Al Qaeda-Iraqi relationship proven beyond any doubt.

ABC World News Now | 4/27/2004

[Beckwith]

ABC World News Now. April 27, 2004

In an interview broadcast by ABC's World News Now, the leader of the Al Qaeda cell organizing the explosive and chemical attack on the Jordanian security headquarters and the American Embassy in Jordan stated that he received his training from Al-Zawahiri in Iraq, prior to the fall of Afghanistan.

[WOSG]

Ronald Reagan supported democracy in Poland, Phillipines, and Nicaruagua ... In different ways, including military ones. Was he a Trotskyite???

Dr Frank, understand that some in the isolationist-crackpot worldview have to declaim the 'pro-democracy' concept as "trotskyite" because they have to demonize the idea. This is demonizing a concept through bad association. Now, the association makes no sense and is illogical. If Trotsky rode bicycles, that doesnt mean all bicycle riders are Communist radicals. If Trotsky believed in the end of history as a global common ideology (global communism) that doesnt mean others who see the 'end of history' (viz. Francis Fukiyama) as one ideology globally triumphant are also Communists.

On the contrary, the end of history could be a global consensus of liberal (ie "free nations") states based on democracy, freedom and human rights. This is the OPPOSITE of Communism's end game. Some of firm realists see that as the real flow of history; a realist can perceive that since cultural and economic trends have worked to expand democratic rule, freedoms, etc. in the last several centuries, and countries like the US 'work' better than primitive dictatorial regimes.

Even though this support for "democracy-building" is simply the expression of freedom-loving ideas, this idea is so 'utopian' since it involves the change of cultures and political entities it REALLY FREAKS OUT isoloationists. So they have to call it some evil name.

Newt Gingrich, George W Bush, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, (heck even Jesse Helms) and most Americans wouldnt mind at all if the whole world was a bunch of free and democratic states living in peace, and all of us think America has a positive role in making that historical possibility reality.

JohnGalt says: "Perhaps it won't hit you until years from now what a disaster permanent debt financed war is to a our fair Republic,"

So if we paid for this in cash it would be okay???
Was WWII a disaster for USA??? I guessed I missed that historical lesson.

"Are you just tossing random articles at me?"

Probably. His manner of debate is definitely post-modern. Who needs logic when 'well-crafted' Dowd-esque ireelevencies sound so much more biting!

[Peach]

Very well said.

I've seen this very crowd actually despair of our involvement in Europe in WWII. That tells me everything I need to know about them.

[Dr. Frank fan]

Ronald Reagan supported democracy in Poland, Phillipines, and Nicaruagua ... In different ways, including military ones. Was he a Trotskyite???

I suspect Galt's answer would be "yes" - not that he himself was necessarily a Trotskyite but that his foreign policy was dominated/"hijacked" by "neocons" who as we all know are just Trotskyites. ;-)

I grew really weary of all that "neocon"/"Trotskyite" garbage last year and I think I just have very little energy to debate the nonsense at this point. Suffice it to say that I'm pretty sure that even Trotsky himself wasn't a "Trotskyite" according to the way today's anti-neocon crowd uses that term. To them the term seems to mean little more than, "willing to use military force to oust autocratic regimes, sometimes". (Apparently all that "communism" stuff was just a side issue for Trotsky... LOL ;-)

But if that's what a "Trotskyite" is then call me a "Trotskyite" (*rolls eyes*)

Dr Frank, understand that some in the isolationist-crackpot worldview have to declaim the 'pro-democracy' concept as "trotskyite" because they have to demonize the idea. This is demonizing a concept through bad association.

Obviously. And what's even more pathetic is that the so-called "association" is built on a house of cards. What the hell is supposed to be the lineage from Trotsky down to George W. Bush, again? ;-)

Seriously, I really question the basic assumption here, that Lev Trotsky was in favor of "global democratic revolution". I don't believe that for a damn second. He was in favor of nothing of the sort, if anything he was in favor of socialist revolutions. Or, where necessary, partially-democratically-inspired anti-autocrat revolutions that (when they succeed) get co-opted and hijacked by international socialists. (You know, like *cough* the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION perhaps??)

Again, what the hell all that's got to do with George W. Bush is beyond me. Is George W. Bush secretly planning to co-opt the new Iraqi regime into an international socialism, and declare an end to private property in Iraq?

