Politics As Usual

[sgtclub]

* 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.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.


http://www.townhall.com/columnists/G...20040618.shtml

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by sgtclub
So Putin is lying?

edited to add:

"Putin Lied, Putin Lied."

Yes, I think he is a lying liar. What evidence does he have that SH was going to attack us? I want to see it.

[Penske_Account]

BUSH IN 7!

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Lengthy summary of various facts, rumors, and innuendo, some with citation, some without

Come on clubby, read some of those. Ansar al-Islam is evidence of the connection? Yeh, right, they were Saddam's best buddies.

The fact that al-Q operatives crossed the Iraqi/Saudi borner is evidence? Al-Q operatives crossed the damn US/Canadian border too!

By the way, US representatives have met with Arafat. Does that create a US/Arafat link?

Now sift through that stuff and try to identify something that constitutes real evidence that the Iraqi government and al Q. command collaborated on terrorist activity, or that traces money from Hussein to al Q. -- something more substantial than speculation.

Don't you think this is the stuff the 9/11 commission carefully reviewed, in full detail, before coming to their conclusion?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/410014|top|06-18-2004::08:05|reuters.html

[Putin says Iraq planning attacks in US post 9/11]

What's the spin on this one, geniuses.

There's still an apparent disconnect between AQ and Iraq -- the paragraph quoted by Putin says Hussein's little shits were planning something possibly on their own against us -- but whatever. If it plays out, sure, that's wonderful "exculpatory" evidence that there was a direct threat against the US from Iraq.

The thing is, though, if this is really true, I can't quite fathom why we're hearing this, you know, NOW. If we really had (to use Tenet's pet phrase) "slam dunk" evidence that Saddam was planning terrorist attacks against us, why did we piss away years arguing about yellow cake from Niger, again?

I can't get past the feeling that we're in the last stages of the OJ trial, arguing about blood on the car and whether the gloves fit, and Jim Brown strides into the courtroom and declares "Fuck that. The brother was with ME that night."

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by sgtclub
["evidence"]

Pretty flimsy stuff. This sort of "friend of a friend" shit even looks kind of desperate.

[SlaveNoMore]

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Come on clubby, read some of those. Ansar al-Islam is evidence of the connection? Yeh, right, they were Saddam's best buddies.

The fact that al-Q operatives crossed the Iraqi/Saudi borner is evidence? Al-Q operatives crossed the damn US/Canadian border too!

By the way, US representatives have met with Arafat. Does that create a US/Arafat link?

Now sift through that stuff and try to identify something that constitutes real evidence that the Iraqi government and al Q. command collaborated on terrorist activity, or that traces money from Hussein to al Q. -- something more substantial than speculation.

Don't you think this is the stuff the 9/11 commission carefully reviewed, in full detail, before coming to their conclusion?

So, you personally won't be satisifed until we find the original copy of the Treaty of Baquaba, the photo of the grinning Saddam and OBL taken at the signing, and the gold plated commemorative pen.

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
So, you personally won't be satisifed until we find the original copy of the Treaty of Baquaba, the photo of the grinning Saddam and OBL taken at the signing, and the gold plated commemorative pen.

Wait, wait wait!!! I know this one: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? That is so liberating.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
So, you personally won't be satisifed until we find the original copy of the Treaty of Baquaba, the photo of the grinning Saddam and OBL taken at the signing, and the gold plated commemorative pen.

I dunno. What convinced you of the connection?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
So, you personally won't be satisifed until we find the original copy of the Treaty of Baquaba, the photo of the grinning Saddam and OBL taken at the signing, and the gold plated commemorative pen.

Frankly, I have little doubt that Iraq dealt with al-Q at a variety of levels, just as we deal with Arafat on a variety of levels. What I don't see is any Iraqi involvement in 9/11.

Look, we had been basically sitting on Hussein for 15 years, limiting his troops movements within Iraq, cutting him off from the outside world, doing everything we could to contain the bastard. I have no doubt he wished ill on Americans everywhere. And I suspect he wanted to play footsie with al-Q enough so he didn't make their short list for Arab leaders needing a vacation. But I don't think there would have been anything in a large scale terrorist attack on the US for him at a point when we were looking for a reason to invade and give him that vacation (and, see, we're even throwing in medical treatment).

What Bush and Cheney have been doing, however, is using the notion of an al-Q / Iraq link to suggest that Iraq is part of the global war against terrorism coming out of 9/11. 9/11 needs to be the casus belli for Iraq for the administration to sustain support.

Iraq is an attempt to coopt the war on terrorism for neo-conservative geopolitical goals, and in many ways an abandonment of higher priorities in the war on terror. That is why our allies didn't support us.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Do you even realize how partisan you have become. Facts: President had evidence that Iraq was planing to attach the US. President acts. Current result: no attacks in the US. Yet, you seem to suggest he was wrong because he didn't list his intelligence sources as one of the supporting reasons for the war.

How many times did he say that Saddam was a threat? What a fucking a-hole.

Funny how we heard this first from Putin.

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Iraq is an attempt to coopt the war on terrorism for neo-conservative geopolitical goals, and in many ways an abandonment of higher priorities in the war on terror. That is why our allies didn't support us.

Had we spent the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Iraq to find and kill Bin Laden et al, I can confidently speculate that we would have been successful. Even if the war on Iraq is semi-justified, which it may be (but definitely not re: the war on terror), that doesn't mean that it should have been a priority. It shouldn't even have been on the priority top-ten list.

Go after Al Queda. Don't quit until successful. Spend everything you have to capture Bin Laden. THEN, and only then, should Iraq have been addressed.

It's the diversion of money/resources that pisses me off. The fact that, had we not gone into Iraq, we could have Bin Laden by now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
So Putin is lying?

edited to add:

"Putin Lied, Putin Lied."

He got to where he is by being the head of the KGB, and you think that's over-the-top criticism of the man? I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Putin is responsible for much worse than lying.

[the Spartan]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
BUSH IN 7!

More like Bush in 5! The dude gots chops!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
* 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.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.


http://www.townhall.com/columnists/G...20040618.shtml

Articles I posted yesterday, which you apparently have not bothered to read, explain that there were meetings between Al Qaeda and Iraq in which the former asked the latter for help. But Iraq did not follow through. Evidently AQ needed Iraq more than Iraq needed AQ. I'm not going Fisk every piece of evidence here, but some of it is laughable weak. Two members of Al Qaeda tried to enter Saudi Arabia from Iraq? Golly, that's practically evidence that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were shtupping sheep together. And the fact that a columnist would be throwing that into the mix smacks of desperation. When facts debunking this stuff is publicly known, the insistence on listing these contacts and implying that they stand for more than they do is evidence either of an intent to mislead, or ignorance. In your case, I'm willing to stipulate that its ignorance, since you don't seem to care to grapple with what other sources say. The frustrating thing, though, is that the ignorance is willful. No matter how many times I point out, for example, that Ansar al-Islam's base in northern Iraq was not in the part of the country controlled by Hussein, you keep credulously posting crap like this as if it proves something. You can't be bothered to think critically or respond to that point -- you just wait a few days and post something else that refers to "the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq." If your role here is to be a propagandist, fine. I don't understand it, since you are inclined to think critically on other issues, but you seem to have lost your senses on this one. At least in the Vice President's case, I expect more.