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Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists

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Cal

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The Algerian Plague
Going inside the terrorist group GSPC.
by Thomas Joscelyn
01/19/2006 12:00:00 AM

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/593kwxuz.asp?pg=1

THE REVELATION that Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists has important ramifications for European counterterrorism efforts. According to officials, one of the groups trained in Iraq prior to the war was al Qaeda's Algerian affiliate, the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat ("GSPC"). The GSPC and its predecessor, the Armed Islamic Group ("GIA"), are well-known to European counterterrorism officials: Within the last several months, in fact, the GSPC has been at the center of several substantive terrorist plots.

Just last week, Spain arrested 20 suspected terrorists who are alleged to have been recruiting and funding suicide bombers to send to Iraq. The New York Times covered the arrests, noting that according to a statement from the Spanish Interior Ministry the group included 15 Moroccans, 3 Spaniards, a Turk, and an Algerian. The suspects were "detained in Madrid and Barcelona, and in the Basque region, and had ties to two Islamic militant organizations . . . the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat [GSPC], based in Algeria, and the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group."

The Interior Ministry did not indicate how many suicide bombers were ultimately recruited and sent to Iraq by the cell. But officials "determined that one of the recruits was responsible for a suicide attack in November 2003 in Nasiriya, Iraq, that killed 19 Italians and 9 Iraqis." The Times noted that at the time, "it was the most lethal attack by insurgents since the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in April 2003."

The group's efforts were not limited to aiding al Qaeda's assault on Iraq, however. The Times reported that according to Spain's Interior Minister José Antonio Alonso, "one of the network's missions . . . was harboring veterans of the Iraqi conflict who had returned home to scout for possible terrorist targets in Europe and help identify promising recruits."


THE RECENTLY-ARRESTED CELL in Madrid and Barcelona is just the latest incarnation of the GSPC to be detected on Spanish soil. Spanish authorities have arrested numerous GSPC suspects over the last several years. In December of last year, for example, a Spanish judge remanded three Algerians from another terror cell to prison. According to one Spanish daily, the judge's writ stated that the GSPC has "a vast financing activity based on a constant labor of common crime," which includes "drug retailing, offences against property" as well as "forgery of documents and credit or phone cards." The judge's writ also noted the close ties between the GSPC and bin Laden's al Qaeda.

Italy--a crossroads for Islamists seeking access to Europe from the Middle East--has also been recently targeted by the GSPC. In November 2005, Italian authorities arrested three Algerians affiliated with the group. Authorities had been eavesdropping on the suspects for some time. Through intercepted phone conversations and bugging devices they learned of the Algerian's plans for a massive terror attack.

According to published reports, the intercepts revealed that the Algerians were discussing plans to kill "at least 10,000 people" and the possibility of packing a Titanic-sized ship with explosives. The three were being recorded as they cheered on video footage of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London and openly discussed their desire to dwarf the carnage of September 11, 2001.

Il Giornale, an Italian daily, published excerpts of these conversations. In one conversation a suspect claimed he had a map of Spain. Another awkwardly replied, "That is a problem, do you want to place a bomb on the subway?" In another, the Algerians discussed an attack on unnamed tourist village with an airplane. It is not clear how far along the Algerians' plots were.


BUT WHILE the GSPC certainly poses a threat to Spain and Italy, France is the group's preferred target. "The only way to make France disciplined is jihad and Islamic martyrdom," a September 2005 statement from the GSPC's leadership reads, "France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community." (The group also accused the Algerian president of ruling in France's name.)

In January 2005, French authorities arrested 11 suspected terrorists with ties to the GSPC. Like their brethren in the Spanish cell, the 11 were charged with recruiting suicide bombers to send to Iraq.

In September 2005, the same month that the GSPC named France its "enemy number one," authorities rounded up several members of the group who were allegedly planning attacks on the Paris metro, Orly airport, and the French intelligence headquarters. Press reports indicate that they had also considered a chemical weapons attack using ricin, but decided against it because it would be too difficult to carry out.

That French GSPC cell was led by a terrorist named Safe Bourada, who had served several years in prison for his involvement in a string of bomb attacks in France in 1995. At the time of the 1995 attacks, Bourada was a member of the GSPC's predecessor, the GIA.