And why on earth the anti-neoconners feel the need to gin up this whole ridiculous theory to begin with, is also beyond me. Sometimes I simply do not understand depth of the iso-con opposition to finishing our ten-year war against Saddam Hussein's regime. It seems all out of proportion to me. *shrug*

Like, this guy Galt is now worried about the cost of the war, it puts us into debt. Better to keep enforcing "no fly zones" and stationing troops in Saudi Arabia to (not really) "contain" the Hussein dynasty, FOREVER?? That costs money too... the whole isolationist opposition just doesn't make too much sense sometimes.

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

We've always known that al Qaeda and Iraq had a relationship. They have for over 10 years. What we couldn't prove (yet) was a connection between them and 9-11.

We even knew that Atta (as I state below, who piloted a plane into a WTC Tower One) had previously BEEN in both Iraq and Spain.

So this isn't a surprise at all. I've posted this before, but it needs repeating.

Read on:

Terrorist pilot Mohammed Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986.

The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, Israel had to agree to release so-called "political prisoners". However, the Israelis would not release any with blood on their hands.

The American President at the time, Bill Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, "insisted" that all prisoners be released. Thus Mohammed Atta was freed and eventually "thanked" the US by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade Center. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the US from all later reports. Why shouldn't Americans know the real truth? (Because it's Clinton? A Democrat? And the media are die hard Liberals? Go figure!)

---

Americans need to understand that al Qaeda had a long relationship with Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein. (For over 10 years!) That's a fact. We can't "prove" a connection to 9-11 yet, but I have a feeling we may yet do so. But to say a relationship didn't exist and then to ignore the fact that al Qaeda and Saddam did have one defies logic!

[Dr. Frank fan]

Urban legend. Different Atta, plus some details are wrong.

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

Despite that, Atta was in Iraq and Spain BEFORE 9-11.
Al Qaeda has been in Iraq, and had a relationship with Iraq for the past 10 years.

Thanks for clearing up the Israel story. We can't say they had a role in 9-11 YET, but I wouldn't doubt that one day we do. Look at Spain, and what happened recently with the al Qaeda terrorist there who WAS connected to 9-11.

Again, thanks for the information regarding the Atta from Israel. Appreciate!

[Dr. Frank fan]

Despite that, Atta was in Iraq and Spain BEFORE 9-11.

I'm not sure about Spain (nor what the significance would be). Perhaps Atta transited through Spain on one of his trips.

As for Iraq, yes there is evidence suggesting Atta went to Iraq (an Iraqi intelligence memo as I recall).

For the record I believe the strongest link is the Prague sighting of him meeting with Iraqi intelligence, which do not believe has ever been satisfactorily debunked. (And all *attempts* to debunk it that I've seen are pathetically grasping at straws.)

Thanks for clearing up the Israel story. We can't say they had a role in 9-11 YET, but I wouldn't doubt that one day we do.

By "they" you mean *Iraq*, not Israel, I hope. :-) If so, I agree. At the moment I'd put the odds of an Iraq role (however small or incidental) in 9/11 at 50/50.

Again, thanks for the information regarding the Atta from Israel. Appreciate!

Glad to clear it up. Best,

[Dr. Frank fan]

Despite that, Atta was in Iraq and Spain BEFORE 9-11.

P.S. By the way, wherever Atta went, he did it before 9/11. He sure as heck didn't go anywhere after 9/11....

[Dr. Frank fan]

P.P.S. You're right about Spain by the way.

[Peach]

King Abdullah: Al-Qaida WMDs Came From Syria

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks.

King Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives had come from Syria, though he took pains not to implicate Syrian President Bashir Assad in the al-Qaida plot, saying, "I'm completely confident that Bashir did not know about it."

In his testimony before Congress last year, weapons inspector Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S. attack on March 19, 2003.

While Kay said investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained weapons of mass destruction, one of his top advisers described the evidence as "unquestionable."

"People below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," said James Clapper in comments reported by the New York Times on Oct. 29. Clapper heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq's WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country ruled by the Ba'ath Party.

On April 1, Jordanian officials announced the arrest of several terrorist suspects, saying they were still hunting for two cars filled with explosives.

Five days later, the State Department revealed that the attackers were linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-based terrorist considered to be one of al-Qaida's most dangerous. One of Zarqawi's targets was the U.S. Embassy in Amman.

By Saturday morning European news services were quoting an unnamed Jordanian official, who revealed that the al-Qaida plotters planned to use weapons of mass destruction in the foiled attack.

"We found primary materials to make a chemical bomb which, if it had exploded, would have made nearly 20,000 deaths ... in an area of one square kilometre," the official told Agence France-Press.

Another operation planned by the network was to use "deadly gas against the US embassy and the prime minister's office in Amman," he added.

