"Huh?"
Nope. No connection there.
Move along.
The post of the day. Yeah, Saddam had no connection to Al Qaeda. /s
An al-Queda operative being given transit by the Iranians. Isn’t the conventional wisdom that Sunnis and Shiites do not cooperate?
Since we know there was no association between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, Abd-al-Hadi al-Iraqi must've signed up fresh after Saddam was overthrown, and moved all the way up the ranks to become an associate of UBL out of revenge against the US-Iraqi invasion all in just the last few years.
Gee, somehow that doesn't wook vewy wew, as UBL was either sealed up in Tora Bora well before the Iraqi invasion began, or if we'd've just kept track of this guy, he could've led us to his close associate, UBL, many times in the last few years. Not likely, you say?
No, if this guy was an associate of UBL, it can only be proof of close ties between Saddam's Iraqi regime and UBL's al-Qaeda.
HF
“The al-Qaeda leader... a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army
Nope. No connection there.”
Iraq is just a distraction from the War On Terror, right??? There was absolutely no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, right???
"Huh?"
And there never was a connection, Bush just went and developed an invade-Iraq fetish for no reason whatsoever.
It’s like the global warming thing...facts have nothing to do it, the Democrats will religiously maintain with insistence that Saddam’s Iraq was the one place in the Islamic world that had no connection to Al-Qaeda and terror. It’s theology and doctrine with them now.
What is also noteworthy is al-Iraqi's background in Saddam Hussein's Army (pointed out to this site by Laurie Mylroie). During his military service over a decade ago, al-Iraqi worked his way up to the rank of Major before moving to Afghanistan to fight "jihad" against the occupying Soviet Union. This is not to assert that al-Iraqi maintained contact with Iraqi officials over the past decade (though many other Intelligence and Military officers from Saddam Hussein's regime, who were later found to be assisting al Qaeda, reportedly did) but his knowledge of the country and contacts within Iraq certainly played a role in al-Iraqi being Osama bin Laden's personal choice to monitor al Qaeda's operations in Iraq. al-Iraqi's military background likely was of great use in the terrorist training camp(s) he commanded in Afghanistan. Those camps were destroyed by U.S. forces in late 2001 around the same time that al-Iraqi's funds were beingfrozen by the United Nations.
The former Iraqi Major's network may now stretch into Europe, where captured al-Qaeda affiliates have admitted meeting with al-Iraqi and other top al-Qaeda leaders. According to Pakistani officials, Zeeshan Siddique, arrested for preparing terrorist attacks (suicide bombing) and membership to al-Qaeda, told his interrogators that Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was among the remaining al-Qaeda leadership still provoking attacks with whom he had met while traveling the Afghanistan/Pakistan borderland.