Saddam Knew 9/11 Was Coming and Colluded with OBL for a Decade

In an effort to put in one place all the reasons why I/we think that Saddam Hussein worked actively with Osama Bin Laden, I am starting a thread which can be saved and added to over time.

We know Saddam worked with the PLO and other terrorists, he funded them. He at LEAST knew that 9/11 was coming.

less than two months before 9/11/01, the state-controlled Iraqi newspaper “Al-Nasiriya” carried a column headlined, “American, an Obsession called Osama Bin Ladin.” (July 21, 2001)

In the piece, Baath Party writer Naeem Abd Muhalhal predicted that bin Laden would attack the US “with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.”

The same state-approved column also insisted that bin Laden “will strike America on the arm that is already hurting,” and that the US “will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs” – an apparent reference to the Sinatra classic, “New York, New York”.

Thank you to freeper Wait4Truth who was kind enough to transcribe this from Bodansky's book:

I've transcribed an interesting and telling excerpt from Yossef Bodansky's recent book that shows the ties between one of the best smoking guns and Israeli intelligence. Sadly, the White House has apparently chosen to keep under wraps anything the Israelis find --

From THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE IRAQ WAR by Yossef Bodansky (Regan Books, 2004), chapter 3, pp. 51-53:

On January 14, 2003, British police and security forces raided a terrorist safe house in Manchester, ending a several-month-long investigation. A Scotland Yard detective was killed in this raid, which recovered a quantity of ricin – an extremely potent poison. The investigation, begun in the fall 2002 in Israel, involved at its peak the intelligence services of more than six countries. The investigators’ findings provided the “smoking gun” supporting the administration’s insistence on Iraq’s centrality to global terrorism, the availability of operational weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and proof of the close cooperation between Iraqi military intelligence and al-Qaeda.

The data accumulated during this investigation could have provided the casus belli – the justification for war – and urgent imperative to take on Saddam Hussein. Yet in the first of several indecisive and self-contradicting political maneuvers, the Bush administration preferred to accommodate Blair’s pressure to keep Israel at arm’s length, not implicate Arafat, and placate Blair’s fellow West European leaders rather than go public with the findings of the investigation. Despite mounting international criticism and skepticism in the media, the American public was not presented with one of the strongest and most explicit justifications for the war with Iraq.

On the night of September 13, 2003, Israeli Special Forces intercepted and captured a three-man squad attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territories on their way to Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The interrogation revealed that they were highly trained members of the Baghdad-based Arab Liberation Front (ALF), sent to conduct spectacular strikes under the banner of Arafat’s Fatah. Specifically, they were dispatched by ALF Chief Muhammad Zaida Abbas, better known as Abu-al-Abbas, to operate directly under the control of Tawfiq Tirawi, chief of the Palestinian Authority’s General Intelligence Service and Arafat’s closest confidant. Abbas and Tirawi were extremely close childhood friends, having grown up together in a village justnorth of Ramallah and ultimately joining Arafat’s fledgling terrorist organization together in the early 1960s.

The three ALF terrorists were trained for several missions, including an operation that involved using shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down civilian airliners as they approached Ben-Gurion Airport and using anti-tank rockets and missiles to ambush convoys – including American groupings on their way to Iraq. They were also there to organize and train Palestinian terrorists – all trusted operatives of Tirawi’s – to assist with operations and intelligence collection inside Israel. The three had been briefed in Baghdad that they would get the missiles, heavy weapons, and explosives they might need from Fatah via Tirawi.

The Israeli interrogators were most interested in what the three had to say about their training: During the summer, they had been trained along with other squads of ALF terrorists at Salman Pak – a major base near Baghdad – by members of Unit 999 of Iraqi military intelligence. They recounted that in an adjacent part of the camp, other teams of Unit 999 were preparing a select group of Islamist terrorists specifically identified as members of al-Qaeda. Although the training was separate, and individuals used code names exclusively, they were able to learn a great deal about the missions of their Islamist colleagues.

The three ALF terrorists told the Israelis that in addition to the myriad special operations techniques taught at Salman Pak, the Islamists also received elaborate training in chemical weapons and poisons, specifically ricin. Moreover, on their way to their operational deployment zones, the Islamists were taken to a derelict complex of houses near Halabja, in Kurdistan, where they conducted experiments with chemical weapons and poisons. The area where the training took place was nominally under the control of Ansar-al-Islam, Osama bin Laden’s Kurdish offshoot. From there, the ALF terrorists recounted, Islamist detachments traveled to Turkey, where they were to strike American bases with chemical weapons once the war [with Iraq] started, and to Pakinsy Gore in northern Georgia (on the border with Chechnya) in order to assist Chechen terrorists as they launched major terrorists operations against Russia. Others were dispatched to train Islamist teams arriving from Western Europe via Turkey in sophisticated terrorism techniques, including the use of chemical weapons and ricin.