A car belonging to the al-Qaida plotters, containing a chemical bomb and poisonous gas, was intercepted just 75 miles from the Syrian border.

[Peach]

Spanish officials made a direct link between the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States and the March 11 attack on trains in Madrid by indicting a Moroccan fugitive believed to have participated in both terror cases.



Judge Baltasar Garzon said Amer Azizi (search) helped organize a meeting in northeast Spain in July 2001 that key plotters in the U.S. attacks, including suspect suicide pilot Mohamed Atta (search), used to finalize details.

Azizi was initially included in an indictment Garzon handed down in September against Usama bin Laden (search) and 34 other terror suspects. Azizi was charged then with belonging to a terrorist organization.

The new indictment charges Azizi with actually helping plan the Sept. 11 attacks. Garzon accused Azizi of multiple counts of murder — "as many deaths and injuries as were committed" on Sept. 11.

The indictment was based on information provided by authorities in Britain, Turkey and the United States, Garzon said.

Azizi provided lodging for people who attended the July 2001 meeting in the Tarragona region of Spain and acted as a courier, passing on messages between plotters, Garzon said in the indictment.

The judge described Azizi as the right-hand man of Imad Yarkas (search), jailed in November 2001 on charges of leading a Spain-based Al Qaeda (search) cell that allegedly provided financing and logistics for planners of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Azizi fled Spain in November 2001, shortly after a wave of arrests that netted Yarkas and more than a dozen other al-Qaida suspects.

The Interior Ministry released a photo of Azizi this month, calling him a suspect in the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, in which 191 people died and more than 2,000 were injured.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

[ARepublicanForAllReasons]

in pursuit of an abstract agenda.

Liberty and security are not abstract agendas to me.

Now you want to convince people here that:

the stated goal of the Iraq policy is "global democratic revolution," a concept rooted in the left and particularly the Trotsky Left

So Jefferson, Washington, Franklin et al were Trotskyites huh? Interesting concept. Now I am supposed to be ashamed of our efforts to provide the Iraqi people with a chance to seize their own liberty? Bush is a stealth commie!?!?!

You sound like an isolationist crank.

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

"No proof links Iraq, al-Qaida, Powell says"

The title of the article says no proof links Iraq, Al-Qaida, but Secretary Powell actually said: “I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed,” he said.

In other words, the author of this piece put words in Powell's mouth.

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

"ANYONE care to deal with the fact that before the war, Zarqawi's operations were in the Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq that was indisputably not under the control of Saddam's government?"

If Saddam had no power in that region, then why did he continually send his troops to that area to kill Kurds?

There was a "No FLY Zone" enforced. There was the ability to transport by land, which means that your indisputably is disputable.

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

Of course he didn't go to Spain after 9-11.

Thanks for the chuckle and the good info. :o)

BTW, I need slow down typing ~OR~ not reply when I'm running out the door. Too many typo's. Yes, I meant Iraq!

Been a long day. Goodnight FRiend.

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

"Salman Pak tinfoil theories came only from Chalabi's since discredited people."

Sorry dude, but the marines found Salman Pak, collected evidence, and destroyed it because it was worse than what they had been told. This is one of the reasons that the army got to Baghdad a few days ahead of the marines. The marines were a little bit busy on other things.

[lugsoul]

"If Saddam had no power in that region, then why did he continually send his troops to that area to kill Kurds?"

After the withdrawal from the area, following Op Provide Comfort, he didn't. Plain and simple. I've already posted comments from the Kurd government and the U.S. Army saying that the Kurds controlled the area. They had their own government. They had their own economy. Do think Saddam just let them have these things?

[Peach]

Good answer. It's impossible to convince the unconvincable, however.

This article bolsters your argument and makes mention of many Iraqis and what they said about Salmon Pak.

The 9/11 Connection
What Salman Pak could reveal.



Not far from Baghdad, Coalition forces may uncover evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime with airline hijackings in general and the September 11 attacks in particular.

Salman Pak, a training camp on the Tigris River some 15 miles southeast of Iraq's capital, could clarify this question. According to Iraqi defectors and U.S. intelligence analysts, this is where Hussein's agents polished the air-piracy skills of foreign Islamist terrorists.




Details on this facility and its al Qaeda ties recently emerged in a Manhattan federal courtroom. Former CIA Director James Woolsey and Iraq scholar Laurie Mylroie offered sworn expert testimony in a largely overlooked lawsuit filed by the families of two people killed on 9/11. They are suing Iraq's government, among other rogue entities and individuals, for allegedly helping to murder their loved ones.

