Posted on 03/23/2008 8:18:17 PM PDT by jdm
An interesting recent claim about al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) says it is a totally homegrown and separate entity from the al Qaeda (AQ) that Osama bin Laden heads.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, on Tuesday’s “Larry King Live” said, "The al Qaeda the president is talking about is different than the al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, which is the al Qaeda that's in Iraq. The al Qaeda that bin Laden is in charge of is a totally separate organization."
And AP’s Jennifer Loven, in an article on the same day, claimed that AQI “"is mostly homegrown ... ". She further claims that, "[t]here has been no evidence presented that the group is plotting or intends attacks outside of Iraq," and, "[t]here is little or no evidence of coordination between the two groups."
Really?
Well then I assume Sen. Schumer and Ms. Loven are able to explain why this "homegrown organization" was started by foreigners. AQI’s founder was Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian, and his successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, is Egyptian. Please explain why a "homegrown organization" chooses to appoint a foreigner as its head and then when he eats a 500 pound JDAM, replaces him with another foreigner – does that sound like something a “homegrown organization” would do?
After that, Schumer and Loven can explain why Zarqawi publicly pledged alliance to bin Laden, and promised “to follow his orders in jihad.", or why bin Laden publicly declared Zarqawi the "Prince of al Qaeda in Iraq," instructed followers to "listen to him and obey him," and regularly communicated with him through his second-in-command Zawahiri.
And it would be peachy-keen if they could also include an explanation as to why the U.S. intelligence community reported that many of AQI’s other senior leaders were also foreign terrorists, including a Syrian who is AQI’s emir in Baghdad, a Saudi who is AQI’s top spiritual and legal adviser, and an Egyptian (Abu Ayyub al-Masri) who fought in Afghanistan in the 1990s and (like Zarqawi) has met with bin Laden.
Once they're finished with that, they can explain why bin Laden, in his 12/28/04 audio message to Muslims in Iraq, claimed Baghdad is "The Capital Of The Caliphate." That is, if he had no connections there why would he say, "I now address my speech to the whole of the Islamic nation: Listen and understand. The issue is big and the misfortune is momentous. The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation. It is raging in the land of the two rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate." Why make that claim if you have nothing to really back it up. And in ’04, AQ actually thought they were winning in Iraq if you’ll recall.
And, of course, there’s that inconvenient statement by AQ’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri made to coincide with our Independence Day in ’07 in which he said, "I convey to you the Mujahideen's commanders mobilization of you, so hurry to Afghanistan, hurry to Iraq, hurry to Somalia, hurry to Palestine” to explain. Maybe Schumer and Loven can tell us who Zawahiri is referring to when he cites the “Mujahideen’s commanders mobilization” order? If Zawahiri is AQ’s number two, then there’s only one “Mujahideen commander” he answers too – and he’s ordering AQ followers to Iraq.
And who can forget, other than Schumer and Loven, that October 2005 missive from Zawahiri in which he laid out the AQ plan for Iraq:
ZAWAHIRI: "…Jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals: The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate – over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq … The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity."
Last but not least, to the Loven claim that "[t]here has been no evidence presented that the group is plotting or intends attacks outside of Iraq," I refer her to July 2007 NIE which is quite specific about her claim:
“We assess that al-Qa’ida will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the Homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups. Of note, we assess that al-Qa’ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland. In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qa’ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.”
You know, given all of that, I'm just not seeing much to back the Schumer/Loven assertions, are you?
While AQI may have become functional after the invasion, it wasn’t then and isn’t now a homegrown and wholly separate organization. And unless both Schumer and Loven can come up with something other than the rather weak claims they’ve made, they should be taken with the giant grain of salt they deserve.
Just like...the black theology movement of Jeremiah Wright is different from the one of Barak Obama.
They’ve just been reading the New York Times stylebook.
This makes total sense. Just like how the 101st and the and the 10th Mountain are totally different armies. Just because they both have 1s and 0s in their names...
If its homegrown in Iraq, why is the majority of its leaders and suicide bombers from countries like Saudia Arabia, Yemen, and Egpyt?
“Schumer and AP: Selective Amnesia”
No, it’s not anything about amnesia. It’s plain, old fashioned, enemy supporting propaganda. Anything to confuse, manipulate, frustrate, misinform, mislead and/or reduce the faith of the average American is all gold for this perfidious filth.
The statements are from betrayers and are all and only about betrayal.
Don't you know it is bad form to recogmnize good old fashioned soviet style disinformation? We are supposed to be dumbing down the American people, not teaching them to be cognizant of such tactics within our own media.
Someone may have to report you.
Schumer knows better than this, but is so blinded by his narrow-minded ideology that he can’t tell the truth about it.
LOL. I was trying to make a stab for the Master of the Obvious award.
