"Saddam's Fingerprints on N.Y. Bombings" (Wall Street Journal, June 1993)

Saddam's Al Qaeda Connection
The Weekly Standard ^ | 09/01/03 | Stephen F. Hayes

KIDS KNOW exactly when it comes--the point when you're repaving a driveway or pouring a new sidewalk, right before the wet concrete hardens completely. That's when you can make your mark. The Democrats seem to understand this.

For months before the war in Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to know of ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. For months after the war, the Bush administration has offered scant evidence of those claims. And the conventional wisdom--that there were no links--is solidifying. So Democrats are making their mark.

"The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." So claimed Al Gore in an August 7 speech. "There is evidence of exaggeration" of Iraq-al Qaeda links, said Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who recently launched an investigation into prewar intelligence. "Clearly the al Qaeda connection was hyped and exaggerated, in my view," said Senator Dianne Feinsten. Chimed in Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, as reported in the National Journal, "The evidence on the al Qaeda links was sketchy." Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate side of that committee, agrees. "The evidence about the ties was not compelling."

These are serious charges that deserve to be answered. If critics can show that the administration overplayed the al Qaeda-Saddam connection, they will undermine not only an important rationale for removing the Iraqi dictator, but the broader, arguably more important case for the war--that the conflict in Iraq was one battle in the worldwide war on terror.

What, then, did the Bush administration say about this relationship before the war? Which parts of that case, if any, have been invalidated by the intelligence gathered in the months following the conflict? What is this new "evidence," cited by Gore and others, that reveals the administration's arguments to have been embellished? Finally, what if any new evidence has emerged that bolsters the Bush administration's prewar case?

The answer to that last question is simple: lots. The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing, according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.

In interviews conducted over the past six weeks with uniformed officers on the ground in Iraq, intelligence officials, and senior security strategists, several things became clear. Contrary to the claims of its critics, the Bush administration has consistently underplayed the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Evidence of these links existed before the war. In making its public case against the Iraq regime, the Bush administration used only a fraction of the intelligence it had accumulated documenting such collaboration. The intelligence has, in most cases, gotten stronger since the end of the war. And through interrogations of high-ranking Iraqi officials, documents from the regime, and further interrogation of al Qaeda detainees, a clearer picture of the links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is emerging.

To better understand the administration's case on these links, it's important to examine three elements of this debate: what the administration alleged, the evidence the administration had but didn't use, and what the government has learned since the war.

WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION ALLEGED

TOP U.S. OFFICIALS linked Iraq and al Qaeda in newspaper op-eds, on talk shows, and in speeches. But the most detailed of their allegations came in an October 7, 2002, letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham and in Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

The Tenet letter declassified CIA reporting on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Two sentences on WMD garnered most media attention, but the intelligence chief's comments on al Qaeda deserved notice. "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade," Tenet wrote. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [in Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." In sum, the letter said, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military actions."

That this assessment came from the CIA--with its history of institutional skepticism about the links--was significant. CIA analysts had long contended that Saddam Hussein's secular regime would not collaborate with Islamic fundamentalists like bin Laden--even though the Baathists had exploited Islam for years, whenever it suited their purposes. Critics of the administration insist the CIA was "pressured" by an extensive and aggressive intelligence operation set up by the Pentagon to find ties where none existed. But the Pentagon team consisted of two people, at times assisted by two others. Their assignment was not to collect new intelligence but to evaluate existing intelligence gathered by the CIA, with particular attention to any possible Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. A CIA counterterrorism team was given a similar task, and while many agency analysts remained skeptical about links, the counterterrorism experts came away convinced that there had been cooperation.

For one thing, they cross-referenced old intelligence with new information provided by high-level al Qaeda detainees. Reports of collaboration grew in number and specificity. The case grew stronger. Throughout the summer and fall of 2002, al Qaeda operatives held in Guantanamo corroborated previously sketchy reports of a series of meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, home to al Qaeda during the mid-90s. U.S. officials learned more about the activities of Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, an al Qaeda WMD specialist sent by bin Laden to seek WMD training, and possibly weapons, from the Iraqi regime. Intelligence specialists also heard increasingly detailed reports about meetings in Baghdad between al Qaeda leaders and Uday Hussein in April 1998, at a birthday celebration for Saddam.

In December 2002, as the Bush administration prepared its public case for war with Iraq, White House officials sifted through reams of these intelligence reports on ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. Some of the reporting was solid, some circumstantial. The White House identified those elements of the reports it wanted to use publicly and asked the CIA to declassify them. The Agency agreed to declassify some 75 percent of the requested intelligence.

According to administration sources, Colin Powell, in his presentation before the U.N. Security Council, used only 10 or 15 percent of the newly declassified material. He relied heavily on the intelligence in Tenet's letter. Press reports about preparations for the Powell presentation have suggested that Powell refused to use the abundance of CIA documents because he found them thin and unpersuasive. This is only half right. Powell was certainly the most skeptical senior administration official about Iraq-al Qaeda ties. But several administration officials involved in preparing his U.N. presentation say that his reluctance to focus on those links had more to do with the forum for his speech--the Security Council--than with concerns about the reliability of the information.

Powell's presentation sought to do two things: make a compelling case to the world, and to the American public, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; and more immediately, win approval for a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force. The second of these objectives, these officials say, required Powell to focus the presentation on Hussein's repeated violations of Security Council resolutions. (Even in the brief portion of Powell's talk focused on Iraq-al Qaeda links, he internationalized the case, pointing out that the bin Laden network had targeted "France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia.") Others in the administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, favored using more of the declassified information about Hussein's support of international terrorism and al Qaeda.

Powell spent just 10 minutes of a 90-minute presentation on the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network." He mentioned intelligence showing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a known al Qaeda associate injured in Afghanistan, had traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment. Powell linked Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda cell operating in a Kurdish region "outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq." Powell told the Security Council that the United States had approached an unnamed "friendly security service"--Jordan's--"to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi," providing information and details "that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi." Iraq did nothing. Finally, Powell asserted that al Qaeda leaders and senior Iraqi officials had "met at least eight times" since the early 1990s.

These claims, the critics maintain, were "hyped" and "exaggerated."

WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION DIDN'T USE

IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION had been out to hype the threat from an al Qaeda-Saddam link, it stands to reason that it would have used every shred of incriminating evidence at its disposal. Instead, the administration was restrained in its use of available intelligence. What the Bush administration left out is in some ways as revealing as what it included.

* Iraqi defectors had been saying for years that Saddam's regime trained "non-Iraqi Arab terrorists" at a camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. U.N. inspectors had confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707. Defectors say the plane was used to train hijackers; the Iraqi regime said it was used in counterterrorism training. Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi Army, worked at Salman Pak. In October 2001, he told PBS's "Frontline" about what went on there. "Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism. . . . All this training is directly toward attacking American targets, and American interests."

But the Bush administration said little about Salman Pak as it demonstrated links between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to administration sources, some detainees who provided credible evidence of other links between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in terrorism and WMD, insist they have no knowledge of Salman Pak. Khodada, the Iraqi army captain, also professed ignorance of whether the trainees were members of al Qaeda. "Nobody came and told us, 'This is al Qaeda people,'" he explained, "but I know there were some Saudis, there were some Afghanis. There were some other people from other countries getting trained."

* On February 13, 2003, the government of the Philippines asked Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, to leave the country. According to telephone records obtained by Philippine intelligence, Hussein had been in frequent contact with two leaders of Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, immediately before and immediately after they detonated a bomb in Zamboanga City. That attack killed two Filipinos and an American Special Forces soldier and injured several others. Hussein left the Philippines for Iraq after he was "PNG'd"--declared persona non grata--by the Philippine government and has not been heard from since.

According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, an Abu Sayyaf leader who planned the attack bragged on television a month after the bombing that Iraq had contacted him about conducting joint operations. Philippine intelligence officials were initially skeptical of his boasting, but after finding the telephone records they believed him.

* No fewer than five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that Mohammed Atta, the lead September 11 hijacker, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer working at the Iraqi embassy, in Prague five months before the hijacking. Media leaks here and in the Czech Republic have called into question whether Atta was in Prague on the key dates--between April 4 and April 11, 2001. And several high-ranking administration officials are "agnostic" as to whether the meeting took place. Still, the public position of the Czech government to this day is that it did.

