilemmas are addressed and placed on a path to change, American civilians will continue to be murdered for misdirected anger and blame. We can no longer stand idly by and turn our backs on the Muslims of the Middle East as their governments oppress and abuse them and use us as the scapegoat. As long as the oil flowed, that is exactly what our government has done.
akyron said:Your tenacity is inspiring. I dont know why you bother sometimes but thank you.
danarhea said:You have not posted one single solitary link throughout this whole thread, so why should I believe you? Because you posted it? Is it your own words, or are you plagarizing someone else? I hate to be so nasty about this, but that is one of the primary reason for links, that is, to distinguish your writing from the published works of others, in addition to offering evidence to back up what you are saying. So, is your response in your own words? If not, who are you quoting? Is your source a journalist, or is he from the American Enterprise Institute, or some other think tank? These questions are important. Go ahead and post your link. Dont be ashamed if it is from Newsmax. I actually read Newsmax sometimes. But do post a link so that I can see where your train of thought is coming from. If it is in your own words, and you didnt plagarize it, then say so. I will still demand a link from you to support what you are posting.
That'd be collaborative ties if not operational ones.Stinger said:But that does not discount the many many many contacts and the planning and the training that WAS going on and that was JUST with Alqaeda.
Simon W. Moon said:That'd be collaborative ties if not operational ones.
If you like you can provide your sources for what you're alleging, and, unless there're some surprises, I'll debunk them for you.
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