The GIA, which took part in a brutal civil war in Algeria, had a long history of attacking France and her interests. One such incident proved to be an eerie precursor to September 11, 2001. In December 1994, four GIA terrorists hijacked an Air France flight leaving Algiers. 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 boarded it, killing the hijackers in the process.

In addition to the 1994 Air France hijacking, investigations into a series of 1995 bombings on French soil led to the convictions of several GIA members, including Bourada. Another bombing in France in 1996 also turned up leads to the GIA.


THE GIA'S HISTORY is especially notable because both bin Laden and Saddam took an early interest in the group. Bin Laden's "Arab Afghans" were among the first leaders of the GIA in the early 1990s. His patronage proved especially beneficial as hundreds of former veterans from the war in Afghanistan were 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 "Arab Afghans" who returned or relocated to Algerian soil.

But bin Laden did not just finance the building of the GIA with money from his own pockets. 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, 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 GIA's leadership had a falling out with the core of al Qaeda in the mid-1990s. Out of that schism, the GSPC was born. Under the guidance of both bin Laden and Zawahiri, an emir named Hassan Hattab broke from the GIA and reconstituted al Qaeda's Algerian affiliate as the GSPC.


TODAY, the world is infected with an Algerian plague. In Europe, counterterrorism officials scramble to stop GSPC members and their recruits from executing their lethal plans. In Iraq, GSPC members fight alongside Zarqawi, killing coalition troops and international aid workers. It is unknown how many of these fighters were first trained by Saddam. But the connection between the former dictator and this particularly deadly strain of international terrorism should be a cause of concern for us all.Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
 
Further proof of Saddam supporting, funding, and training, Radical islamic terrorist operations in Iraq prior to the US military removing him from power.....even though some will whine and say it is not..........
 
Cal copied:
THE REVELATION that Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists has important ramifications for European counterterrorism efforts.

I must have missed that day, Cal. Please take time to post something to show that Saddam did train thousands of terrorists. It seems to me there has been some question as to whether that's true or not. I'll be waiting...
 
Dis I have a question on opinions, I know you told me a while back that you have opinions on lots of stuff, and I'm not someone you care to share them with, but endulge me this.... do you honestly believe in your heart of hearts that Saddam Hussein was just an innocent bystander that never had anything to do with training terroists and he has not had WMD's since clinton bombed him in '98? Please be honest... :D

Now I know your opinion is about as good as anybody elses but I would just like to know your thoughts
 
Copied from BBJ's post:

Courtesy of our little buddy DIS.
"I have opinions on lots of stuff. You're not someone I care to share them with
 
Avoiding the question just as I expected you to. When it comes to being honest you just don't quite have it in you huh?
 
Disagreeable said:
Cal copied:
THE REVELATION that Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists has important ramifications for European counterterrorism efforts.

I must have missed that day, Cal. Please take time to post something to show that Saddam did train thousands of terrorists. It seems to me there has been some question as to whether that's true or not. I'll be waiting...
So sorry for the slipup.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/550kmbzd.asp
Saddam's Terror Training Camps
What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17



THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

"We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"

How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?

ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40 documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them. The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.

For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response. "John--Unacceptable." Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear something before the end of the year. He didn't.

"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," said Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made the claim unnecessary. "It's just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give me answers slowly."

On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: "I'm giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work."

Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has blocked this every step of the way." In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.

Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining the 40 documents he asked for in November. "There comes a time when the talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet."

Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search might take. His answer: Not long. "The retrieval of a HARMONY document is a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before lunch."

Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that, he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media exploitation problem for about four years.

We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to release all of the documents loses momentum.


TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project failing?
Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in the intelligence community. They've managed to find a number of golden nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons--primarily time and resources--there has not been much opportunity to step back, think about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various solutions. Inasmuch as we've won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age intelligence tool.

TWS: Why haven't we heard more about this project? Aren't most of the Iraqi documents unclassified?

Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater: unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard always one step away from being mothballed.

The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified documents.

In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming, it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins. Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be dated doesn't mean it isn't still valuable.

TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000 documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps, in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?

Tanji: I couldn't say what the total take of documents or other forms of media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.

In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.

Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq" was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.

Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence, recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I'd get various Department of Energy labs involved; they're used to dealing with large data sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.

TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to terrorism. Does the material you've seen support this conventional wisdom?

Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often complain about the lack of "proof"--a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain "proof" and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we've captured.

TWS: I've spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?

Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from getting into this kind of detail.

Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.

Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."

The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."

STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.

I thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.

The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written application for political asylum in the United States. In that document, Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as "guerrilla warfare training." And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.

Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got away.

Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were welcomed next door--and trained--in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Spanish investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."

Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). According to Baram, "The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches."

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the U.N. weapons inspection program. "The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country," he said, adding, "Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."

And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said, "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state." Dickey continued:


Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn't the senator instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years before the U.S. invasion?
 
Al Qaeda's Mad Scientist
The significance of Abu Khabab's death.
by Dan Darling
01/19/2006 1:15:00 AM

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/602zqghe.asp?pg=1

BEFORE HIS UNTIMELY DEMISE in Damadola, Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar--a man known better among both jihadists and intelligence agencies as Abu Khabab al-Masri--was one of the most reclusive members of the al Qaeda leadership. Despite having been identified as a senior member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, little public information exists about him. He was among the dozens of Islamists arrested in the 1980s for participation in the conspiracy to kill Anwar Sadat and no information except his birth date (April 29, 1953) is available on the "Rewards for Justice" poster circulated by the U.S. government which offered a $5,000,000 reward for his capture.

According to an Associated Press report from December 2005, which cited Islamist researchers from the London-based Islamic Observation Center, Khabab grew up in Alexandria's crowded al-Asafirah district and graduated from Alexandria University in 1975. He left Egypt for Saudi Arabia in 1987 and from there traveled to Afghanistan to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. His activities following the Afghan War are clouded in mystery, but as of the late 1990s he was in charge of his own facility at al Qaeda's Darunta training camp in Afghanistan. It is the activities undertaken at that camp and other facilities like it, however, that elevated Khabab's profile.

According to computer files recovered by the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as of May 1999 the al Qaeda leadership, spearheaded by the group's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, had decided to establish an unconventional weapons program codenamed al Zabadi ("curdled milk"). The unit was to be headed by Khabab; a large sum amounting to several thousand dollars was approved as its start-up budget. As of May 26, 1999, another computer file noted that Khabab had made "significant progress" with his work, a comment made all the more ominous by the discovery of al Qaeda videotapes aired on CNN in 2002, which showed Khabab and several assistants killing three dogs in crude chemical weapons experiments using what is believed to have been hydrogen cyanide, the same agent used by the in gas chambers in Nazi death camps.

How far Khabab got with al Zabadi before the war in Afghanistan is unknown, but according to the Robb-Silberman commission on weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence had assessed prior to the invasion that al Qaeda "had small quantities of toxic chemicals and pesticides, and had produced small amounts of World War I-era agents such as hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene . . . Training manuals . . . indicated that group members were familiar with the production and deployment of common chemical agents" and that unconfirmed reports "indicated that al-Qa'ida operatives had sought to acquire more modern and sophisticated chemical agents."

More alarmingly, the commission noted that post-war discoveries had shown that the terror network's biological weapons program "was further along . . . than pre-war intelligence indicated," particularly with regard to an agent the report referred to by the commission as "Agent X." According to the commission, "Reporting supports the hypothesis that al-Qa'ida had acquired several biological agents possibly as early as 1999, and had the necessary equipment to enable limited, basic production of Agent X."

Following the fall of the Taliban, Khabab vanished from the public eye, only to resurface in a February 2003 CNN report on a series of suspected chemical and biological terrorist plots in France and the United Kingdom. Citing European intelligence sources, CNN reported that the terror suspects arrested in these raids "trained at a camp in the Caucasus region, particularly the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia and in nearby Chechnya" and "some of the men recently arrested in Europe were trained by Khabab not only in Afghanistan, but also in the Caucasus . . . those being trained in the Caucasus region may also be receiving instruction from men who had experience with chemical and biological weapons in the Russian army."

CNN noted that Khabab was not the only leader involved in the Caucasus training: "according to interrogations of prisoners, Zarqawi was at the Pankisi Gorge providing training for the men."

