do I really have to say it???
Posted on 09/08/2006 8:11:33 PM PDT by FairOpinion
The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.
In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Will do, FairOpinion.
Peach of a post. Well done and thorough...save it and post it when the topic pops up. Send a copy to the DNC or post it for the 'Einsteins at DU.
"But, but,... that was years ago, and we forgot about that, and you also forgot about it, didn't you? Besides, Bush lied."
said the Democrat.
The votes undermining the war on terror, the funding of the troops, the Patriot Act, etc. speak for themselves to the sobering reality of the Democrats as a party governing during a time of grave danger to our country.
Your viewpoint, I respectfully offer, ignores reality and is dangerously naive and quixotic.
Thank you, tflabo. I try to use it in good health :-)
It's so very funny and a little sad when I read posts at DU and these guys can't understand why, with so much evidence that Bush lied, he hasn't been impeached yet.
They have no clue who the real liars are.
SALMAN PAK
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iraq/salman_pak.htm
Iraq told UN inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces. However, two defectors from Iraqi intelligence stated that they had worked for several years at the secret Iraqi government camp, which had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995. Training activities including simulated hijackings carried out in an airplane fuselage [said to be a Boeing 707] at the camp. The camp is divided into distinct sections. On one side of the camp young, Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam are trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage. The Islamic militants trained on the other side of the camp, in an area separated by a small lake, trees and barbed wire. The militants reportedly spent time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the airplane. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.
GREAT JOB!
Thank you, Nord. Now if we could just figure out why the Republicans remain silent on this issue. Spineless jellyfish that they are.
Thanks brother and sister Freepers....helping preserve sanity in an insane world. We will win...never give in.
"Your viewpoint, I respectfully offer, ignores reality and is dangerously naive and quixotic."
These same people were in lockstep w/ Clinton when WJC was saying the same things as Dubya, as Peach points out w/ her long (and very useful!) post. If what you say is true, that they've always believed what they say now, then Peach's list would be a lot, lot shorter.
No, as we all know, the anti-war people are 90% "we hate Dubya", 9% moonbat, and 1% Amish/Mennonite. If there was a Dem POTUS, you'd see Chucky, JFKerry, et al reverting back to the stuff they said during the Clinton years.
Any other combo...doesn't.
Ping for Peach
If the Dems take control of Congress they will take a page out of their Vietnam playbook. They will set up a timetable to leave Iraq and begin reducing funding for the war. They will not continue the same basic policies of the current Congress. Moreover, the House will start hearings on the war and push for impeachment of Bush using the pretext of violation of the Constitution citing the NSA terrorist survailance progam and the CIA "secret prisons" as the reasons why. It does make a difference what party is in power.
Ironically, your point makes my case. The "lockstep w/Clinton" Dems' hypocritical and contradictory positions on these grave matters only serves to condemn them all the more as a serious governing party in a time of war--most especially when viewed through the prism of the 9/11. If Democrats couldn't behave like serious adults in the aftermath of an event as significant as 9-11, it's the height of wishful thinking to believe that they'll suddenly grow up should they grab the reins of power again.
Whether the Democrats do it for political expediency to undermine a Republican president or as a matter of conviction, the end result is the same. The undeniable and inescapable bottom line is that during the time in our history when it matters the most--with real bombs and bullets flying, and real American lives in jeopardy here and on foreign battlefields--the Democrats consistently and willfully take positions that undermine our nation's security, not to mention the free world at large.
Pollyanna is starting look like a gloomy Cassandra next to your, I believe, wholly unfounded optimism about the Dems.
That has been the latest Dem talking point, that there was no link. This just refutes that and points to their cheap political rhetoric.
Great job, Peach. Lot's of work to provide excellent information.
Question: What warning, if any, did the CIA receive from the National Reconnaissance Office concerning Arabs training on the fuselage of a passenger airliner at a terrorist training camp prior to September 11th, 2001?
Answer: After Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, an Iraqi military officer, defected from Iraq in 1999 to Turkey. He now lives in Fort Worth, Texas. When he was debriefed, he described his training mission at Salman Pak, a military base about 21 miles from Baghdad that had been used for the testing of secret weapons, including chemical biological warfare agents, and paramilitary training for covert actions. Captain Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami said that as late as 1998 he trained an elite commando team, Fedayeen Saddam, in airline hijacking and sabotage. Through a translator, Mr. Alami described, according to the Wall street Journal, a daily regimen of exercises on kidnapping, assassination, and -- using a Boeing 707 parked inside the complex -- how to hijack a plane or bus without weapons. He said that a separate group of non- Iraqis were being similarly trained by Saddam's intelligence service, the mukhabarat. Asked about the plane by an interviewer for Front Line, he said "Yes, there's a real whole 707 plane, a whole real plane, standing in the middle of the training area in this camp."
Subsequently, a second Iraqi defector, a former intelligence officer who defected in early 2001 , described "Islamicists" training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak from about 1995 to as recently as September 2000. Neither defector said any efforts were made to hide or conceal the Boeing from satellite photography. And, according to Front Line, a former U.N. inspector who worked for the United Nations said that he saw the fuselage of an airliner at Salman Pak which was smaller than a Boeing. Whatever manufacture and size , there is agreement such a plane was in the Salman Pak complex.
During this period, the base at Salman Pak was under surveillance of US KH-11 reconnaissance satellites which were providing intelligence on Iraq's possible weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological warfare equipment, to the CIA. The information about Salman Pak was also used publically by UNSCOM, the UN agency charged with monitoring Iraq's disposal of such weapons. Since Salman Pak was systematically photographed, if the defectors' accounts are accurate, the Boeing 707 would also have been routinely photographed between 1995 and 2000 many times. Given that Salman Pak was not an air base, a Boeing 707 on the ground there would have stood out like a sore thumb. It is also possible that the Arabs training on it were recognizable (unless training was only at night or they wore masks). After September 11th, a private US satellite photo company, Space Imaging, went through its archives and found a photo that included a plane parked in the Salman Pak compound.
The National Reconnaissance Office collates, analyzes and distributes the intelligence gleaned from satellite imagery in Iraq. If it had pictures of an airliner, Boeing or whatever kind, permanently stationed inside the Salmon Pak complex, it is reasonable to assume that they would not have withheld them from the CIA. If so, the CIA had photographic evidence confirming defectors claims that Iraq was practicing, if not preparing, covert actions against a Boeing prior to September 11th.
http://edwardjayepstein.com/2002question/salmanpak.htm
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