Within a week of the capture of the ALF trio, a delegation of senior Israeli military intelligence officers traveled to Washington to brief the White House about their findings. By then, there had already been independent corroborations of the Israeli reports: Turkish security forces, acting on tips provided by Israel, arrested two al-Qaeda operatives studying plans to attack the U.S. air base in Incerlick with chemical weapons, and American intelligence also learned from its own sources about the activities of foreign mujahedein in Georgia’s Pakinsky Gore. Then, on October 23, a group of Chechen and Arab terrorists captured a Moscow theater in the middle of a performance, taking over seven hundred people hostage, rigging the theater with bombs, and threatening to kill everyone in the building. When negotiations failed and the terrorists shot at least one hostage to demonstrate their determination, Russian antiterrorist forces broke into the theater after using a special knockout gas to neutralize the Chechens before they were able to detonate their bombs. The Russian operation was considered a great success, as all the terrorists were killed before they could blow themselves up; however, close to two hundred hostages died from secondary effects caused by the gas, including heart attacks and choking on their own vomit. In any case, the mere occurrence of a spectacular strike in Moscow meant that there could no longer be any doubt about the accuracy of the material provided by the three Palestinians in Israel’s custody.

Still, the White House was reluctant to advertise this evidence because it demonstrated Israeli intelligence’s major contribution to the war on terrorism…[W]hen ricin was discovered in Manchester and all the dots connected, the intelligence Israel had extracted from the terrorists in its custody was proved wholly accurate. Israel had in fact demonstrated to the Europeans why Saddam Hussein has to be toppled, and soon…

Fox News reports on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report regarding Iraq and AQ (July 2004):

http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2004/cyb20040714.asp#5

But page 316 of the Senate report states that the CIA provided 78 reports from various sources that from 1996 to 2003, Saddam Hussein's regime was actively training Iraqi intelligence operatives for terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

FNC on Monday night explored another area of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that other media outlets have skipped: Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq’s role in helping terrorists. On the July 12 Special Report with Brit Hume, Bret Baier reported how “sixty-six pages of the report fall under the heading 'Iraq's Links to Terrorism'” and in it, Baier related, “multiple, credible sources are cited that Iraq provided al-Qaeda with various kinds of training, combat, bomb-making, along with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training, backing up public and private statements by former CIA director George Tenet." Baier pointed out: “The details in the report seem to shoot down at least two of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke's bold claims.”

MRC analyst Megan McCormack noticed the story, which fill-in anchor Brian Wilson introduced: “There's been a lot of emphasis on the negative aspects of the Senate intelligence committee report on U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq, the parts that show what the Senators believe the intelligence community got wrong. But there's another section of the report about the pre-war intelligence that was right. Fox News Pentagon correspondent Bret Baier reports."

Baier began: "Almost all of the media coverage on the Senate intelligence committee's report about pre-war assessments by the CIA has focused on how harshly critical it is on CIA analysts. However, Friday the acting director pointed to one positive view."
John McLaughlin: "They made the point that we had done very well at our assessment over the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda and other terrorists."
Baier: "Sixty-six pages of the report fall under the heading 'Iraq's Links to Terrorism.' While the conclusion reads that the CIA correctly assessed there was no hard evidence of Iraq's command and control over al-Qaeda or no hard evidence of an established formal relationship, the report lays out the extent of the informal ties. A January 2003 CIA assessment from reliable, clandestine sources states that quote 'direct meetings between senior Iraqi representatives and top al Qaeda operatives took place from the early 1990s to the present,' meaning all the way up to January 2003. Multiple, credible sources are cited that Iraq provided al-Qaeda with various kinds of training, combat, bomb-making, along with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training, backing up public and private statements by former CIA director George Tenet."
George Tenet: "Iraq has in the past provided training and document forgery and bomb-making to al-Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al-Qaeda associates."
Baier: "The report states that the CIA had multiple sources telling them that Saddam Hussein had issued a standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his organization in 1999. The details in the report seem to shoot down at least two of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke's bold claims. Clarke told 60 Minutes in March quote, 'There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda. Ever.' Clarke also claimed that Iraq had not been involved in anti-U.S. terrorism since the failed 1993 plot to assassinate the first President Bush in Kuwait. But page 316 of the Senate report states that the CIA provided 78 reports from various sources that from 1996 to 2003, Saddam Hussein's regime was actively training Iraqi intelligence operatives for terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. Here's one particular reference, quote, 'Ten intelligence reports from multiple sources, indicated Iraqi Intelligence Service 'casing' operations against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague began in 1998 and continued into early 2003. The CIA assessed, based on the Prague casings and a variety of other reporting that throughout 2002, the IIS was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against U.S. interests.'
“The ranking member of the committee, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, said on Fox News Sunday this weekend he still believes that political pressure was put on the CIA analysts by the Bush administration, despite the fact that the committee's report concluded that none of the analysts or other people interviewed said they were pressured to change their conclusions, and the committee did not find any changes in their analytical judgments."

Don’t count on seeing that kind of story elsewhere given how much the other networks have invested in the storyline that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

-- Brent Baker

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