(It is interesting to note that these European terror plots served as the basis for Secretary Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the threat posed by the Zarqawi network. According to the State Department's 2002 Patterns of Global Terrorism report, "In the past year, al-Qaida operatives in northern Iraq concocted suspect chemicals under the direction of senior al-Qaida associate Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and tried to smuggle them into Russia, Western Europe, and the United States for terrorist operations," thus making its true scope more extensive than that noted by Secretary Powell.)

Since the failed European plots, Khabab's location and activities have been unknown to the general public with the exception of a January 2004 report in the New York Post claiming that U.S. intelligence agencies were mounting a worldwide manhunt for him based on new intelligence that he had resumed his activities and may have been involved in the construction of a "dirty bomb" or other devices for use in terrorist attacks in the United States.

In March 2004, Egypt arrested his teenage son, Hamzah, following his deportation from Pakistan in an apparent bid to gain leverage on the boy's father. Since then, it is unknown whether or to what extent Khabab was involved with either the disrupted April 2004 plot by followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi to carry out a terrorist attack in Amman (Jordanian authorities claimed it would have involved the use of chemical weapons to kill thousands of civilians) or the May 2005 plot using cyanide-based substances that the Russian government claims was organized by Chechen Islamists and a Jordanian terrorist known as Abu Mudjaid.


IF KHABAB CAN BE SAID to have had a lasting effect on the development of Islamist extremism, it would be that he moved the possibility of Islamists using unconventional weapons out of the theoretical and into the practical. Those wishing to view his legacy need look no further than the extremely crude but deadly chemical and biological experiments set up under the auspices of Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion.

With Khabab dead, it is unclear what has become of the leadership of al Zabadi, particularly if the other Egyptians killed in Damadola include any of Khabab's assistants or aides. The issue of determining Khabab's successor is complicated by the fact that the U.S.-led campaign against al Qaeda has already dealt a number of blows to the terror network's unconventional weapons efforts--including the capture of Mohammed Omar Abdel Rahman, the son of the convicted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman whom the Los Angeles Times identified in April 2004 under his kuniyat (assumed name) of Asadullah as being a member of al Zabadi prior to his capture in February 2003. Another senior al Qaeda leader, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, is believed to have worked closely with Khabab in Afghanistan and was captured in Pakistan in November 2005.

In the absence of either man, one possible successor would be Abu Bashir Yemeni, whom the Los Angeles Times reported in April 2004 had worked with both Khabab and Mohammed Omar Abdel Rahman.

While Khabab was not listed among the senior echelons of the al Qaeda leadership, he was one of its most dangerous engineers.

Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute's Center for Policing Terrorism.
 
BBJ said:
Dis I have a question on opinions, I know you told me a while back that you have opinions on lots of stuff, and I'm not someone you care to share them with, but endulge me this.... do you honestly believe in your heart of hearts that Saddam Hussein was just an innocent bystander that never had anything to do with training terroists and he has not had WMD's since clinton bombed him in '98? Please be honest... :D

Now I know your opinion is about as good as anybody elses but I would just like to know your thoughts

Its been quite a while now and I'm still waiting? Dis, are you still out there? :? Seems to me you don't have a problem expressing your opinions when they bash our President. Well I just keep waiting. :wink:
 
The Weekly Standard?!

That's like getting your news from MoveOn.org (and expecting people to take it seriously)

If you want to go with the whole liberal media conspiracy thing, that's fine. But can you at least find something on Fox?
 