That assertion should be seen in the context of Atta's curious stop-off in Prague the previous spring, as he traveled to the United States. Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but did not have a valid visa and was denied entry. He returned to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and took a bus back to Prague. One day later, he left for the United States.

Despite the Czech government's confirmation of the Atta-al Ani meeting, the Bush administration dropped it as evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection in September 2002. Far from hyping this episode, administration officials refrained from citing it as the debate over the Iraq war heated up in Congress, in the country, and at the U.N.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS LEARNED SINCE THE WAR

THE ADMINISTRATION'S CRITICS, including several of the Democratic presidential candidates, have alluded to new "evidence" they say confirms Iraq and al Qaeda had no relationship before the war. They have not shared that evidence.

Even as the critics withhold the basis for their allegations, evidence on the other side is piling up. Ansar al-Islam--the al Qaeda cell formed in June 2001 that operated out of northern Iraq before the war, notably attacking Kurdish enemies of Saddam--has stepped up its activities elsewhere in the country. In some cases, say national security officials, Ansar is joining with remnants of Saddam's regime to attack Americans and nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq. There is some reporting, unconfirmed at this point, that the recent bombing of the U.N. headquarters was the result of a joint operation between Baathists and Ansar al-Islam.

And there are reports of more direct links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden. Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.

For one thing, the meeting was reported in the press at the time. It also fits a pattern of contacts surrounding Operation Desert Fox, the series of missile strikes the Clinton administration launched at Iraq beginning December 16, 1998. The bombing ended 70 hours later, on December 19, 1998. Administration officials now believe Hijazi left for Afghanistan as the bombing ended and met with bin Laden two days later.

Earlier that year, at another point of increased tension between the United States and Iraq, Hussein sought to step up contacts with al Qaeda. On February 18, 1998, after the Iraqis repeatedly refused to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into sensitive sites, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a hawkish speech about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Said Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The following day, February 19, 1998, according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's security forces, agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might be "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

I emailed Potter, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for the Toronto Star, about his findings last month. He was circumspect about the meaning of the document. "So did we find the tip of the iceberg, or the whole iceberg? Did bin Laden and Saddam agree to disagree and that was the end of it? I still don't know." Still, he wrote, "I have no doubt that what we found is the real thing. We plucked it out of a building that had been J-DAMed and was three-quarters gone. Beyond the pale to think that the CIA or someone else planted false evidence in such a dangerous location, where only lunatics would bother to tread. And then to cover over the incriminating name Osama bin Laden with Liquid Paper, so that only the most stubborn and dogged of translators would fluke into spotting it?"

Four days after that memo was written, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a famous fatwa about the plight of Iraq. Published that day in al Quds al-Arabi, it reads in part:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. . . . The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million . . . despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

The Americans, bin Laden says, are working on behalf of Israel.

The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Bin Laden urges his followers to act. "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." It was around this time, U.S. officials say, that Hussein paid the $300,000 to bin Laden's deputy, Zawahiri.

ACCORDING TO U.S. officials, soldiers in Iraq have discovered additional documentary evidence like the memo Potter found. This despite the fact that there is no team on the ground assigned to track down these contacts--no equivalent to the Iraq Survey Group looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Interviews with detained senior Iraqi intelligence officials are rounding out the picture.

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.

This impulse is understandable. It is also dangerous. Some administration officials argue privately that the case for linkage is so devastating that when they eventually unveil it, the critics will be embarrassed and their arguments will collapse. But to rely on this assumption is to run a terrible risk. Already, the absence of linkage is the conventional wisdom in many quarters. Once "everybody knows" that Saddam and bin Laden had nothing to do with each other, it becomes extremely difficult for any release of information by the U.S. government to change people's minds.

So very true!!
The word needs to get out on this stuff, the socialistic media has ignored, buried, altered,etc...this info and you've got to know that if this stuff breaks out "mainstream" it's over for alot of people!!
The 'Rats have got to be asking themselves WHY...WHY...Did We Demand This 9-11 Commission....it's coming back to bite them bigtime, and deservedly so!

Thanks. The link on that isn't working for me; here's another site with a copy of that article:

Kelly Patricia O'Meara, "Iraq connections to U.S. extremists: in the global war on terror, law-enforcement officials may need to look in our own backyard for clues about who sent anthrax to Capitol Hill and TV anchormen.", Insight on the News, Nov 19, 2001, (Nation: Domestic Terrorism)(Cover Story)

On that subject, the link between Islamic extremist, Nazi groups, and Communist groups is an important topic I think has been much neglected in investigations and discussions of terrorism. The Nazi links to Islamism go back to World War II, and I've seen numerous indicators pointing to the Soviets using Nazi and Islamic groups alike as allies/fronts during the Cold War. For instance some of the Nazi/white supremacist groups mentioned in the article had links to the emerging Skinhead movement in the 1980s, which looked for leadership to among others the then-imprisoned Charles Manson, who since his incarceration had developed links to a prison gang called the Aryan Brotherhood. One of Manson's liaisons to the Skinhead movement, Nikolas Schreck, wrote in The Manson File in 1988 (p. 142):

"Manson has expressed allegiance to both Ayatollah Khomeini and Libya's Colonel Khaddafy. . .Manson claims participation in a 'holy war' against the forces of corruption. . .It's well-known that Khaddafy has made overtures of financial support to many American 'extremists', largely revolutionary, anti-Zionist organizations, such as Louis Farrakhan's black nationalist movement and, purportedly, Aryan Nations, whose leader, Richard Butler, currently a defendant in a rare trial for sedition. A Manson associate has 'made contact' with Libyan and Soviet representatives serving as Manson's emissary."

This illustrates that Nazi and Islamist terrorist groups in the US were already joining forces in the 1980s, which I'd suggest sheds some light on certain aspects of the Oklahoma City bombing and anthax letters cases.

On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.

I think this bears repeating. Thanks for posting, raving ...

Thanks... I'm working on restoring/transferring my bump lists which were left behind on the old computer, so I can alert people to your archive here.

Thank you. So maybe the "WALL" was put in place because of OK. bjclinton did try and lay the blame upon "right wing extremists" Rush radio.

From Clarke's Against All Enemies, p. 127 (although it is one of those "consider the source" type things):

"Another Conspiracy Theory intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American boy friend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.

Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earliler in, of all places, Oklahoma City.

Source

... And Gorelick's wall insured that if anything turned up in some other investigation (regarding Nichols, al Qaeda and/or Iraq) such could be stiffled by the sinkEmperor's henchgoons such as the Nylon mafiosa of Hatellary, Reno, Gorelick, et al. It is telling that Chris Matthews has continuously sought to establish a 'no fault' focus upon Gorelick and her blindass partisan activities on the 911 Commission. The dnc is going to hell and taking many with it who should have been delivered long ago!

Ack. I meant to say :

Iraqi officers have said that al Qaeda were in Iraq and were being trainied with the help of Uday. On Hussein's birthday in one year, Uday put on a demonstration for his father where a MOCKUP of a US ship was attacked using divers

Thank you for the "ping"..and "bump" for later read.

