Posted on 03/11/2008 5:56:52 AM PDT by jdm
A new study commissioned by the Pentagon has reviewed over 600,000 documents captured in the invasion of Iraq, and the analysis shows no evidence of operational ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. It did find operational ties and more between Saddam and other terrorist groups, however, which will likely be lost in an avalanche of I-told-you-sos:
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy Newspapers. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
The study found, though, that Saddam Hussein turned Iraq into a state sponsor of terrorism, including for groups with “global” scope. Saddam had openly bragged about some of his activities. He made a great show of paying $25,000 to families of Palestinian suicide bombers, for instance, and at one point held a convention for international terrorists in Baghdad.
McClatchy reporter Warren Strobel also includes a strange passage in this report:
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al-Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq.
“The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” the president said.
That has little to do with pre-war intelligence. Not too many people dispute that AQ has an active presence in Iraq in the post-invasion period, mostly because AQ keeps reminding people of it. The argument which the Pentagon report addresses is whether AQ existed in Iraq before we invaded, or whether they entered Iraq as a consequence of the invasion. Clearly, the Pentagon report believes it to be the latter.
As this report makes clear, though, Saddam sponsored terrorist groups outside of Iraq as well as conducted terror inside Iraq with his own security forces. He made himself into a malevolent force in the region, and he represented a threat to American and Western interests in the region. Had we let the sanctions regime collapse — which was what was happening when we invaded — Saddam would have restarted his WMD programs and would have continued in his ambitions to make himself the leader of a unified and hostile Arab state.
Heavens! What a shock!
Yep, let's just gloss over the fact that Zarqawi and others entered Iraq after the invasion of Afghanistan and approximately one year before the invasion of Iraq. I'm tired of hearing this stupid argument that the U.S. caused Al Qaeda to go to Iraq after we invaded it.
It's worth the read.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
[Full text of confession]Al Qaeda Plans Terrorist Attack in Chemical Weapons against Jordan
What about the Weimar Republic was bad? Seems to me our republic had a little trouble in 1861; France’s republic had several civil wars; England had several. It wasn’t the structure of Weimar that was bad-—and it absolutely was better than the Kaiser. The fact that a dictator takes over the country with only 44% of the vote is hardly a problem of the voting process.
A rather complete article on Salman Pak and the various theories pre- and post-invasion can be found in Wikipedia. It has numerous references. Surprisingly, for Wikipedia, the article notes errors by the New York Times and PBS Frontline in reporting the Salman Pak story. Lefties are as prone to being manipulated as conservatives, maybe more so.
Conclusion: the plane was probably used for counter-terrorism training by an Iraqi intelligence agency, but DIA said it has "no information from Salman Pak that links al-Qa'ida with the former regime."
Salman Pak was one in a series of planted stories (WMD, the three mystery ships, convoys into Syria, mobile weapons labs) engineered to sway public opinion prior to the March, 2003, invasion.
Errr... WMDs a planted story? President Bush on Sept 12, 2002 and Hans Blix on Jan 27, 2003 reported that Iraq had tons of unaccounted for biological and chemical weapons. The REASON they said this was because Iraq produced the documents of production to the UN inspectors after Bush got the inspectors back in. The onus was on the Hussein regime to validate disarmament and in doing so was required to prove that the production of tons of biological and chemical weapons had been: a) destroyed, b) already used, or c) the documents were frauds. The Hussein regime did neither a,b, nor c.
This is well worth the read and certainly better than a journalists spoon feeding you.
THE SECURITY COUNCIL, 27 JANUARY 2003: AN UPDATE ON INSPECTION Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, Dr. Hans Blix
http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocusnewsiraq.asp?NewsID=354&sID=6
Then how do you explain his support for Hamas?
Smoking? You need to come up with new catch phrase. I remember that you were using it back in 2006 when I EXACTLY predicted the results of the 2006 elections and won a bet here of several hundred dollars. Not bad for someone who supported a kook, eh? How'd you do in predicting that election by the way?
To the extent that there were Al Qaeda in Iraq before Saddam fell, they were in the Kurdish areas. Bush showed absolutely no interest in getting them even though Kurdistan was our defacto ally at the time. Al Qaeda didn't enter the picture in the rest of Iraq until after the U.S. invasion. Even then, Al Qaeda never represented more than a small fraction of the insurgency.
Most of the peoplle killing Americans then were the folks who are now in the Awakening Councils. Interestingly, the Awakening Councils members could have been bribed much earlier to turn their guns on Al Qaeda (who they already beginning to fight) but Rumsfeld showed no interest in giving them the cash. Of course, the folks in the Awakening Councils still hate Americans as much as ever and are rapidly expanding their powr as local kingmakers in the Sunni areas. Ain't no way that Maliki is going to integrate them in the iraqi army.
Meaning that they did not act in direct concert with one another as allies. Yeah...so? That's hardly new...nor is it anything the Administration asserted.
He needed to have been dealt with from when we found the massive violations of the Ceasefire agreement...circa 1994. Everything after that was borrowed time that hurt this nation and empowered the nuts.
Oh yes he did. After initially hiding them, eventually they were located, and declared, with many inspected, sampled, and tagged. Some of these were destroyed. So not only did we not find the new stuff we thought he'd be making...we couldn't even find the old stuff that inspectors had put their hands on.
You forgot the mountain of surprises that Libya was cooking up. That alone made Iraq worth it...aside from any accomplishments in Iraq itself.
Counter-terrorism, huh? Well, I guess that’s better than Saddam’s official story, that he was innocently using it to train flight attendants (I wonder why he’d lie if he was innocently using it for counter-terrorism?). Regardless, the IIS must’ve had a top-flight counter terrorism program, considering how all the terrorists surrounding them, who hated their “secular” guts, never managed to pull off a single attack against the Ba’athists.
And thanks for the Wiki link. I learned everything I needed to know without having to open it.
And we should have done it as soon as it became clear they were funding an insurgency. Really though, we had to attack Iraq fisrt. Afghanistan is landlocked on one side of Iran, and Iraq has ports on the other side of Iran.
Maybe a bit. I haven't heard MurryMom protest the Federal Occupation of New Orleans.
Wasn't Abu Nidal in a like situation?
It is not easy, until you try to comprehend why current administration bankrolls the very same Hamas terrorists while allegedly waging the war on terror.
The key problem is an idea among the elites that islamists can be utilized for anything. They are only good for one thing - to be quickly sent to Allah by the fastest means available.
Of course, I don’t think operational support has ever been claimed.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID={78EE5063-49A5-4ABE-8815-C9AFCC7A236F}
Saddamm was up to his neck in blood....
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