Iraq's Place in the 21st Century's Great Crusade
By pkev

Jan 15, 2006


The Democratic Party has been invested in criminalizing and scandalizing the Iraq War. For political gain and a genuine disdain for what our great country stands for, this once mainstream party desires defeat in Iraq, and has taken sides with the enemy. The Iraq War and Afghanistan are the great crusade of the 21st century. Just as World War II was the great crusade of the 20th century. The Iraq War like World War II is a crusade for freedom and a crusade for the defeat of tyranny. Although the combat operations of the two wars are very different, the enemy and circumstances are very similar. Saddam Hussein like Hitler was a threatening dictator who attacked his neighbors to conquer regions, and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. Japan also attacked neighbors to conquer regions murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the process. After World War I Germany and Japan were signers to peace treaties and arms limitations treaties. These treaties were designed to help prevent another World War. Under the 1991 Gulf War cease fire agreement, Saddam was required to dismantle his WMD programs to prevent him from threatening his neighbors again. Saddam like Hitler and the Emperor of Japan before him violated these agreements and continued with his weapons programs. Throughout the 1990's Iraq refused to comply with the Gulf War cease fire agreement and UN Resolutions. Iraq repeatedly defied UN weapons inspectors. Not only did Saddam posses WMD's, he used them repeatedly as early as 1980 against Iran, and against his own people. During the Clinton presidency, Iraq further violated the cease fire agreement by attacking the United States. On numerous occasions Iraq attacked US warplanes that were patrolling the no fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. These no fly zones were established to protect Iraqi's from further biological attack by Saddam's savage regime. Iraq presents a very different threat to America and our allies than that of World War II. Iraq is the main battle front in the War on Terror. The War on Terror is a world war against a hidden enemy who does not fight for a country, and does not obey conventional rules of warfare. Terrorists fight for an ideology of hate. Saddam Hussein's regime was a key ally of terrorist organizations. Under Saddam, terrorists were trained in Iraq by members of the Iraqi army. Saddam provided financing for terrorists, and Iraq was a safe haven for terrorists like Abu Abbas the mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking, and Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization started operating in Iraq in the early 1990's. Anti-war Democrats insist that Saddam had no connection with Al-Qaeda. They incorrectly reason that Al-Qaeda would never operate in Iraq because Saddam and Osama bin Laden did not see eye to eye. It is laughable that Democrats can conclude that Al-Qaeda would operate in places like New York, Massachusetts, and Florida, but not in Iraq! On the night of the horrific September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, President Bush declared that any country who supports terrorism, or gives aid and comfort to terrorists is an enemy of the United States. Invading Iraq was critical to the security of our country. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a madman like Saddam would eventually lead to weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists who would use them against the United States. In the post 9/11 world, this was a threat the United States could not afford to ignore. The United States has a clear choice. We can fight terrorists abroad, or fight terrorists at home. Our servicemen and women fighting in Iraq are fighting to defeat terrorism, and to spread freedom and democracy. One of the best weapons against terrorism is the spread of freedom. The people of Iraq have proven that given the choice between freedom and tyranny, people will choose freedom. Each successful election in Iraq is a defeat for terrorism. Establishing a free democracy in Iraq will make America safer. A free Iraq will completely change the landscape of the Middle East. Freedom and democracy that is now taking hold in Iraq will spread to neighboring countries. Freedom and democracy spreading across the Middle East will crush tyranny and terrorist ideals. Our nation has never gone to war against a country that supports freedom and democracy. We have only gone to war against ruthless dictators who oppose freedom and democracy. Our servicemen and women who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are today's greatest generation. God bless America!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Find this story at: http://townhall.com/blogs/soapbox/pkev/story/2006/01/15/182451.html
 
"Find this story" ROTFLMAO! A blog! Gasp! Just wait until BBJ sees this. I'm sure she'll drag you over the coals for posting such a thing! Oh, maybe not, since you're supporting the Iraqi war. We'll wait and see who's the hypocrite here. :)
 
September 19, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
No Question About It
Saddam and the terrorists.
http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins091903.asp


hen President Bush stated that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th" attacks, his critics quickly spun this into "Saddam Hussein had no links to terrorism." This was despite the fact that in the same breath the president had said, "there's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." According to Editor & Publisher, the story got little play, though it is certain to come back to haunt the president during the election campaign when Democrats seek to wedge the Iraq and al Qaeda issues. Thus, it is useful to review the bidding on the known facts of the relationship between the two.




