Posted on 02/21/2003 4:55:48 AM PST by JohnHuang2
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Iraq has rejected U.S. claims of links to a Kurdish terrorist group believed connected to al-Qaida, and said it has offered to hand over a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Baghdad had no ties to Ansar al-Islam nor an alleged al-Qaida fugitive Abu Musaab Zarqawi, who has been linked to the murder of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan and poison plots in a half-dozen European countries.
Sabri, in a 13-page letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to rebut U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council earlier this month, also said Baghdad is offering to hand over to Washington Abdul-Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who is on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Sabri's letter, which was posted on the Iraqi Foreign Ministry's web site Thursday, denied any link between Iraq and Zarqawi or Ansar, saying both operated in northern Iraqi areas under the control of Kurdish groups allied to Washington and beyond Baghdad's reach.
Powell also accused Ansar of harboring al-Qaida fugitives from Afghanistan, implying the group would not have offered al-Qaida any refuge without Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's consent.
"The Government of the Republic of Iraq stresses that no Iraqi government or nongovernment party had any meeting in the past or currently with this person (Zarqawi)," the Iraqi Foreign Ministry statement said.
Baghdad found no evidence Zarqawi had entered Iraq through any border point "whether using his own name or other aliases the Jordanians have provided." They are still looking for other fugitives, whose entry into Iraq also have not been proven.
Iraq said Zarqawi is in Biyara, part of the Sulaymaniyah region in northern Iraq. The areas "are not under central authority since 1991," the statement said. That was a reference to autonomous Kurdish areas that are protected by U.S. and British warplanes enforcing a no-fly zone.
Iraq also denied U.S. accusations of Iraqi government links to Ansar, saying it has helped fight the group.
The Iraqi letter said Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan militia asked Baghdad for light arms and military equipment to fight the militants, a request Baghdad honored. Ansar is operating in an area outside Baghdad's control "and under the control of Talabani, the friend of the United States," the letter said.
Sabri also said Washington refused Iraqi offers of cooperation in the case of Yasin, the man accused of mixing the bomb that blew up in the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, killing six people and injuring 1,000.
Iraq arrested Yasin in Iraq in 1994. Baghdad has offered America information and, through an international mediator, said it was willing to hand Yasin over, but the U.S. government rejected the offer, the statement said.
It did not explain why the United States would have rebuffed the offer, and U.S. officials could not immediately be reached to confirm the Iraqi account.
"Iraq's government once again would like to assert that it is ready to hand over this suspect in a formal way to American authorities," the statement said.
The FBI has offered a $25 million reward for information leading to Yasin's arrest. The FBI questioned him after the bombing but let him leave America. He was later indicted on charges he helped mix the explosives.
Yasin, of Iraqi heritage, was born in Bloomington, Ind., while his father studied at Indiana University. He moved to Iraq as a child and returned to the United States in 1992.
He lives there and they have been harboring him but they had nothing to do with it. Yeah, right
Iraq's Saddam: 'We did not have terror relations with with that man, Mr. bin Laden!'
Neither Clinton's nor Iraq's claim passes the laugh test.
by Laurie Mylroie
ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned, tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.
Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy. In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water." [1] Quickly extradited, he is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial this spring.
Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States. But who is he? Is he a free-lance bomber? A deranged but highly-skilled veteran of the Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Is he an Arab, or of some other Middle Eastern ethnicity? Is there an organization--perhaps even a state--behind his work?
These questions have an obvious bearing not only on past events but on possible future ones as well. [2] It is important to know who Ramzi Yousef is and who his "friends" are, because if he is not just a bomber-for-hire, or an Islamic militant loosely connected to other Muslim fundamentalists, Yousef's "friends" could still prove very dangerous to the United States. It is of considerable interest, therefore, that a very persuasive case can be made that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his bombing conspiracies were meant as Saddam Hussein's revenge for the Gulf War. If so, and if, as U.S. officials strongly suspect, Baghdad still secretly possesses biological warfare agents, then we may still not have heard the last from Saddam Hussein.
This essay will focus on three points. First, it will argue that, as things stand now, coordination between the Justice Department and the relevant national security agencies is such that the latter--and thus national security itself gets very short shrift when it comes to dealing with terror incidents perpetrated on U.S. soil. Second, it will look afresh at the evidence from the World Trade Center bombing case and suggest that the most logical explanation of the evidence points to Iraqi state sponsorship. Third, it will assay briefly what dangers the Iraqi regime may still pose to the United States should this analysis prove correct.
THE SUGGESTION THAT Iraq might well have been behind Ramzi Yousef's exploits may initially strike many as implausible. Wouldn't the U.S. government investigation of the World Trade Center bombing have uncovered evidence to that effect, evidence that the press, in turn, would have broadcast far and wide? Wouldn't America's robust anti-terrorist intelligence capacities have focused on such suspicions long ago?
While these are reasonable questions, they reveal a lack of understanding about how the U.S. government works when legal and national security issues of this special sort overlap. A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions. [3]
In effect, the Justice Department puts the prosecution of individual perpetrators--with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the U.S. judicial system--above America's national security interest in determining who may be behind terrorist attacks. Questions of state sponsorship that are of pressing interest to national security agencies are typically relegated to a distant second place, or never properly addressed at all, because the national security agencies are denied critical information. In particular, whenever early arrests are made regarding a terrorist incident on American soil, the U.S. government cannot properly address both the national security question of state sponsorship and the criminal question of the guilt or innocence of individual perpetrators at the same time.
No records are kept of the massacre of Kurds with CB weapons either.
In fact, there is no record of who keeps the records becuase they are non persons who got a non bullet in the back of their non heads.
Nonsense.
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