BTTT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                         CRM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1995                         (202)514-2008
                                               TDD (202) 514-1888

    WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING SUSPECT APPREHENDED IN PAKISTAN

     Attorney General Janet Reno said today that Ramzi Ahmed
Yousef, a fugitive indicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
in New York City, has been arrested abroad and returned to the
United States by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be tried on
the bombing charges.
     Reno said "Yousef was apprehended in Pakistan and turned over
to American authorities to face charges of taking part in a bombing
that killed six persons and injured more than 1,000 others."
     Reno said Yousef was taken into custody Tuesday in Pakistan,
turned over to FBI agents there, and then flown aboard a U.S.
aircraft to New York last night.
     FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said "The FBI has conducted a
world-wide search for Yousef since he was charged shortly after the
bombing on February 26, 1993."  Yousef was first indicted on March
11, 1993, and named in a fifth superseding indictment on September
1.
     Freeh said "Other parts of the federal government that made
invaluable contributions to the investigation were the Department
of State, including its Diplomatic Security Service, and the Drug
Enforcement Administration."
     United States Attorney Mary Jo White of the Southern District
of New York said "Yousef is expected to be arraigned in Manhattan
Federal Court on Thursday."
     White said "The message that this sends is that we will pursue
accused terrorists wherever they seek to hide and bring them to
justice."
     Four of Yousef's co-defendants were convicted of federal
charges on March 4, 1994, in the World Trade Center bombing:
Mohammad Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Ahmad
Mohammad Ajaj.  They have each been sentenced to 240 years of
imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
     The indictment charged Yousef, 27, who was born in the Middle
East, with 11 counts relating to the World Trade Center bombing. 
The most serious charges carry a maximum penalty upon conviction of
life in prison without parole.
     The indictment said Yousef, using a false name, flew to New
York from Pakistan in September 1992, and later purchased
chemicals.  In January and February 1993, the indictment said,
Yousef and other co-conspirators mixed chemicals in a Jersey City,
New Jersey, apartment to produce explosive materials.
     The co-conspirators caused an explosive device to detonate in
a van in a garage area beneath the World Trade Center complex on
February 26, 1993, the indictment said.  On the same day, Yousef
again used a false name when he boarded a flight in New York City
for Pakistan, the indictment said.
                               ###
95-078

Yousef was first indicted on March 11, 1993, and named in a fifth superseding indictment on September 1.

There's that pesky March 11 date again.

Link didn't work, trying again:

WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING SUSPECT APPREHENDED IN PAKISTAN

Thanks for the very worthwhile summary.

I would assume the lame-stream media could do this also, I wonder why they don't?

01/21/2002: "INSIDE SADDAM'S TERROR REGIME"

The most senior officer ever to defect from Iraq’s Mukhabarat intelligence service, brigadier general Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy was forced into exile in the summer of 2000 when he crossed Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. After a three-day interview in Beirut, DAVID ROSE has the exclusive on al-Qurairy's brutal history of-rape, torture, and mass murder, his training of a previously unknown elite force called al-Qare' a-including an untraceable 30-commando unit that left Iraq a year ago and his strong belief that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks

April 28, 2000, was a very special day in Iraq. The president, Saddam Hussein, had turned 63. Along the 106 miles of highway from the capital, Baghdad, to Saddam's official birthplace in the town of Tikrit, government officials had erected a line of marquees, from which they dispensed free rice and lamb from steaming cauldrons. In Tlkrit itself, top presidential aide Izzat Ibrahim cut an enormous, flower- shaped cake to the tune of "Happy Birth- day to you." He ended the ceremony with a prayer: "We ask God...to prolong his [Saddam's] life, and make this an occasion of victory to us and to our nation against our enemies and the enemies of humanity."

Later that evening, Saddam's elder son, Uday, gave his father the perfect birthday gift. It had been a long time in the making. Uday had ordered his closest aide and confidant, Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy-a brigadier general in Iraq's feared intelligence service, the Mukhabarat-to put together a team of 30 specially trained fighters. In al-Qurairy's seasoned judgment, the men were the finest members of the secret unit he administered-the 1,200-strong commando force known as al-Qare'a, "the Strikers," Iraq's elite of elites, trained to a level far beyond ordinary special forces in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking, and murder.

Al-Qurairy had given the 30 men new identities, complete with genuine United Arab Emirates passports supplied by a corrupt U.A.E. minister in the pay of the Mukhabarat: a means of travelling any- where, without creating the least suspicion they had originally come from Iraq. He had overseen their final training project-an exercise, using limpet mines and diving gear, to blow up a specially constructed mock-up of a U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet destroyer, moored in central Iraq's Habbaniya Lake. Like all al-Qare'a exercises, it had been conducted using real explosives and live ammunition. Uday had the fake ship's destruction videotaped, and that birthday evening he played the recording to his father.

Al-Qurairy never found out what happened to his 30 fighters. Less than three months after Saddam's birthday, his glittering, 20-year career as a Mukhabarat officer was at an end, and he was fighting for his life. Somehow, he managed to escape, and today he is trying to find a safe haven. At the end of November 2001, in a sparse hotel room in Muslim West Beirut in Lebanon, Henry Porter, Vanity Fair's London editor, and I interviewed him, over three intense days. The most senior Mukhabarat officer who has ever left Iraq, he gave a complete picture of his career, including his personal involvement in mass murder, torture, abduction, and rape. He supplied details of Iraq's terrorist training for Islamic fundamentalists, and described al-Qare'a-its very existence previously unknown to the Western public-for the first time.

As for the 30 fighters, al-Qurairy says all he knew about their future missions was that they would shortly be going abroad, for a long but unknown period. Abu Omer, the unit's former cook, whom we also met in Lebanon, described the first stage of their journey. In January 2001 they boarded the ferryboat which plies daily from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to one of the emirates, Dubai. There, untraceable as Iraqis, they vanished. They could, says al-Qurairy, be anywhere.

Like many defectors, al-Qurairy, who is 41, crossed from Iraq to its northern neighbour, Turkey. There, stuck in a Spartan refugee camp, his life going no- where, in August 2001 he did what would once have been unthinkable: he made contact with Iraq's democratic opposition, the Iraqi National Congress, which brought him to us in Beirut. The photograph on his Turkish temporary residence permit depicts him, as he was when he served the Mukhabarat: a stocky, gnome-like figure, bald, with a Saddam-style mustache. The man we met had disguised himself with a red Palestinian headscarf and a carved goatee. His manner was cheerful; his small brown eyes seemed kind. The only sign he might have been under stress was his prodigious consumption of alcohol and tobacco. On the second night, he drank a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch. There were no ashtrays in the hotel room, forcing him to extinguish his cigarettes in a glass of water. By the end of the first morning's interview, the water was stained the color of strong tea. It is not uncommon for intelligence officers to cultivate an air of inscrutable stillness. Al-Qurairy seemed to have taken this to extremes. He'd left a wife and four children in Baghdad. Surely he must miss them, I asked. He shrugged. "Not really. They're just little kids."

It is not until al-Qurairy begins to talk of the terrorist training camp he used to run at Salman Pak, a 45-minute drive south from Baghdad, that he speaks with real feeling- unconcealed pride. "It's got a long-established history and we're proud to be associated with it," he says, "because it's trained the elite-the people who've carried out operations abroad, who are on the Interpol wanted lists. By the time a trainee leaves our school he can protect any V.I.P. or assassinate any V.I.P. In 1979, when Saddam Hussein executed half his Cabinet, they had the honor of executing them at the camp." Alone of all Iraq's myriad security installations, Salman Pak remains directly answerable to Saddam. "When he writes to the camp," says al-Qurairy happily, "he calls it 'the school of the liars.' "

On a satellite photo, he picks out Sal- man Pak's main features. In the southern part of the camp, at a bend in the Tigris River, is the barracks used for non-lraqi Arabs, Islamic fundamentalists who first came to Salman Pak in 1995 to be trained in classes of 24 by al-Qurairy's closest friend, Brigadier General Jassim Rashid al-Dulaimi. He is a man who practices what he preaches: he is wanted by Lebanese authorities for the 1994 murder of an opposition leader in Beirut. As recently as the summer of 2000, al-Qurairy saw the Arab students being taught to hijack aircraft on Salman Pak's own passenger jet, an Old Russian Tupolev. They all took a special course, he says-"how to gain control of the cockpit and passengers without using fire- arms." Professional pride meant the Iraqis ensured the Islamists reached a high standard: "When we train non-lraqis, we're not training them to preach in a mosque. We don't expect them to preach in a mosque, but to carry out offensive duties." But al- Dulaimi and his fellow instructors, all members of Saddam's secular Baath Party, regarded their Islamist students with con- tempt. "When Jassim and I go for a drink after work, Jassim says they are sons of bitches. They have all this work to do, but they spend half their time praying."