While it is still debatable to what degree Saddam Hussein supported the global terrorist network, it is becoming increasingly clear that Iraq provided terror groups with some forms of logistical, intelligence, transportation, training, weapons, and other support. The emerging evidence points to the conclusion that al Qaeda had a cooperative relationship — that is, a strategic alliance — with Iraq. The conventional wisdom has been that this could not have been the case because bin Laden, an Islamic fanatic reactionary, and Saddam, a secular Baathist modernizer, could never align or cooperate. On a personal level, they probably hated each other. If intelligence analysts approach their task with the premise that a relationship could not exist, they will lack the analytical framework necessary to piece together the clues that could demonstrate that it did. Maybe an Elvis Presley/Richard Nixon-type photo of the two would convince them, but not much else.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 101
But the premise is facile. The principle that drove Iraq and al Qaeda together is one of the oldest in international-relations theory — the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The motive for their alliance was a common hatred for the United States and Israel. Ideology seldom determines wartime-alliance structures, and for both Saddam and Osama the 1990s were wartime. The Iraq/al Qaeda combination is as reasonable as the temporary strategic alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or Syrian and American troops fighting side by side during Operation Desert Storm. (Note that it is hard to distinguish Syria from Iraq ideologically, and Baathist solidarity was certainly not a motivating factor in the relationship between the two countries.) Moreover, despite their personal dislike for each other, Saddam Hussein was the only state leader openly to praise bin Laden's attacks on the U.S. (if not bin Laden himself).

Saddam Hussein showed no reluctance to support terrorism per se during his career. The fact that he gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists and had a close working relationship with the PLO was well known, and something he admitted. The Iraqi regime maintained a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak near Baghdad where foreign terrorists were instructed in methods of taking over commercial aircraft using weapons no more sophisticated than knives (interesting thought that). Saddam also harbored Abu Nidal and other members of his international terror organization (ANO) in Baghdad. Abu Nidal died under suspicious circumstances in Baghdad in August 2002, an apparent multiple gunshot suicide. Abd-al-Rahman Isa, ANO's second in command based in Amman, Jordan, was kidnapped September 11, 2002, and has not been heard from since. Coalition forces did recently apprehend ANO member Khala Khadr al-Salahat, the man who reputedly made the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was hiding out in Baghdad. Another bomb maker, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was also a Baghdad resident. He was one of the conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who had fled there after being detained briefly by the FBI. Recent document finds in Tikrit show that Iraq supplied Yasin with both money and sanctuary. The 1993 WTC attack was masterminded by Yasin's associate Ramzi Yousef, who received financial support from al Qaeda through Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key 9/11 planner.

There is also the case of Abu Zubayr, an officer in Saddam's secret police who was also the ringleader of an al Qaeda cell in Morocco. He attended the September 5, 2001 meeting in Spain with other al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, the 9/11 financial chief. Abu Zubayr was apprehended in May, 2002, while putting together a plot to mount suicide attacks on U.S. ships passing through the straits of Gibraltar. He has allegedly since stated that Iraq trained and supplied chemical weapons to al Qaeda. In the fall of 2001 al Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan took refuge in northern Iraq until they were driven out by Coalition forces, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda terrorist active in Europe and North Africa, fled from Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has reportedly been sent back to Iraq to coordinate al Qaeda activities there.

Iraq made direct payments to the Philippine-based al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Sayyaf group. Hamsiraji Sali, an Abu Sayyaf leader on the U.S. most-wanted terrorist list, stated that his gang received about one million pesos (around $20,000) each year from Iraq, for chemicals to make bombs. The link was substantiated immediately after a bombing in Zamboanga City in October 2002 (in which three people were killed including an American Green Beret), when Abu Sayyaf leaders called up the deputy secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Husham Hussain. Six days later, the cell phone used to call Hussain was employed as the timer on a bomb set to go off near the Philippine military's Southern Command headquarters. Fortunately, the bomb failed to detonate, and the phone yielded various contact numbers, including Hussain's and Sali's. This evidence, coupled with other intelligence the Philippine government would not release, led to Hussain's expulsion in February 2003. In March, ten Iraqi nationals, some with direct links to al Qaeda, were rounded up in the Philippines and deported as undesirable aliens. In addition, two more consulate officials were expelled for spying.

The most intriguing potential link is reflected in documents found by Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter in Baghdad in April, 2003. The documents detail direct links between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime dating back at least to 1998, and mention Osama bin Laden by name. The find supports an October 2001 report by William Safire that noted, among other things, a 1998 meeting in Baghdad between al Qaeda #2 Ayman al Zawahiri and Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan. Other reports have alleged bin Laden himself traveled to Iraq around that time, or at least planned to. Former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, now in custody, allegedly met with bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.