Al Qaeda has two meanings in Aribic. “The Base”, which would indicates and organization for training and directing Jihadists, but also “The Method” which indicates and ideology and program that can be replicated anywhere. Both meanings are intended. Liberals insist on focusing only on the first (although even there they are wrong about AQI), while ignoring the second. As if Jihadists who want actively seek to spread Jihad and bring the entire world into the Uma under Sharia law only need to be worried about if they came from Afghanistan and carry an offical Al Qaeda ID card that shows they trained under Osama before 9/11/01.
No, Schumer is not "blinded" by anything. He is a very deliberate liar.
Is a lying, hate Republicans, DNC hack. I know of her shoddy, partisan work.
This election is turning the lies back on them in so many ways...and the Republicans are finally standing up to them more and more!(RINOs excluded)
Both Hillary and Obama are promising to make that little dream come true for Mr. Zawahiri.
Good article from Ken Timmerman:
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/iraq_al_qaida_ties/2008/03/20/81851.html
A much-publicized report released by the Pentagon last week details the extensive ties between the regime of Saddam Hussein and a wide variety of international terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
“Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States,” the report’s authors at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) state.
But instead of reporting on this conclusion, most of the media accounts have focused on a single sentence that appears in the executive summary, stating that the report’s authors found “no smoking gun” or “direct connection” between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaida.
The United States Joint Forces Command, which commissioned the report from IDA, provided reporters late last week with a CD containing nearly 2,000 pages of supporting documents that purportedly formed the basis of the conclusions authored by Lt. Col. Kevin Woods and James Lacey in the 94-page redacted summary that initially was leaked to the press.
Intriguing Analysis
An analysis by Newsmax identified several documents with critical evidence of Saddam’s close ties to al-Qaida that were overlooked or ignored by the report’s authors, however.
These documents, published previously by the Foreign Military Studies Office of the Joint Reserve Intelligence Center, Fort Leavenworth, have since been taken down from U.S. government Web sites. Newsmax downloaded copies when they were still available.
“This is not a comprehensive, end-all, all-in-one study,” a source familiar with the drafting of the report told Newsmax. He spoke on background because his comments had not been cleared in advance by the U.S. military.
“This was a study very specifically for military lessons learned, to explain an environment. People shouldn’t make this report into something it’s not,” he added.
Another source involved in the report told Newsmax that one reason some documents were not included in the analysis was because of the sheer mass of material available — more than 600,000 documents, in all.
I have written about the Harmony data base of captured Iraqi military and intelligence documents in my recent book, “Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.” [Editor’s Note: Get Ken Timmerman’s book with a free offer. Go here now.]
One of the most damning documents to emerge from the Harmony data base, I wrote, was a Jan. 18, 1993 order from Saddam Hussein, transmitted to the head of Iraqi intelligence, “to hunt the Americans that are in Arab lands, especially in Somalia, by using Arab elements or Asian (Muslims) or friends.”
In response, the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service informed Hussein that Iraq already had ties with a large number of international terrorist groups, including “the Islamist Arab elements that were fighting in Afghanistan and [currently] have no place to base and are physically present in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt.” In other words, al-Qaida.
The authors of the IDA study note that Saddam’s Iraq “was a long-standing supporter of international terrorism,” and that these particular documents provided ‘detailed evidence of that support.’”
The study also points out that the captured documents “reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior” to the 2003 war.
But the study shies away from identifying them as al-Qaida terrorists, even though many of them were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, became the deputy leader of al-Qaida in 1998.
Preparations for Suicide Operations Against U.S.
While the IDA study includes no information that would show operational ties between Saddam’s regime and the 9/11 hijackers, it reveals that Saddam personally gave orders on Sept. 17, 2001 to his general military intelligence directorate to recruit Iraqi officers for “suicide operations” against the United States.
The 112-page Harmony data file ISGQ-2005-00037352 contains Saddam’s order, as well as personal pledges to carry out suicide operations from more than one hundred “volunteers,” including a brigadier general.
In the order he issued just one week after the 9/11 attacks, Saddam stated that the volunteers should sign pledges “to be written in blood,” presumably their own.
Four years before this order, Saddam announced with great fanfare that he had tasked a prominent Iraqi calligrapher to produce a Quran written with his own blood. Saddam reportedly had doctors draw his blood for the task.
Several other key documents are glaringly absent from the IDA report and provide direct evidence of Saddam Hussein’s deep involvement with al-Qaida and its component organizations.
Among them is a 1999 notebook kept by an unidentified Iraqi intelligence official that detailed meetings between top Iraqi leaders and visiting Islamic terrorists. (Harmony document ISGP-2003-0001412).
One Baghdad visitor was Maulana Fazlur Rahman a signer of Osama bin Laden’s infamous 1998 fatwa calling on Muslims to “murder Americans.” Another was Afghan mujahedin leader Gulbudin Hekmatyar, who was also supported by Iran.
Roy Robison, a former U.S. government contractor who published an analysis of Saddam’s relationship to al-Qaida last year, argues that when Rahman met with Iraqi Vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan in 1999 “he did so as the father of the Taliban and as a leader of the World Islamic Front which declared war on the U.S the year before.”
Another document not included in this latest report was a review by Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) of their ongoing ties with Osama bin Laden and other opponents to the Saudi regime (Harmony document ISGZ-2004-009247).