AI-Qurairy was responsible for running the north part of Salman Pak, and for al-Qare'a. He served as the unit's staff general and supervised its formation, at Uday's behest, from the best and most politically reliable fighters from an earlier and larger special-forces group-the Fedayeen Saddam, 'Saddam's Martyrs." (He remained in charge of. the Fedayeen as well.) From the time of its conception in 1995, al- Qurairy says, al-Qare'a was seen as a super-elite, as a force inured to violent death.

Faced with the aftermath\ of defeat in the Gulf War, Saddam believed that "to defend the country, sometimes you have to go on the attack." That could mean several things, including assassination, hijacking, and suicide missions. "Trainees who fail are used as targets in live ammunition exercises," al-Qurairy explains. "So they die. ... The training is purely offensive and not only offensive but suicidal. They are made to sign a document when they join that specifically says that orders will ask individual members to commit suicide on missions." The suicide-attacker principle was not original. Al-Qurairy says, "They got that idea from the Islamists."

In one training procedure, regularly repeated, students had to land three helicopters on the roof of a speeding train on Salman Pak's own railroad, and then hijack it. With sudden animation, al-Qurairy gets up from his chair and performs a series of jumps and pirouettes, demonstrating the difficulty of the necessary maneuvers. "Fifty took part; 38 passed," he says. "Twelve failed. They were used as 'passengers' in sub- sequent exercises."

Part of the role envisaged for al-Qare'a is to crush future internal rebellion. But the unit's primary ethos remains aggression against enemies abroad. "That's the very nature of our training," al-Qurairy says. "We have to go outside lraq-why would we train to blow up a building in Baghdad?" In July 2000, al-Qare'a moved en masse from Salman Pak to a camp near Basra on the Kuwait border, with orders to begin a campaign of sabotage and murder inside Kuwait. On that occasion, the plan was aborted.

In Arabic, says Nabeel Musawi, the Iraqi National Congress member who acted as our translator, there is a saying: "Evil comes back to the evildoer." If any individual could be said to prove this maxim's veracity, it is al-Qurairy. He, it swiftly became apparent, was no reluctant, press-ganged recruit to what the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya calls Saddam's "republic of fear." He embraced its beliefs and inhuman practices with unrestrained enthusiasm. Even in exile, he still refers to Saddam by his respectful title, "Haji." He proudly relates how, when Uday was lying in the hospital after the 1996 shooting that left him crippled, he had the honor of bending over his hospital bed and kissing him.

Al-Qurairy was born to a wealthy, prominent family north of Baghdad. His parents were Baath Party members, and he joined at the age of 10. By 18, he was the party's youngest full-time organizer. In al-Qurairy's opinion, Michel Aflaq, the party's founder, "was a greater prophet than Muhammad himself." The Baath Party's official ideology-in fact a vague mishmash of socialism and nationalism- was "written to serve humanity." Cursed by poor high-school grades, al-Qurairy missed university, and in 1980, a year after Saddam became president, he began to train for the Mukhabarat.

In London, I met another of Iraq's Mukhabarat defectors, who like al-Qurairy, spent six months at the Mukhabarat's "April 7th" camp at Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. "The fatal-casualty rate was 5 percent," this defector says. "In my course, we lost three men." The graduation ceremony was peculiarly brutal. The new graduates were put in a yard with 200 or 300 dogs. "We had to show what we can do" the defector continues.

"So we catch them with our bare hands and kill them with our teeth, by biting the arteries in their necks. Then we had to jump off a bridge into filthy, sewage-Iaden water, holding another dog. You mustn't let the dog go. If the dog lives, you are out of the Mukhabarat."

Al-Qurairy recalls the same experience. But as far as he is concerned, "to Mukhabarat people that was just a joke. Mukhabarat training was much more serious than that."

In 1990, by now a captain, al-Qurairy joined with the Iraqi forces that invaded Kuwait, and helped administer the seven- month occupation. It was a time for frolics. One day a young Palestinian woman made the mistake of visiting the Mukhabarat office, to complain that her estranged husband was failing to pay child support. In a conversation with Iraqi National Congress officers, al-Qurairy said the woman was beautiful-and that he, along with others in the Mukhabarat, raped her and let her go. Then al-Qurairy told the husband of what they had done, reminding him to pay up.

Saddam's defeat in Kuwait in March 1991 was followed by rebellion, by Kurds in the North of Iraq and by Shiite Muslims in the South. (Saddam and the Baathists come from the other principal Muslim sect, the Sunni.) George H. \\I: Bush had made a televised call to the Iraqi people to "force Sad- dam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." For the Baath regime and its servants, it was the moment of deepest peril. Fourteen provinces were lost, and in most of them all Mukhabarat agents and officers were killed. "Once the people woke up," says al-Qurairy, "they were out to get revenge."

He turns to us with a smile. "We have you to thank for letting us save the day." The U.S. had already halted the allied advance, failing to take the road to Baghdad when it lay almost undefended, and allowing Sad- dam's best troops, the Republican Guard, to escape the military debacle unscathed. To the regime's barely suppressed amazement, America said it had no objection to Iraq's flying its helicopter gun ships. Iraq's Mukhabarat, says aI-Qurairy, interpreted this announcement as a "green light" for repression. Far from planning to protect the rebels from the air, thus ensuring Saddam's down- fall, it seemed America intended Saddam to survive. If Saddam's orders were 'Lash out, take the land back, even if it's bare land,'" aI-Qurairy says. The Mukhabarat were to do whatever it took to regain the lost territory, however great the human cost. In the first phase of the repression, the Mukhabarat and the army asked no questions at all. In some Shiite cities, says al-Qurairy, all the young men were rounded up and killed.

At Razaza, on the shores of Milh Lake in central Iraq, thousands of people from the Shiite city of Kerbala, including women and children, gathered in the open air. Al- though the air force and Republican Guard were storming their city, they thought they would be safe there. "The orders came: 'Use helicopters, gun them all down.' Then they immediately called for bulldozers to dig mass graves. The bulldozer drivers radioed back, 'Quite a lot are still alive.' The order came in response: 'Don't waste bullets. Bury them!"' While these and other massacres unfolded, U.S. fighters and reconnaissance planes watched uselessly from the skies high above.

After the first month, al-Qurairy says, the operation became marginally more discriminating. He was transferred to a camp at Radwaniya, north of Baghdad. Alleged rebels were brought to the camp each morning, subjected to cursory interrogation, then dispatched. "They brought them in buses, and they left in lorries, dripping with blood. Every lorry we and the special-security agency possessed was being used for dead bodies, taking them to mass graves. We kept each grave open for days; when it was full, we'd dig another one. ...When you see the bullets being fired all the time, and the lorries coming out, drenched in blood, and blood drenching the ground because there was nowhere for it to go- the effect stays with you forever. ...It took me days during that period before I could sleep. Some of my friends in the Mukhabarat simply lost their minds. They could not cope with the level of murders we were committing."

One recalls the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's account of the massacres of Jews perpetrated by the German Police Battalions in Poland in 1942. Like the Mukhabarat, the Police Battalions killed their victims with shots to the head. Goldhagen quotes one killer's recollection: "The executioners were gruesomely soiled with blood, brain matter, and bone splinters. It stuck to their clothes." It can have been no different at Radwaniya. On one morning, al-Qurairy says, he checked his list of prisoners' names. He was up to No. 4,300. That was the number of killings that had taken place that morning. In all, he says, at least 100,000 were killed there in a few weeks. The Iraqi National Congress estimates that 330,000 Iraqis were murdered in the spring of 1991. AI-Qurairy believes the true figure may well be higher.

AI-Qurairy claims he is still haunted by the memory of these terrible events. Yet as he describes them, he seems devoid of emotion, and matter-of-fact. Does he believe in God? I ask. For the first and only time, he pauses, apparently unable to provide an answer. "This is a hard question. I'm not a strong believer. We mention God by instinct, not because we think about it. I had to think!" The Iran-lraq war of 1980-88 "hardened our attitudes towards death." Yet the killings of 1991 were on such a scale, "even our own people can't come to terms with what they did," he says.

