VP Cheney excerpt re: link between AQ/Iraq and CW,BW~~~~~~~
"I can give you a few quick for instances -- one, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The main perpetrator was a man named Ramzi Yousef. He's now in prison in Colorado. His sidekick in the exercise was a man named Abdul Rahman Yasin . . . Ahman Rahman . . . Yasin is his last name anyway. I can't remember his earlier first names. He fled the United States after the attack, the 1993 attack, went to Iraq, and we know now based on documents that we've captured since we took Baghdad, that they put him on the payroll, gave him a monthly stipend and provided him with a house, sanctuary, in effect, in Iraq, in the aftermath of nine-ele ... (sic) ... the 93' attack on the World Trade Center."
The reporter followed up. "So you stand by the statements?"
"Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can look at Zarkawi, (Abu Mussab) al-Zarkawi, who is still out there operating today, who was an al Qaeda associate, who was wounded in Afghanistan, took refuge in Baghdad, working out of Baghdad, worked with the Ansar al Islam group up in northeastern Iraq, that produced a so-called poison factory, a group that we hit when we went into Iraq. They were involved in trying to smuggle things, manufacture and smuggle things like ricin into Europe to attack various targets in Europe with. He also, Zarkawi, was responsible for the assassination of a man named Foley, who worked for A.I.D. in Amman, Jordan, an American assigned over there."
"The links go back. We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaeda sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it. A lot of it has been declassified. More, I'm sure, will be declassified in the future, and my expectation would be as we get the time. We haven't really had the time yet to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We'll find ample evidence confirming the link -- that is the connection, if you will, between al Qaeda and the Iraqi intelligence services. They have worked together on a number of occasions."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/14/opinion/main593145.shtmlThanks! I read about the connection with Yasin and Yousef in the book titled "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror". Check it out if you get the chance, quite the eye opener.