This document reads like a memorandum for the record, written in early 1997, tracing the beginnings of the Iraqi regime’s relationship to Osama bin Laden.
In a letter dated Jan. 11, 1995, Saddam Hussein personally authorized the General Director of Intelligence to establish direct contact with bin Laden in Sudan, the report states.
The initial meeting with bin Laden took place just one month later, on Feb. 19, 1995, and included an offer by Iraq to provide bin Laden with broadcasting facilities and a discussion of plans “to perform joint operations against foreign forces in the land of Hijaz [ie, Saudi Arabia].
Following bin Laden’s expulsion from Sudan, in July 1996, the memo states that the Iraqi intelligence service is “working to revitalize this relationship through a new channel.”
The IDA report includes in its supporting documentation a detailed report by the Iraqi general director of intelligence in response to an “action directive” issued by Saddam on Jan. 18, 1993, ordering his intelligence service to establish relations with terrorist groups around the world and to develop the “expertise to carry out assignments.”
In addition to a variety of Palestinian groups, the document lists the Hezb Islami of Afghanistan, the Islamic Scholars Group of Pakistan, the Jam’iyat “Ulama Pakistan, all of which subsequently became affiliated with al-Qaida.
The authors of the IDA report note in the abstract accompanying their work that the captured documents provide “evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including . . . Islamic terrorist organizations.”
While the documents “do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al-Qaida network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al-Qaida,” and to provide financing and training of these outside groups.
“This created both the appearance of and, in some ways, a ‘de facto’ link between the organizations,” the report’s authors stated.
Much of the polemic over Saddam’s support for al-Qaida arises from disputed claims, put forward in a Czech government intelligence report, that an Iraqi intelligence official met with 9/11 pilot Mohamed Atta in Prague in the April 2001.
No documents have surfaced that would corroborate that claim, while in press interviews well after the liberation of Iraq, the Iraqi intelligence officer who reportedly met with Atta in Prague told reporters that the meeting never took place.
All Iraqi Roads Lead to Terrorism
Contrary to the accounts that have appeared in mainstream media outlets, the Harmony documents and the IDA report show beyond any doubt that Saddam Hussein was willing to fund, train, and use Islamic terrorists, including groups affiliated with al-Qaida, to carry out his long-standing plans against the United States and U.S. allies in the region.
A 2002 annual report to the Iraq Intelligence Service M8 directorate of liberation movements shows that the IIS hosted 13 terrorist conferences during the year, and that Saddam personally received 37 congratulatory messages from international terrorist groups. The annual report also noted that the IIS had issued 699 passports to terrorists during the year.
“Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al-Qaida [such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri], or that generally shared al-Qaida’s stated goals and objectives,” the IDA report states.
But an element of competition also kept Saddam from too much direct involvement with al-Qaida, the IDA report states.
While both Saddam and bin Laden wanted to drive the West out of Muslim lands and to create a single powerful state that would replace America as a global superpower, “bin Laden wanted — and still wants — to restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam, despite his later Islamic rhetoric, dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation,” the report’s authors state.
The relationship between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden bore some resemblance to the Cali and Medellin drug cartels.
While the seemingly rival cartels were vying for market share, “neither cartel was reluctant to cooperate with the other when it came to the pursuit of a common objective,” the report’s authors state.
“Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, “terror cartel” that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam’s regime,” the IDA report states.
Link to First World Trade Center Attack
One terror tie apparently put to rest in this latest report are the suspicions that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
Analysts such as Laurie Mylroie have argued for years that Saddam’s regime was behind the 1993 attack, and cited as evidence the fact that a key member of the plot, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Iraq immediately after the bombing.
As I reported in Shadow Warriors, Saddam Hussein recorded all meetings in his presidential office, and the Harmony data base includes tapes from a series of meetings during 1993 that discussed the interrogation of Yasin.
Saddam “discusses the possibility that the attack was part of the ‘dirty games that the American intelligence would play if it had a bigger purpose,’” and expresses concern that Yasin might be an American agent, the IDA report states.
According to Saddam, Yassin was “too organized in what he is saying and [he] is playing games, playing games and influencing the scenario” during his interrogations by Iraqi intelligence. Saddam ordered that the interrogations continue but “actually warns against allowing Yasin to commit suicide or be killed in jail,” the report states.
Saddam believed that “the most important thing is not to let the Arabic public opinion [believe] we are cooperating with the US against the opposition. I mean that is why our announcement [that Yasin is being held] should include doubts . . . [about] who carried out this operation. Because it is possible that in the end we will discover — even if it is a very weak possibility — that a fanatic group who carried it organized the operation.”
Saddam and his advisors were hoping to use the interrogations of Yasin, and whatever information they could gather from him about the organizers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to enhance their position in world public opinion.
If handled correctly, Saddam said, Yasin’s confessions “will benefit us greatly; it will benefit us in our issue in the matter of the stance that the U.S. has taken against us.”
. . . for later. It’s bedtime for me.
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