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Are you surprised?

fff

Well-known member
The Pentegon said they'd release this on the web. But the White House stopped them from putting it out where we could all see the actual report. Can't wait for someone to put it online.

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn't due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.

The new study, entitled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents", was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a "painful" declassification review.

It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report's authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.

The issue of al Qaida in Iraq already has played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he'd keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there.

"I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq," McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, "There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade." (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn't emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)

The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush's decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.

While the documents reveal no Saddam-al Qaida links, they do show that Saddam and his underlings were willing to use terrorism against enemies of the regime and had ties to regional and global terrorist groups, the officials said.

However, the U.S. intelligence official, who's read the full report, played down the prospect of any major new revelations, saying, "I don't think there's any surprises there."

Saddam, whose regime was relentlessly secular, was wary of Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaida, although like many other Arab leaders, he gave some financial support to Palestinian groups that sponsored terrorism against Israel.

According to the State Department's annual report on global terrorism for 2002 — the last before the Iraq invasion — Saddam supported the militant Islamic group Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical, Syrian-based terrorist group.

Saddam also hosted Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, although the Abu Nidal Organization was more active when he lived in Libya and he was murdered in Baghdad in August 2002, possibly on Saddam's orders.

An earlier study based on the captured Iraqi documents, released by the Joint Forces Command in March 2006, found that a militia Saddam formed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Fedayeen Saddam, planned assassinations and bombings against his enemies. Those included Iraqi exiles and opponents in Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite communities.

Other documents indicate that the Fedayeen Saddam opened paramilitary training camps that, starting in 1998, hosted "Arab volunteers" from outside of Iraq. What happened to the non-Iraqi volunteers is unknown, however, according to the earlier study.

The new Pentagon study isn't the first to refute earlier administration contentions about Saddam and al Qaida.

A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam was "distrustful of al Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaida to provide material or operational support."

The Senate report, citing an FBI debriefing of a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi, said that Saddam turned down a request for assistance by bin Laden which he made at a 1995 meeting in Sudan with an Iraqi operative
 

Goodpasture

Well-known member
the ONLY evidence, in 2001, that there was a link between AlQaeda and Saddam came from the RUMOR that there was a meeting between an Al Qaeda operative and a Iraqi diplomat in Yugoslavia. That Saddam had a link to Al Qaeda is, on its face, so unlikely that such allegations are just plain stupid.

Al Qaeda is a religiously extreme group fighting a religious war against all those that don't believe like they do. Saddam was a sectarian (he had a Christian in his cabinet) dictator. He could not handle ANY allegiance to anyone but himself. He would not, and he did not, tolerate religious extremism in Iraq.....he couldn't afford to. Religious fanatics recognize an authority greater than that of the state, and so are willing to die for the faith rather than obey a dictator. When Saddam found a fanatic religious group in his domain, he killed them all......short and sweet. The only "terrorist training camps" that were in Iraq were in the northern areas dominated by the Kurds, which Saddam could not take out because of our imposition of the no fly zones.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

Since which Powell has admitted that he was "used" by people that he had trusted - and apologized to the world for his part in helping the proliferation of this info that turned out to be false.... :(

The General- who actually knows the realities of war- had been much more cautious of our venturing to an unprovoked war than GW/Cheney/Rumsfeld whose only experience was provoking wars- and not fighting them...

Experts often possess more data than judgment.
General Colin Powell

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
~William Westmoreland

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are being used by the owning elite's as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad.
~Major General Smedley Butler
 

fff

Well-known member
Mike said:
Is anyone denying Zarqawi was not in Iraq before the war?

I don't know. Was he? Link, please.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a Jordanian, not an Iraqi. He didn't declare his allegiance to Bin Laden and rename his organization "al Qaeda in Iraq" until 2004, after the US invaded Iraq.

Al-Qaeda is in Iraq to stay.
It's not a conclusion the White House talks about much when denouncing the shadowy group, known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, that used the U.S. invasion five years ago to develop into a major killer.

The militants are weakened, battered, perhaps even desperate, by most U.S. accounts. But far from being "routed," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed last month, they're still there, still deadly active and likely to remain far into the future, military and other officials told the Associated Press.

Commanders and the other officials commented in a series of interviews and assessments discussing persistent violence in Iraq and intelligence judgments there and in the U.S.

Putting the squeeze on al-Qaeda in Iraq was a primary objective of the revised U.S. military strategy that Gen. David Petraeus inherited when he became the top commander in Baghdad 13 months ago. The goal — largely achieved — was to minimize the group's ability to inflame sectarian violence, which at the time was so intense that some characterized Iraq as trapped in a civil war.

