Posted on 09/14/2006 4:32:52 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
WASHINGTON — A deputy prime minister of Iraq yesterday offered a sharp contradiction of the conventional wisdom here that Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda had no connection before the 2003 war, flatly contradicting a recent report from the Senate's intelligence committee.
In a speech in which he challenged the belief of war critics that Iraqis' lives are now worse than under Saddam Hussein, Barham Salih said, "The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told." He went on to say, "I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam's regime."
A Kurdish politician who took his high school exams from inside a Baathist prison, Mr. Salih said he was the target of the alliance between jihadists, Baathists, and Al Qaeda in 2001, when a group known as Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate him. In 2002, envoys of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish parties sharing sovereignty over northern Iraq between the two Iraq wars, presented the CIA with evidence that the organization that tried to kill Mr. Salih had been in part funded and directed by Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.
Those words directly contradict a recent report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that declassified a 2005 CIA assessment of Iraq's pre-war ties to Al Qaeda and found that none existed. In an interview after the speech yesterday, Mr. Salih said he was unaware of the CIA assessment. But he added, "There were links between Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda. The information at time [in 2002] was quite different...
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Well i wonder if the NYSun is going to be the only paper publishing this little tidbit.
Wait ... Sen. Rockefeller said ...
Wonder why the Dems are so worried about having more seats, when they already call the shots.(sarcasm)
Thanks for posting this!! BTTT !!
bttt
Bump and ping.
Well Saddam would never allow it. Never ever. Saddam hated radical Islamic terror groups, dontchaknow?
/sarcasm
BTTT
Yeah he was our great ally against them. /s
Paging the Senate Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ikez78 - ping aling.
Following that logic, it's reasonable to assume that just because AQ is somewhere doesn't mean that they're welcome.
Al-Qa'ida is in America. American CIA agents have contact with al-Qa'ida members. That doesn't mean that AQ and the U.S. are in cahoots, or that the CIA launched 9/11.
Powers, even opposing ones, having low-to-mid level contact isn't as nefarious as it sounds in the intelligence game. We've been overplaying the ominous sounding "Saddam/AQ" link, just as the Democrats are trying to deny it existed at all. Both views are misleading, but we should know better than to give them ammo like this. It winds up hurting us more when we stretch the truth.
Excellent.
This is the same general that says Saddam loaded up planes with WMD to get them out of Iraq before the war. I believe he's written a book.
We know with absolute certainty that he was giving monies to the families of terrorists willing to blow themselves up in Israel.
He is the hater of Christians and Jews and the United States in particular. His goal, as we know for certain, was to annihilate Israel.
If you are a supporter of Alqueda and its' branches, YOU ARE A PART OF AL QUEDA!!
Can we expect to see this via Maureen D., Katie C., CNN, ABC, NBC, and all the others? No? How foolish of me.
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