THE ATTA CASE
The alleged meeting between 9/11 team leader Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, Czech Republic (CR) is a unique case in that the Czechs have been more adamant about proving it than the United States. Interior Minister Stanislav Gross held a press conference on October 26, 2001, revealing the details of the Prague connection. According to Czech police, visa records indicate that Atta visited Prague twice in 2000. His first confirmed visit was while he was in transit from Hamburg to Newark, New Jersey, June 2-3, 2000. The German newspaper Das Bild reported on October 25, 2001 that according to unnamed FBI sources, Atta met with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Samir al-Ani in a cafe in Prague on June 2. Another report has it that Atta did not leave the airport terminal since he lacked a visa. Later that summer Atta flew back to the CR. He stayed one night in the Prague Hilton, and may have spent a brief period of time in the town of Kutna Hora, 35 miles north of Prague, under the name Mohammed Sayed Ahmed. During his second visit, he allegedly met with Ahmed Hedshani, the former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey.

The more controversial part of the story is the alleged meeting between Atta and al-Ani in the Iraqi embassy in Prague in the spring of 2001. Atta was identified based on photographs published after the 9/11 attacks by an informer who was at the embassy at the time and had met Atta, though said he was "not 100 percent sure" it was him. The Czech counterintelligence service (BIS) gives it a 70 percent probability. Al-Ani was expelled from the Czech Republic in April 22, 2001, for "activities which conflicted with his status." He was allegedly plotting an attack on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which was also supporting Radio Free Iraq.

But if they met, why? It is unlikely they were discussing the alleged RFE/RL operation, since Atta had more important things to do and the Iraqis did not need his help with that one anyway. They might have been discussing the 9/11 attacks, but there is no evidence to support that claim. The article in Das Bild raised another, more intriguing possibility: The Iraqis were supplying Atta with anthrax spores for use in attacks on the United States. The anthrax attacks had commenced shortly before the article was published, and the idea seemed plausible at the time. In fact, it still does — the anthrax used in the attacks was weapons grade, the attacks originated from areas near where the hijackers had been active, and two years of investigation have not turned up the presupposed domestic perpetrator. At some point, you would think Occam's Razor would come into play.

The US Justice Department disputes most of the above. Because the US has no independent evidence that the 2001 meeting occurred, and since an examination of INS records published in May 2002 showed no movements corresponding to the Czech timeline, Justice concluded that the meeting could not have taken place. (The report did however show Atta going to Madrid for a week in January 2001, and to Zurich for twelve days in July 2001.) Yet, the Prague meeting came and went in a day or so. If Atta had traveled under an assumed name, a possibility the Justice Department acknowledged, he could have been there and back before anyone noticed. (Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz also denied the meetings took place.) The affair has been a matter of contention between the U.S. and CR. Interior Minister Gross, BIS chief Jiri Ruzek, and Jan Klas, chairman of the parliamentary commission overseeing the BIS, have stated that thus far they have seen no evidence to challenge their conclusions. Clearly, the essential person to talk to is al-Ani. He was reportedly apprehended by U.S. forces on July 2, 2003, though where he was caught, where he is now, and what he has had to say about the alleged meetings, are all unanswered questions.

Last June, former CIA Director James Woolsey said that "there were enough connections [between al Qaeda] and Iraq and Iraqi intelligence that we ought to be looking at this very hard, as we capture files and people and hard disk drives in Iraq and so on, and see what we can turn up." There are more open-sourced links than those noted here — I would refer readers to Appendix A of Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden for some more noteworthy incidents and possible evidence of collusion. As I have noted before, Saddam Hussein had means, motive, and opportunity to be involved with global terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular. Much remains to be revealed, and one hopes the administration is compiling a dossier to make the case in detail and beyond doubt. The president has stated that there is no question these ties existed, and it is frustrating that something unquestionable keeps being questioned so persistently.
 
Truly, Cal. If it's a credible story that support the whole going-to-war thing, Fox will have it.
I can't find it, but that doesn't mean it's not there...