However, the militants are proving they can survive even the most suffocating U.S. military pressure.

"They are not to be underestimated. That's one thing I've seen over and over," said Col. John Charlton, commander of the Army's 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. His unit has fought al-Qaeda for the past 14 months in a portion of Anbar province that includes the provincial capital of Ramadi.

"I'm always very amazed at their ability to adapt and find new vulnerabilities," Charlton said in a telephone interview this week from his headquarters outside of Ramadi. "They are very good at that," even though they have largely lost the support of local citizens.

The U.S. and Iraqi government intent is to chip away at al-Qaeda until it is reduced to "almost a nonentity," Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said March 4 shortly after finishing his tour as the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq. "Unfortunately with these terrorist organizations, they will always be there at some level."

Demonstrating anew their remarkable staying power, the militants are thought to be behind attacks in recent days in Baghdad and beyond, including bombings in the capital March 7 that killed at least 68 people.

Now that U.S. troop reinforcements are beginning to go home, Petraeus and the Bush administration will be watching closely to see if American-trained Iraqi forces can keep up the pressure on al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which did not exist as a coherent group before U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, probably now numbers no more than 6,000, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. It may have been closer to 10,000-strong before the severe pummeling it took last year, when it lost its main bases of Sunni Arab support. It controls no cities but is still active in pockets through much of central and northern Iraq.

Charlton, whose unit is leaving Iraq shortly and will not be replaced by another U.S. brigade in Anbar, said he is confident of the Iraqis' determination not to allow al-Qaeda back into their communities.

But resilience has been a hallmark of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which emerged only after its leader, the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, leader of the global al-Qaeda network, in October 2004. It has survived innumerable reverses in recent years, including al-Zarqawi's death in a June 2006 U.S. airstrike

The successor to al-Zarqawi is Abu Ayub al-Masri, an Egyptian who keeps a lower public profile.

The group's other leadership figures also are foreigners from Arab nations including Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Morocco and Libya, according to two defense officials who discussed details of the organization on condition of anonymity. The rank-and-file membership is largely Iraqi.

Hardly a day goes by that the U.S. military command in Baghdad doesn't announce the capture or killing of an al-Qaeda figure. On Thursday, for example, the military said troops detained four suspected terrorists northwest of Samarra while targeting an alleged foreign terrorist facilitator and associates of a media cell leader involved in al-Qaeda's network in Anbar province.

Brian Fishman, an al-Qaeda watcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, said that although al-Qaeda in Iraq lost some of its "strategic focus" after al-Zarqawi's death, it remains a threat.

"It's way too soon to count these guys out," he said.

In a report to Congress this week, the Pentagon said elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq are "highly lethal" in parts of the Tigris River valley north of Baghdad and in Ninevah province in northern Iraq. And it said the group, though less effective overall, is capable of striking "across Iraq."

That doesn't seem to fit the description offered by Army Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, a battalion commander in the 1st Infantry Division, who wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post on March 9 that al-Qaeda in Iraq was "largely defeated."

Certainly the group's stated goal of establishing an Islamic fundamentalist state in Iraq has been blocked. And there is no sign that al-Qaeda is anywhere near being in position to regain momentum.

Charlton, the Army commander in Ramadi, said propaganda material from local al-Qaeda members or supporters has changed markedly in tone in recent months.

"Back in early 2007 and in 2006 you would typically see propaganda that was very boastful, very aggressive and very confident," Charlton said. "It would say things like, 'We're coming to get the sheiks, we're going to kill them all,' that type of stuff. Lately, the propaganda is very different. It's appealing on an ideological basis to the population — as if they realize they've lost the support of the people."

But al-Qaeda isn't going away.

Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the top U.S. commander in Anbar province, told reporters at the Pentagon by teleconference this week that al-Qaeda in Iraq has the wherewithal, when squeezed, to shift to other places. After being pushed out of Anbar in early 2007, the militants reasserted themselves in Baghdad. After getting hammered in the capital they slipped north, first to Diyala and more recently to the northern province of Ninevah, whose capital, Mosul, is now the scene of heavy fighting.

"Our sense is they'll come back to where they know best," Kelly said, referring to Anbar.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-03-14-al-qaeda_N.htm
 

Mike

Well-known member
Al-Zarqawi's Rise to Militant Leadership in Iraq
A timeline of events in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's life as leader of al-Qaida in Iraq:

Oct. 20, 1966: Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh in Jordan, part of Bani Hassan Bedouin tribe.

1980s: Embraces Islamic militancy, makes first trips to Afghanistan to fight Soviet invasion.

Mid-1990s: Returns to Jordan, is arrested, solidifies radical ideology in prison. Shares cell block with militant cleric Isam Mohammed al-Barqawi, known as Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi. Adopts extremist strain of Islam that brands enemies as "infidels" worthy of death.