If I ever went back to Iraq," al-Qurairy says, "they would put me on a machine and cut me to pieces." There are taxis with Baghdad license tags for hire on Beirut's streets, some almost certainly driven by members of the Mukhabarat; from Beirut to Baghdad by road takes less than nine hours. The Iraqi National Congress had arranged our meetings with al-Qurairy with care. Until the previous evening, he had been staying in a safe house in another Middle Eastern state. He was brought to Lebanon by a member of that country's intelligence service, who had the experience and the paperwork to travel the region freely. He was introduced to us by Nabeel Musawi, our translator and effectively al- Qurairy's case officer.

Based in an office in London protected by bulletproof glass, the Iraqi National Congress is an underground intelligence network that hopes to topple Saddam. Led by Ahmed Chalabi, a genial, wealthy intellectual with a mathematics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, it has built its own net- work, its effectiveness enhanced by technology. In London, Ahmad Allawi, the Iraqi National Congress's director of operations, exchanges dozens of highly encrypted E- mails each day with agents in Iraq who have been given digital cameras, small titanium laptops, and satellite phones. The Iraqi National Congress has handled many other defectors from within the regime- Khidhir Harnza, for example, who ran Sad- dam's nuclear-weapons program, and Wafiq Samaraii, his head of military intelligence. Before arranging our interviews with al- Qurairy, Musawi and his colleagues had de- briefed him thoroughly, checking every aspect of his story with sources inside Iraq and with other defectors. There was no doubt he was what he claimed. Before we met him, he had spent three days in Ankara, Turkey, with agents from the FB.I. and C.I.A. A senior C.I.A. analyst told me that, as far as the agency was concerned, al-Qurairy was telling the truth.

On our first night in Lebanon, we all dined together in a traditional Lebanese restaurant next to a Roman bridge. Shouting over the noise of the cabaret, Musawi laughed at al-Qurairy's jokes, slapped his back good-humoredly, and played the convivial host. It was left to his fellow opposition activist, Zaab Sethna, to tell us later how much effort this bonhomie required. Musawi's father and two cousins disappeared in 1981, taken as prisoners by the Mukhabarat. His quest to uncover their fate cost him years and thousands of dollars in bribes. It was not until 1995 that he learned they had been murdered shortly after their abduction and were buried in an unmarked grave.

Toward the end of our stay in Beirut, Musawi and Sethna left abruptly on another assignment-a meeting in Bangkok with a new Iraqi defector. This man, a building contractor, claimed to have been working to construct new facilities that Saddam would use to restore his biological- and chemical-weapons arsenals and to develop a nuclear bomb. Before their departure, the two activists showed us "contracts the defector had sent them. The documents suggested he had been building radiation- proof underground laboratories. That same day, President Bush ordered Saddam to admit U.N. weapons inspectors or "face consequences."

In 1995, when Saddam's son Uday took control of the Fedayeen, the unit that was to spawn aI-Qare'a, aI-Qurairy found himself cast as his principal henchman. In addition to his duties at Salman Pak, he had a new office in the Iraqi Olympic Committee's downtown- Baghdad building that Uday had made his headquarters. What happened there had little to do with the noble ideals of athletics. Beneath the building's ground floor, its cells slotted into the spaces between the piles of its foundation, is a dungeon that has housed as many as 520 detainees. "We were under strict orders to deny its existence, al-Qurairy says. "For a long time, even Saddam didn't know about it." Worst were the sensory- deprivation cells-almost sealed, painted red, with red lightbulbs and only a tiny slot for the passage of food. Prisoners would be kept there for up to three months before being re- moved for release, a determinate prison sentence, or execution.

Many of the Olympic committee's victims had committed no transgression,

even by the warped standards of Saddam's Iraq. They were businessmen or children of wealthy families whom Uday saw as ripe targets for extortion. In one case, al-Qurairy says, a businessman had arranged to import a shipment of steel for construction, and had deposited his payment with a bank in Baghdad to transfer to his foreign supplier. Uday arranged for the paperwork to disappear, "and then they brought him to us." Uday had stolen the money, and after interrogation the businessman was given a stark choice: pay for the steel again or die. On other occasions, people were simply ransomed, for as much as $100,000.

Sometimes the reasons for arrest were more personal. Al-Qurairy named a famous Iraqi concert pianist, who was seized from his own wedding and brought to the committee. When al-Qurairy arrived at work the next day, he was baffled: "I looked at his record. There was nothing obvious to do with politics or business." The man was a yoga practitioner, al-Qurairy says, "so I decided to take advantage of his presence and asked him to teach me some yoga." A few days later, the pianist was transferred to the prison at the Presidential Palace. Finally, after the victim had been imprisoned for 40 days, al-Qurairy asked Uday why he was there. Uday replied, speaking of the pianist's bride,” I fucked her two years ago!" Eventually, the pianist was released.

Other committee victims had been arrested for political offences, drug dealing, prostitution, theft, or minor corruption. What- ever the reason, at night they would be taken, blindfolded, to the building's third floor and interrogated. "Usually they're ready to confess, but they're tortured anyway. It's just part of the process: they have to go through torture and a confession." The luckier ones would merely go through "light beatings, just kickings and punchings." Those who showed signs of resistance would be handed over to the "real professionals": hard-core sadists whose names were well known- men al-Qurairy named as Ghalib Jawad, Samir Adnan al-Obeidi, and, the most in- famous of all, Kadum Sharqia. I ask al- Qurairy what methods Sharqia used, and he shrugs. "To him, torture is like an exercise. Once they're out of our control, it's none of our business."

Al-Qurairy says he personally supervised at least 1,000 arrests on the commit- tee's behalf, a small fraction of the total. Many of his victims were women: "Mainly pharmacists who were overcharging, and nurses. I followed one nurse's case very closely, because I really fancied her-she'd been arrested for trying to restore a girl's virginity. I liked her a lot." Were the prisoners raped? "Once they get in there, they're open to all. Most of them are more than happy to be had if it means the end of their ordeal. Those who resist, they take them anyway. Most of the women hope it will reduce their sentence or get them discharged, so they submit to it. To them, we're one step below God. If they're nurses or university students, it's great."

Many of the committee's prisoners are later executed. Al-Qurairy doesn't know exactly how many: "It's like the flow of oil. It never stops. Thousands come through the gates of the Olympic committee. We don't know what happens to them. There's no judicial process. They just disappear." The committee, he stresses, is only one of many portals to Iraq's apparatus of detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. Since d the Gulf War, Iraq's gulag has expanded v substantially. "My estimate is that thousands die each year. And this continues.

As we were interviewing al-Qurairy in v Beirut, becoming lost in the horror he so baldly described, it became apparent t that the defeat of the Afghan Taliban was a only a matter of time. America and its partners in the anti-terrorist coalition were conducting a furious debate over whether to t extend military action to Iraq. The Pentagon appeared to be the main source of hawks. The Europeans, including Britain's 11 prime minister, Tony Blair, were urging caution, claiming that a strike against Saddam 1= was unjustified and might easily destabilize i1 the Middle East. One argument was being, repeated often: that there was no conclusive evidence of an Iraqi role in terrorism in general, nor in the September 11 atrocities specifically.

As yet, there isn't a case that would stand up in a court of law. We know Mohammed Atta, the hijackers' leader, who flew the first 1: airplane into the World Trade Center, twice met a notorious Mukhabarat special-operations expert in Prague in the months before the attacks; and it is believed that his former roommate in Hamburg, Marwan al-Shehhi (who flew the second W.T.C. plane), and another Hamburg associate, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker who piloted Flight 93 before it crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania), both met Mukhabarat men in the U.A.E. That amounts to strong evidence of a connection with the 19 hijackers. A1-Qurairy s says: "When I saw the World Trade Center a attack on television I turned to a friend and said, 'That's ours.'"

Yet there are other issues besides responsibility for September Il-such as justice for the people of Iraq. By granting y Saddam his "green light" in 1991, the West v appeared to condone a further decade of killing. Now, perhaps, it has a chance to d put that right.

In the roughest way possible, justice started to catch up with al-Qurairy. Nabeel Musawi's Arabic proverb was coming true. In February of 2000, Saddam gathered his b top 400 officials, including al-Qurairy, and warned he was launching a major drive against a corruption, backed by a military committee. Offenders could expect only one penalty: death. It placed al-Qurairy in a very difficult position. Uday had been running a vast, multimi1lion-dollar scam against his father's 1 government, involving illegal transfers of dozens of government buildings. Al-Qurairy had signed many of these contracts, and 11 now he feared they would come to light. So he wrote a report denouncing Uday to Saddam's personal secretary, hoping-as Saddam had promised his loyal disciples-it would remain confidential.