But if even Fox won't publish this, you have to wonder what that means so far as credibility.
 
theHiredMansWife said:
Truly, Cal. If it's a credible story that support the whole going-to-war thing, Fox will have it.
I can't find it, but that doesn't mean it's not there...

But if even Fox won't publish this, you have to wonder what that means so far as credibility.
Maybe you'll like this one :lol: http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=4830&forum=DCForumID30
 
Three members of a Palestinian terror cell who trained in Iraq's military camps

First of all, this is a post that is over three years old, linking to an article that no longer exsist.
Secondly, we already know Iraq had military camps. They had a military, remember? That's not the same thing as training terrorists.
Were there people that became terrorists after training in the military? I have no doubt. But that's not quite the same thing as state-supported terrorism.

Seriously. If this is true, Fox will have something.
 
Fox would have and George W. Bush would be calling a press conference to tell the world. I would expect as the election gets closer, more speculative articles like this will come out, maybe even in the mainstream media. We may perhaps even see some documents late enough that they can't be verified before the election. Fear was a great tool for the Republicans in the last election, I'd not expect them to ignore it's use this time.

But Bush's first, and strongest, stated reason to go to war in Iraq was because Saddam had WMDs and could give them to terrorists to use on the US.

That's obviously not true. All the spinning and trying to detract attention away from that is just desperation.
 
Disagreeable said:
"Find this story" ROTFLMAO! A blog! Gasp! Just wait until BBJ sees this. I'm sure she'll drag you over the coals for posting such a thing! Oh, maybe not, since you're supporting the Iraqi war. We'll wait and see who's the hypocrite here. :)

I think it's pretty clear who the HYPOCRITE is since you are insistant on not answering my question. I'll deal with the creditbilty of others as soon as I finish proving yours. :D :D Not that it matters much but BBJ is not a she.

I know its getting old me trying to get you to annswer this one but I'll post it again for you...Dis I have a question on opinions, I know you told me a while back that you have opinions on lots of stuff, and I'm not someone you care to share them with, but endulge me this.... do you honestly believe in your heart of hearts that Saddam Hussein was just an innocent bystander that never had anything to do with training terroists and he has not had WMD's since clinton bombed him in '98? Please be honest...
 
BBJ said:
Disagreeable said:
"Find this story" ROTFLMAO! A blog! Gasp! Just wait until BBJ sees this. I'm sure she'll drag you over the coals for posting such a thing! Oh, maybe not, since you're supporting the Iraqi war. We'll wait and see who's the hypocrite here. :)

I think it's pretty clear who the HYPOCRITE is since you are insistant on not answering my question. I'll deal with the creditbilty of others as soon as I finish proving yours. :D :D Not that it matters much but BBJ is not a she.

Being a hyprocrite has nothing to do with anwering your questions. You got on my case for evening mentioning the term "blog". You wrongly claimed I used blogs for reference. Now here's Cal posting blogs. We'll see if you treat him the same as you treated me when I didn't post a blog or use one as a reference.

I know its getting old me trying to get you to annswer this one but I'll post it again for you...Dis I have a question on opinions, I know you told me a while back that you have opinions on lots of stuff, and I'm not someone you care to share them with, but endulge me this.... do you honestly believe in your heart of hearts that Saddam Hussein was just an innocent bystander that never had anything to do with training terroists and he has not had WMD's since clinton bombed him in '98? Please be honest...

Saddam a bystander to what? 9-11? We know there's no proof that he was involved with 9-11; President Bush has said so and you know what an honest man he is. :roll: No, I don't believe Saddam was routinely involved in training terrorists. In the satellite imaging before the Iraqi invasion, our intelligence analysts identified maybe two or three sites that might be terrorist training camps. They were all in the Kurdish region of Iraq; a region that was not effectively under Saddam's control because of the "no fly zone."

I don't know when Saddam gave up his WMDs. But it's obvious to anyone who reads government reports, or Bush's chosen weapons inspector's reports that he had no WMDs that were a threat to this country when George W. Bush told the UN inspectors to get out of the country so he could invade. And that's a cornerstone of Bush's justification for this war.

But since Saddam is gone, terrorists are training in Iraq. Yes this is an older article, but, if anything, things have only gotten worse:

"Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

"Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."


Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7460-2005Jan13.html
 

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