1999: Returns to Afghanistan after prison release. Forms links with al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

Late 2001: Flees Afghanistan during U.S.-led ouster of Taliban. Passes through Iran to Iraq.

Oct. 2002: U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley slain in Jordan, believed to be first terror operation by al-Zarqawi followers.

Feb. 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell, in presentation to U.N. Security Council, cites al-Zarqawi presence in Iraq as proof of link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. U.S. counterterrorism officials later cast doubt on connection.

Aug. 2003: Al-Zarqawi group, called "Monotheism and Jihad," stages suicide attacks on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and Shiite shrine in Najaf, seen by many as start of Iraqi insurgency.

April 2004: Beheads U.S. hostage Nicholas Berg, posts videotape of killing on Internet.

May 18, 2004: Car bomb by al-Zarqawi followers assassinates president of now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council.

July 2004: United States sets $25 million bounty for al-Zarqawi.

Sept. 2004: Beheads U.S. hostage Eugene Armstrong, posts videotape of killing on Internet.

Oct. 2004: Vows fealty to bin Laden, changes name of group to "al-Qaida in Iraq."

Feb. 2005: Suicide bombing against Iraqi security recruits in Hillah kills 125. Claimed by al-Qaida in Iraq, is single deadliest attack of insurgency.

Nov. 9, 2005: Triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman, Jordan, kills 60, mostly Sunni Muslims. Attack draws criticism from fellow Islamic militants.

Jan. 5, 2006: Al-Zarqawi fighters blamed for string of suicide bombings against Shiites in holy city of Karbala and police station north of Baghdad, killing at least 130. Attacks came weeks after parliament election.

Jan. 2006: Announcement that Al-Zarqawi movement joining umbrella organization of Iraqi insurgents called the Shura Council of Mujahedeen. Seen as attempt to give Iraqi face to al-Qaidi in Iraq, believed to be mainly non-Iraqi, Arab fighters.

June 7: Al-Zarqawi and several aides killed in targeted U.S. air strike. Followers vow to continue holy war.

Washington Post
 

fff

Well-known member
Oct. 2002: U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley slain in Jordan, believed to be first terror operation by al-Zarqawi followers.

Says who? The Bush Administration? :roll:

Feb. 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell, in presentation to U.N. Security Council, cites al-Zarqawi presence in Iraq as proof of link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. U.S. counterterrorism officials later cast doubt on connection.

Another joke. Powell has apologized for his remarks. He knew better when he made them.

And I don't see a link.
 

Mike

Well-known member
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR2006060800299.html

Zarqawi was in the Kurdish territory of Iraq before the war. Powell was not wrong about him being there.

Fact is.......this paper only alleges that there was are no found "written" acknowledgements about Al Qaeda in formal documents pertaining to the collaboration of Saddam and Al Qaeda.
 

fff

Well-known member
Mike said:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR2006060800299.html

Zarqawi was in the Kurdish territory of Iraq before the war. Powell was not wrong about him being there.

Fact is.......this paper only alleges that there was are no found "written" acknowledgements about Al Qaeda in formal documents pertaining to the collaboration of Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Fact is your link doesn't support what you're spewing.

Fact is this paper doens't allege anything. It's a Pentegon-supported study, reviewing more than 600,000 Iraqi documents. And it says they "found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion...." Let's see now: Zarqawi wasn't part of AlQaida before the invasion. Saddam didn't have any direct link before the invasion. Gasoline was $2.29 before the invasion. We had a projected Federal surplus, our military was the strongest in the world. We were respected around the world. Virtually the entire world supported the invasion of Afghanistan. But Georgie took care of all that.
 

Mike

Well-known member
fff said:
Mike said:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR2006060800299.html

Zarqawi was in the Kurdish territory of Iraq before the war. Powell was not wrong about him being there.

Fact is.......this paper only alleges that there was are no found "written" acknowledgements about Al Qaeda in formal documents pertaining to the collaboration of Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Fact is your link doesn't support what you're spewing.

Fact is this paper doens't allege anything. It's a Pentegon-supported study, reviewing more than 600,000 Iraqi documents. And it says they "found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion...." Let's see now: Zarqawi wasn't part of AlQaida before the invasion. Saddam didn't have any direct link before the invasion. Gasoline was $2.29 before the invasion. We had a projected Federal surplus, our military was the strongest in the world. We were respected around the world. Virtually the entire world supported the invasion of Afghanistan. But Georgie took care of all that.

I reiterate:
"1999: [Zarqawi] Returns to Afghanistan after prison release. Forms links with al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden."
 
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