It all depends on what good means.
Posted on 12/04/2004 12:02:04 PM PST by kattracks
In what may be the most shocking news to emerge from the already stunning Oil for Food scandal, investigators say that Saddam Hussein bankrolled key al Qaida players in the late 1990s - a period of time when the terror group was planning the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi dictator was ripping off billions from the U.N. program.
"Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley."It's likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil for Food] money to al Qaida."
In an eerie coincidence, an October 2001 estimate by the Justice Department put the entire cost of the 9/11 operation at $300,000.
While the inception of Iraq's financial relationship with al Qaida pre-dated the 1996 Oil for Food program, the U.N. jackpot enabled Saddam to become much more generous towards his terrorist allies in the years before 9/11.
Hayes said the total amount of Iraqi cash funneled into al Qaida reached into the "millions."
"Saddam had pretty strong ties to bin Laden when bin Laden was in Sudan," he said, based on what a former CIA counterrorism official had told him.
"He talked about this system of Saddam funneling money, usually cash payments, to a variety of al Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist groups," the Standard reporter said.
Freelance reporter Claudia Rosett, who singlehandedly broke the Oil for Food story last year, first broached the possibility of a U.N. connection to the 9/11 attacks in the Weekly Standard last August:
"By 1996, remember, bin Laden had been run out of Sudan, and seems to have been out of money. He needed a fresh bundle to rent Afghanistan from the Taliban, train recruits, expand al Qaida's global network, and launch what eventually became the 9/11 attacks.
"Meanwhile," Rosett continued, "over in Iraq about that same time, Saddam Hussein, after a lean stretch under United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief."
Rosett noted that just prior to Saddam's $300,000 payment to Al Zawahiri in 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa against the U.S. that included references to "the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people" as well as "the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance."
They can try hide it, deny it, but once it gets on the senate floor, it becomes real and just won't go away. DemocRATS aren't the only ones who can demand a Congressional investigation. Then it can't be soft peddled by the Old Media.
(calling them MSM gives them too much credibility, "Old Media" is what they are now)
ping
Incompetent Kofi strikes again.
ping
Ping
View Replies says: "No replies."
I agree with you SA, 45 replies later and the key element of this story remains undisclosed: a reliable source for the claim that Saddam gave Zawahiri $300,000 in the spring of 1998. Don't misunderstand me, I believe it to be true, but belief doesn't get the job done.
--Boot Hill
NO! The NYTimes today said that the US is more to blame, and only right-wingers are pushing this anyway. End of story. How DARE we question the UN!
As a former member of JBS, this has been a dream of mine for many years: US out of the UN and they off our soil. But since doing some serious study of eschatology, I'm beginning to see beyond the UN. The thing I worry about is not a helpless or ineffective UN in the near term, but rather a completely revamped and suddenly more dangerous UN that might pose a more serious threat to our sovereignty. That organization will be the vehicle by which the AntiChrist will rise and take power.
Rossett deserves a pulitizer...the woman is amazing!!! kudos to Claudia Rossett!!!!!!
"No amount of proof will ever sway the leftists from their anti everything Bush position."
Hmmmm. You might be surprised. There's no shortage of potential koolaid drinkers out there, but your average garden variety Democrat is not going to take kindly to solid proof of a Food for Oil/9-11 connection.
Another reason why conservative Democrats are a key to eventual conservative victory.
Note that I didn't use the term "democrats", I was referring to "leftists", such as those residing at the NY times and other bastions of leftist socialism.
There are many democrats who saw through the leftist propagnada and cast their votes for Bush in both the '00 and even more so in the '04 election. You could hardly call those types of right thinking democrats leftist.
Tenet should be brought back and placed in the Yuri Ivanovitch Nosenko Memorial Basement Cell for 1400 days until he explains why he sold out U.S. national security, i.e., until he gives up traitor-rapist42.
Of course there's a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and the 911 attacks--since Gulf War One Saddam has been out to get us. See the Laurie Mylroie assertion that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed used Kuwait passports obtained by Iraqi intel during the 1990-1 occupation.
Hang Kofi Annan off the roof of the UN building by his silk socks; let's get to bottom line before we release that POS.
But 54 African nations say Kofi is a good guy. They wouldn't lie to us would they?
Agreed. And I thank you for using the more accurate term "leftist" rather than Democrat or "rat" as is the common vernacular.
Unfortunately, too many on the right ignore their ideological allies in the Democratic party. We're not a huge minority in the Democratic party, but we're still alive and kicking.
The line in the article I did find dubious, though, was the statement that Bin Laden "may" have been "out" of money when he left Sudan, and "may" have needed more to "rent" Afghanistan. (As though $300,000, or $3 million, would be enough for the latter).
Bin Laden had a fortune in the hundreds of millions, from his contractor days in Saudi Arabia and from his period as intel go between dispersing Saudia funds to the Afghan resistence to the Russians. It probably brought him regular income of tens of millions per year.
He may have lost assets when he was kicked out of Sudan, but it is extremely unlikely he lost everything (he would be diversified, etc). He could "rent" Afghanistan because he had access to regular streams of hard currency from portfolio investment abroad.
Iraqi payments may have supplimented this - that is entirely plausible. But it is unlikely he was broke without Iraqi support. As for Zawahiri, he may be Bin Laden's number two man now and certainly appears to be leading the foreign fundamentalistsin Iraq (as opposed to the Baathist resistence and the Shia under Sadr), but this does not imply he was already Bin Laden's number 2 in 1998.
Unholy Alliance:
Radical Islam and the American Left
by David Horowitz
Great ammunition for Bush, if true. He could silence a lot a critics, foreign and domestic, and have suddenly a huge credibility in asking for support from Russia, France, and Germany in setting up democracy in Iraq and in putting the screws to Iran.
But he hasn't made this intelligence treasure public. Making the article very suspect to me.
Like you, it wouldn't surprise me if true, but one unnamed source means nothing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