On July 24, 2000, he returned to Baghdad from a mission to inspect the al-Qare'a camp on the Kuwaiti border. A driver was waiting at the station, saying Uday wanted a meeting. Ushered into Uday's office at the Olympic committee, al-Qurairy spent an hour reporting on his inspection of the al-Qare'a camp, then, he says, Uday changed. "He said, 'You sonofabitch, you think you care more about government money than we do?' I was so shocked, I immediately stood up. I said, 'Sir, there is a military committee investigating, this means execution.' He produced an electric cattle prod from nowhere, and he jabbed me with it between my legs. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a red cell in the Olympic-committee prison."

Al-Qurairy was moved to an isolation cell at the Presidential Palace. After 40 days he was released. But first, he had to see Uday again. There was a gold scimitar on his wan, a gift from one of the U.A.E. sheikhs. Uday said, "If I see your face or hear your voice again, I’ll cut your head off.", As al- Qurairy ,was well aware, temporary release, followed by re-arrest and execution, was a common tactic. Abandoning his family and everything he owned, he fled by taxi.

As we say our good-byes to al-Qurairy, I wonder what win become of him.

His admitted crimes make political asylum in the West an unlikely possibility. It seems the C.I.A. has no further use for him. He speaks of returning to Turkey and trying again to become a refugee, using a ~'clean" false identity. Perhaps America will topple Saddam through bombing or supporting a coup d'etat, he muses. In that case, there might be a role for him in a reconstructed, yet still Baathist, Iraq: "The truth is, I was born a Baathist. If you're born Christian, you don't question your mom and dad taking you to church. ...Till September 2000, the thought of ever leaving Iraq, of leaving my position or the party, never entered my mind."

Al-Qurairy believes that Saddam and his family's hold on power, though hard, has become brittle. "Nobody does my job for the love of Saddam. ...There is a lot of anger inside many people. If there is a U.S. strike on Baghdad, and it's clear the regime is being targeted, for example by bombing the Presidential Palace, no one will stand and fight-not al-Qare'a, not the special forces. They will turn against the regime, because they remember hen."

I look into those warm, brown eyes a final time. I realize that his eventual destiny will make little difference. Whatever hap- pens to al-Qurairy, they are the eyes of a man who is already dead.

I still can't track down WHO was scheduled to be in court Sept.11, but I did find the Embassy bombers were scheduled for conviction Sept. 19th:

Life sentence for U.S. embassy bombers

The four defendants originally were to be convicted September 19, but that was delayed by the World Trade Center attacks.

I'd post the whole article except for the (new?) rules against posting CNN.

Another (CNN) Iraq - Al Qaeda link:

Iraqi link to two Abu Sayyaf bomb plots: report

Has Abu Sayyaf ever been connected to Cebu - where Yousef and Nichols both visited?

Yousef & KSM links to Abu Sayyaf (Al Qaeda) - as well as bombing the plane from Cebu.

The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), or simply Abu Sayyaf, also known as Al Harakat Al Islamiyya, is a separatist group of Muslim terrorists based in and around the southern islands the Philippines, primarily Jolo, Basilan and Mindanao.

Khadaffy Janjalani is named as the nominal leader of the group by the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

It is reported that they recently began expanding into neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia. The group is responsible for bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and extortion in order to promote an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago and create an atmosphere conducive to the creation of a Pan-Islamic superstate in the Malay portions of South-east Asia.

The name of the group is Arabic for Father (Abu) of the Sword (Sayyaf). The ASG is the one of the smallest and arguably the most radical and dangerous of the Islamic separatist groups in Mindanao. Some ASG members have studied or worked in the Saudi Arabia and developed ties to muhajadeen while fighting and training in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

History

Members of the ASG were once part of the Moro National Liberation Front, but started on their own in 1991 under the leadership of Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani.

Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, both of who were involved with Operation Bojinka, took scuba trips to Puerto Galera. The trips may have been a cover for the training of Abu Sayyaf militants.

After Ramzi Yousef bombed Philippine Airlines Flight 434 (Dec. 11, 1994), killing a Japanese passenger, a man stated in a telephone call "We are Abu Sayyaf Group. We explode one plane from Cebu." The bombing was supposedly a test for Operation Bojinka, which was discovered by Manila police on January 6, 1995.

Abu Sayyaf's first large-scale action was the beachhead asault on the town of Ipil in Mindanao in April 1995. It is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of more than 30 foreigners and Christian clerics and lay-workers.

Abdurajik Janjalani was killed in a clash with the Philippine National Police on December 18, 1998. Khaddafy Janjalani, his younger brother, is said to have succeeded him.

The death of Aburajik Abubakar Janjalani, otherwise known as Abu Sayyaf, marked a turning point in ASG operations, shifting from its ideological focus to more general kidnappings, murders and robberies.

The ASG primarily operates in the southern Philippines with members occasionally traveling to Manila, but the group expanded its operations to Malaysia in 2000 when it abducted foreigners from two different resorts. A commander named Abu Sabaya was killed in 2002 while trying to evade forces. See Source. Galib Andang, aka Commander Robot, was captured in Sulu in December 2003.

Source

Abu Sayyaf is estimated to have a core membership of 200 with an extended membership of over 2000.

The group was originally not thought to receive funding from any government, but intelligence reports from the United States, Indonesia, and Australia have found intermittent ties to the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group.

More Iraq - Al Qaeda links here:

Why we're going
to liberate Iraq

Posted: March 14, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

The following is adapted from a speech I gave Saturday at Southern Oregon University to a group largely made up of anti-war students and professional activists. No one threw anything at me, but I stood behind the podium just to be safe.

There were, however, some colorful outbursts from the audience. One person, when I referred to "a clever psychopath leader like Saddam," shouted out "or George Bush!" When asked whether he thought America should even be hunting down Osama bin Laden for the Sept. 11 attacks, he replied that "maybe we could get some sort of dialogue going with him." Another fellow, who identified himself as a Native American, referred angrily to "broken treaties with the white man" and said the U.S. government hasn't changed ever since.

I think you get the picture.

My speech didn't go over too well with that crowd, so I thought I'd try it out on WorldNetDaily's readers.

Since our purpose today is to try to shed some light on America's imminent invasion of Iraq, let's look at the situation together – honestly – and try to separate reality from fantasy and foolishness.

The first and biggest reality we need to face is that, barring a truly dramatic and unexpected turn of events – such as Saddam Hussein dropping dead or going into exile and voluntarily relinquishing the reins of power in Iraq – there is going to be a massive military invasion. Count on it.

As one of the most-read news sources in the world, WorldNetDaily has access to intelligence sources all over the globe. And our sources in the military, in the intelligence services, in government, in the Persian Gulf, in the Mideast and elsewhere virtually unanimously predict an invasion of Iraq very soon. And, as a matter of fact, that's pretty much what the Bush administration is saying or indicating as well.

So, we can debate and argue all we want about the war today, but that's point No. 1: It's going to happen.

Why is it going to happen?

Let's talk about 9-11 for a minute. On that truly dreadful day, the U.S. was thrust into a new world. We suffered a national trauma of indescribable magnitude. We'd never seen anything like it before. Demonically inspired Islamic terrorists commandeered four American passenger jets and turned them into gigantic, fuel-laden missiles, flying three of them into giant buildings containing thousands of innocent Americans. Some 3,000 people perished in those attacks.

As with Pearl Harbor a half-century before, America had been attacked on her own soil, and was thus catapulted into a war not of her own choosing.

Nine days later, President Bush addressed a nation in intense and profound grief:

"Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated," he said. "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. ... From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." And he added, pointedly, "The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows."

One place where terror grows big-time is in Iraq.

The imminent liberation of Iraq, like the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, is a continuation of the war on terror. And pretty much everyone is on board with the war on terror.

Afghanistan had no weapons of mass destruction – only terrorists. That was enough to justify invasion, and very few of us had any problem with that military campaign. Now, finally, we are capturing some of the big al-Qaida operatives – and hopefully Osama bin Laden's days are numbered.

We all know Osama is a terrorist, but what about Saddam? Let's consult one of the world's most respected experts on terrorism, and particularly on Osama bin Laden. Yossef Bodansky was director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the author of eight books on the subject, and has been the U.S. Congress' foremost expert on terrorism. In his book, "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," Bodansky shows in great detail how Saddam has supported al-Qaida for over a decade. Bodansky names names, dates, times and places for that support.

What kind of support?

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 hijackers commandeered four planes without guns – using only box cutters. Those carefully choreographed terror attacks required a lot of training and practice. Well guess what, it's been widely reported now that Saddam Hussein provided terrorists a Boeing 707 fuselage in which to practice airline hijackings. Commercial satellite photos show the body of a Boeing 707 at Salman Pak, where the Iraqis maintain terrorist training camps. Iraqi defector Sabah Khalifa Alami says Iraqi intelligence trained groups at Salman Pak on how to hijack planes without weapons.

Am I saying Saddam trained the 9-11 hijackers? Not necessarily. But I am saying he's training other terrorists to do the same thing – and perhaps worse.

It seems Saddam just loves suicide bombers. He boasts about supporting Palestinian suicide bombers, giving $25,000 to each family of a "martyr" who manages successfully to vaporize himself while murdering dozens of Israeli men, women and children in pizza parlors, or on board buses like the one in Haifa last week. Then there are the dozens – sometimes hundreds – of wounded in these horrific attacks. Those who don't die are frequently filled with dozens of pieces of shrapnel, and recovery for them is long, difficult and painful. Saddam supports these mass murderers financially, and brags about it.

Didn't President Bush say we would treat countries that harbor and support terrorists just the same as we do the terrorists themselves? And didn't you cheer? Saddam Hussein supports terrorists, and is proud of it.

Remember Abu Nidal, the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s? He made his home in Iraq until a few months ago, when Hussein had him murdered.

And, did you know this, you who still insist Saddam has never attacked the United States in any way? As the Boston Globe reported last Tuesday: "The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center ... a decade ago had several Iraqi fingerprints on it."

Referring to the recent capture in Pakistan of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the No. 3 man in al-Qaida, sometimes referred to as al-Qaida's "CEO," the Globe reported: "U.S. intelligence sources associate Mohammed with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the killing of French naval technicians in Karachi, the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia, and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl."

Mohammed is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the acknowledged mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and of plots to plant explosives on 11 U.S. airliners in Asia and to fly a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

"There are unnerving similarities between Mohammed's interest in using cyanide derivatives in terrorist attacks and his nephew [Ramzi Yousef's] attempt to vaporize cyanide in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center," reported the Globe. "That operation a decade ago had several Iraqi fingerprints on it. Yousef entered this country on an Iraqi passport. His No. 2 man then, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi who returned to live in Baghdad after the operation. And it is likely that the false identity papers Yousef used to obtain a Pakistani passport in New York in the name of Abdul Karim Basit – the passport he used to flee after the bombing – were falsified in Kuwait during Saddam Hussein's occupation of that country."

Maybe some readers are a little hazy on the first World Trade Center attack 10 years ago. It killed six people and injured about 1,000. An expert on the Iraq-terror connection, Laurie Mylroie, wrote the book, "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War against America." In it, Mylroie says the bomb was designed to topple the North Tower into the South Tower and envelop the scene in a cloud of cyanide gas. It failed – but had it succeeded, the destruction to the twin towers would have been total, resulting in much greater loss of life than even Sept. 11's catastrophe, since there would have been no time to exit the towers, and the cyanide gas would have wreaked who knows how much more destruction.

Hussein is complicit, says Mylroie. And he is harboring a wanted terrorist, Abdul Yasin, one of several suspects who got away. Recently, Hussein offered to give up Yassin to the U.S. – the man the FBI wants most in connection with that attack.

Do you get it? For all these years, Saddam Hussein has been protecting Yasin – the man who actually mixed the bomb that exploded in the basement of New York City's World Trade Center in 1993.

By the way, how did we respond to the first World Trade Center attack? We didn't. We treated it like just one more crime. That shows how much good is accomplished by a weak response to terrorism – eight years later they came back and finished the job. So much for looking the other way and burying your head in the sand.

The evidence continues to pile up that Saddam Hussein's regime is tied to al-Qaida. Citing Pentagon officials, reporter David Rose wrote in both Vanity Fair and the United Kingdom's Evening Standard recently that CIA reports of Iraqi-al-Qaida cooperation number nearly 100 and extend back to 1992.

These are the hard realities we need to face. But instead, we are preoccupied with illusions and pleasant distractions, chief among them the United Nations.

Let's see, we're supposed to convince Security Council members France, Germany, Russia, China, Syria and others to agree that we can defend ourselves against a maniacal terrorist leader with doomsday weapons.

Is this real, or surreal? Think about it. We're being asked to get the approval of Security Council members like China – a communist totalitarian nation with one of the worst human-rights records in the world, and which claims to have ICBMs targeting U.S. cities. And Russia – a long-time friend and weapons-trading partner of Saddam Hussein's regime.

France also has long-standing, lucrative business dealings with Iraq, which will go bye-bye when Saddam is toppled. And Germany, whose anti-American leader Gerhard Schroeder shamelessly played the hate-America card during the last election just to stay in office.

Here's one of my favorites: Syria – a prime sponsor of the largest terror organization in the world, Hezbollah. Did you watch Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara at the U.N. Friday, speaking so piously and nobly about the good of the international community? Syria is a major supporter of Saddam's regime. And as I said, it's a major sponsor, along with Iran, of what is arguably the world's most dangerous terrorist group – Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has about 10,000 short-range missiles and rockets that can strike much of Israel. It is also equipped with tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft guns and missiles. That's not just a terror group – that's a terror army – brought to you by Syria.

And then there's Guinea, Angola, Cameroon. Excuse me – and meaning no offense to these nations – but how many people could even find Cameroon on a map? I wish Cameroon well, but what does Cameroon have to do with the U.S. fighting its terror war?

The anti-war crowd says we're supposed to act only under U.N. authority. But France wasn't attacked by terrorists. Germany wasn't attacked. And I'm sure Syria wasn't attacked – it was too busy harboring, funding and training the largest terror army in the world.

Why do we have to get other nations' permission to act in our own self-defense? Especially when many of those nations are known to be in cahoots with the enemies of peace?

It's a farce.

Now let's talk about inspections.

Is there anyone who's not dead from the neck up that can't see that this is an idiotic cat-and-mouse game?

Question: If you were a clever psychopath leader like Saddam, with months and even years to prepare, could you hide objects – some of them the size of a washing machine, but some, particularly in the biological weapons area, that could be tiny – could you hide these things from a couple hundred inspectors, in a nation the size of France? Especially if the inspectors were known occasionally to tip off inspection sites up to two days before the inspection team arrived. Especially if the leader of the inspection team was a weak European diplomat notoriously soft and accommodating toward Saddam Hussein?

Iraq is supposedly destroying missiles right now, right? Well, sort of.

On Wednesday, Colin Powell told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.: "From recent intelligence, we know that the Iraqi regime intends to declare and destroy only a portion of its banned Al Samoud inventory and that it has, in fact, ordered the continued production of the missiles that you see being destroyed." He added, "Iraq has brought its machinery that produces such missiles out into the daylight for all to see. But we have intelligence that says, at the very same time, it has also begun to hide machinery it can use to convert other kinds of engines to power Al Samouds."

Now guess what? There's more to the story. It is now being reported that U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iraq deceived the United Nations by destroying stockpiled Al Samoud missiles with old engines.

U.S. officials now say Saddam Hussein has not destroyed any Al Samoud missiles deployed in forward bases in southern Iraq. Instead, they said, Iraq has brought out missiles from military warehouses and replaced the engines with those from the Soviet-origin SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, developed in the 1950s.

Also, U.S. officials said U.N. inspectors have not been allowed to actually inspect most of the missiles. As one U.S. official put it: "It is one big deception and the U.N. knows it. The entire Al Samoud episode is being stage-managed by the Iraqis. They find the missiles and they destroy them."

Inspections. They're not real. Get over it.

Enough fantasy. This is too important an issue to live in la-la land. Let's get back to reality:

There was a lot of talk Friday in the U.N. about avoiding military force by allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power by keeping his weapons of mass destruction program in check by having hordes of international inspectors rummaging throughout this large country for a generation. Are we all brain-dead? Even if "the international community" were to commit to this massive and long-term occupation of Iraq to try to keep mad-dog Saddam from destroying this or that neighbor, what about life in Iraq?

Do you know what life is like in Iraq?

Here's what Amnesty International says about life in Iraq.

"The systematic torture and climate of fear that have prevailed in Iraq for so many years must be brought to an end. The continuing scale and severity of human suffering must not be allowed to continue."

Can Blix fix that?

Forgive me if I take just a few minutes to give you a taste of what life is really like within Iraq today. This is from a recent report (December 2002) from the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor:

"In 1979, immediately upon coming to power, Saddam Hussein silenced all political opposition in Iraq and converted his one-party state into a cult of personality. Over the more than 20 years since then, his regime has systematically executed, tortured, imprisoned, raped, terrorized and repressed Iraqi people. Iraq is a nation rich in culture with a long history of intellectual and scientific achievement. Yet Saddam Hussein has silenced its scholars and doctors, as well as its women and children.

"Iraqi dissidents are tortured, killed or disappear in order to deter other Iraqi citizens from speaking out against the government or demanding change. A system of collective punishment tortures entire families or ethnic groups for the acts of one dissident. Women are raped and often videotaped during rape to blackmail their families. Citizens are publicly beheaded, and their families are required to display the heads of the deceased as a warning to others who might question the politics of this regime.

"Saddam Hussein was also the first leader to use chemical weapons against his own population, silencing more than 60 villages and 30,000 citizens with poisonous gas. Between 1983 and 1988 alone, he murdered more than 30,000 Iraqi citizens with mustard gas and nerve agents. Several international organizations claim that he killed more than 60,000 Iraqi citizens with chemicals, including large numbers of women and children."

We hear from many anti-war spokesmen that there's no evidence Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Let me paint a brief picture of one Iraqi town on March 16, 1988. It was 6:20 p.m. when a smell of apples descended on the town of Halabja. This Iraqi Kurdish town of 80,000 was instantly engulfed in a thick cloud of gas, as chemicals soaked into the clothes, mouths, lungs, eyes and skin of innocent civilians. For three days, Iraqi Air Force planes dropped mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin and VX.

These chemicals murdered at least 5,000 civilians within hours of the initial attack, and killed and maimed thousands more over the next several years. Halabja has experienced staggering rates of aggressive cancer, genetic mutation, neurological damage and psychiatric disorders since 1988. If you walk through the streets today, you will still see many diseased and disfigured citizens.

Was this an isolated event? Iraqi exiles claim Saddam has used chemical weapons 281 different times.

We learn two important lessons from this story: 1) Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and 2) he is willing to use them, even on his own people.

Back to everyday life in Iraq. What about basic freedoms?

"The Iraqi people are not allowed to vote to remove the government." (In the last election, there was one candidate. The ballot said "Saddam Hussein: Yes or No?" Each ballot was numbered so any no votes could be traced to the unfortunate voter, who would disappear forever. Big surprise – Saddam got 100 percent of the vote.

"Freedom of expression, association and movement do not exist in Iraq. The media is tightly controlled – Saddam Hussein's son owns the daily Iraqi newspaper. Iraqi citizens cannot assemble except in support of the government. Iraqi citizens cannot freely leave Iraq."

Here's a quote from Safia Al Souhail, an Iraqi citizen, and advocacy director of the International Alliance for Justice:

"Iraq under Saddam's regime has become a land of hopelessness, sadness and fear. A country where people are ethnically cleansed; prisoners are tortured in more than 300 prisons in Iraq. Rape is systematic ... congenital malformation, birth defects, infertility, cancer and various disorders are the results of Saddam's gassing of his own people ... the killing and torturing of husbands in front of their wives and children ... Iraq under Saddam has become a hell and a museum of crimes."

I apologize for the graphic nature of what follows. I actually deleted the worst descriptions, but left enough in to give you a sense of why the Iraqi people are hoping and praying we will liberate them from the current Baghdad terror regime.

The official State Department report continues: "Under Saddam Hussein's orders, the security apparatus in Iraq routinely and systematically tortures its citizens. Beatings, rape, breaking of limbs and denial of food and water are commonplace in Iraqi detention centers. Saddam Hussein's regime has also invented unique and horrific methods of torture including electric shocks to a male's genitals, pulling out fingernails, suspending individuals from rotating ceiling fans, dripping acid on a victim's skin, gouging out eyes, and burning victims with a hot iron or blowtorch."

Why don't more Iraqis complain? I wonder if it could be because of Saddam's decree in 2000 authorizing the government to amputate the tongues of citizens who criticize him or his government.

The following are routine in Iraq today:

Medical experimentation
Beatings
Crucifixion
Hammering nails into the fingers and hands
Amputating sex organs or breasts with an electric carving knife
Spraying insecticides into a victim's eyes
Branding with a hot iron
Committing rape while the victim's spouse is forced to watch
Pouring boiling water into the victim's rectum
Nailing the tongue to a wooden board
Extracting teeth with pliers
Using bees and scorpions to sting naked children in front of their parents

Does this sound familiar to you? Medical experimentation? Routine torture for the fun of it? It reminds me of Nazi Germany. We went in for Hitler – who didn't attack the United States, by the way – and we are going in for Saddam.

Saddam does not deny the fact that his regime tortures and brutally murders women. The daily newspaper "Babel," owned by Uday, Hussein's eldest son, contained a public admission on Feb. 13, 2001 of beheading women who are suspected of prostitution.

The Iraqi Women's League in Damascus, Syria, describes this practice as follows: "Under the pretext of fighting prostitution, units of 'Feda'iyee Saddam,' the paramilitary organization led by Uday, have beheaded in public more than 200 women all over the country, dumping their severed heads at their families' doorsteps. Many of the victims were innocent professional women, including some who were suspected of being dissidents." (March 3, 2001).

So much for treatment of women. What about the children?

"Since the Gulf War alone, Saddam Hussein has built 48 lavish palaces for himself," says the U.S. State Department. "Meanwhile, pharmaceutical supplies intended for sick children are being exported for resale overseas. Medicine and medical supplies that are desperately needed by children are frequently delayed because regime members demand bribes from suppliers. The lack of health care in Iraq has led to the re-emergence of diseases that had been exterminated years ago, including cholera and polio."

By the way, Saddam's regime also forces children between the ages of 10 and 15 to attend 3-week training courses in weapons' use, hand-to-hand fighting, rappelling from helicopters and infantry tactics so they can be part of Saddam's army. These children endure 14 hours of physical training and psychological pressure each day. Families that do not want their children to attend this rigorous training course are threatened with the loss of their food-ration cards.

Let's add it all up. Torture, murder and extreme cruelty are a way of life in Iraq. Saddam is involved in international terrorism. He was complicit in the first World Trade Center attack. He has for years supported al-Qaida, which killed 3,000 Americans on our own soil. He has weapons of mass destruction – not is trying to develop – but has weapons of mass destruction and has already used them for the attempted genocide of the Kurds.

If we send our troops home and leave Saddam's regime in power – and even if we deploy a few hundred or a few thousand inspectors and troops to roam hither and yon in that large country – will the U.N. presence stop Saddam's daily torture? No.

Will they stop his support of terrorists? No.

Will they stop his clandestine program to continue developing more and more fearsome weapons of mass destruction? No.

Eventually, as happened in 1991, we will leave, and Saddam Hussein will rise again. If we let him, he will – very shortly – put his weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

And if you didn't like what terrorists did to us with four stolen jets and box cutters, you'll really dislike what they can do with weapons of mass destruction.

Ask yourself this question: Is it right to let this man stay in power?

David Kupelian is vice president and managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com and Whistleblower magazine.