"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common effort in the sense of aiding or abetting or conspiracy was involved here between Iraq and the al Qaeda," Woolsey said on March 3. President Clinton's CIA chief from 1993 to 1995 added: "Even if one cannot show that...any of the individual 19 hijackers were trained at Salman Pak, the nature of the training and the circumstances suggest, to my mind, at least, some kind of common aiding, abetting, assistance, cooperation — whatever word you might want to take."

Mylroie, a Pentagon terrorism consultant and Iraq-policy adviser to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign (and author of The War Against America), also testified March 3. She believes "It took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive and deadly as what happened on September 11."

Top Iraqi defectors amplify these American suspicions.

"There have been several confirmed sightings of Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states being trained in terror tactics at the Iraqi intelligence camp at Salman Pak," Khidir Hamza, Iraq's former nuclear-weapons chief, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last July 31. "The training involved assassination, explosions and hijacking."

"This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world," former Iraqi army captain Sabah Khodada told PBS's Frontline in an October 14, 2001 interview. Khodada worked at Salman Pak. He said that instruction there was "all for the general concept of hitting and attacking American targets and American interests." He added: "We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes...They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane...They are trained how to plant horror within the passengers by doing such actions." A map of the camp Khodada drew for Frontline closely matches satellite photos of the base, thus bolstering his story.

"I was the security officer in charge of the unit," at Salman Pak, an ex-Iraqi lieutenant general told Frontline anonymously in a November 6, 2001 interview. "This unit was under the direct supervision and control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service," he added. "And the fact that the training was concentrated on a plane made it even stranger as far as I was concerned."

Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, denied this to Frontline that October 29. "I am lucky that I know the area, this Salman Pak. This is a very beautiful area with gardens, with trees," Aldouri said. "It is not possible to do such a program there, because there's no place for planes."

Oddly enough, that satellite photo shows no rose bushes. But clearly evident is the Russian-built Tupolev 154 airliner on which these Iraqi emigres report hijackings were rehearsed.

"We were told it was for counterterrorist training," former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said in the Scotsman newspaper on February 18. "We automatically knocked off the word 'counter.'" Duelfer and his team saw the jet on a January 1995 visit.

Meanwhile, in a February 24 letter to James Beasley, Jr., the attorney in the aforementioned lawsuit, Czech U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek affirms an October 26, 2001 statement by Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross: "In this moment we can confirm, that during the next stay of Mr. Muhammad Atta in the Czech Republic there was the contact with the official of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Al Ani, Ahmed Khalin Ibrahim Samir, who was on 22nd April 2001 expelled from the Czech Republic on the basis of activities which were not compatible with the diplomatic status." Atta flew from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Prague on April 7, 2001. Car-rental records place him in the Czech capitol the next day. He flew home to Florida that April 9.

"If he [Atta] goes there and meets with an Iraqi intelligence officer, and then turns right around and comes right back, it looks an awful lot to me like it was an operational meeting," Woolsey said in court. "Certainly he and Mr. Al-Ani were unlikely to be discussing or looking at the lovely architecture of Medieval Prague."

Czech officials sent Al-Ani packing just two weeks after his meeting with Atta when they caught the Iraqi casing and photographing Radio Free Europe's Prague headquarters, some believe in hopes of bombing it.

Iraq also is tied to the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Chief conspirator Ramzi Yousef reached America bearing an Iraqi passport, although he fled to Pakistan on a Pakistani passport issued to one Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani-born resident of Kuwait whose identity Mylroie surmises that Yousef assumed, perhaps with the help of Iraqi intelligence agents who had access to immigration files before U.S. and allied forces drove them from Kuwait.

For his part, Indiana-born and Iraqi-reared Abdul Rahman Yasin — indicted for mixing the chemicals in the bomb that shook the Twin Towers, killing six and injuring roughly 1,000 people — returned to Iraq after the explosion, stopping first at the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan. He lived freely in Baghdad for a year. Iraqi officials say they have kept him in custody since 1994, though they neither have prosecuted him nor extradited him to face American justice.

Also, according to the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism — 2001,"released May 21, 2002, "Iraq was the only Arab-Muslim country that did not condemn the September 11 attacks against the United States." That day, an official Iraqi broadcast said America was "...reaping the fruits of [its] crimes against humanity."

Some have dismissed the notion that supposedly secular Saddam Hussein would conspire with Muslim extremists like Osama bin Laden and the men of al Qaeda. Woolsey and Mylroie note that Hussein sometimes embraces Islam for political purposes. The Iraqi flag, for instance, has borne the Arabic words Allahu akbar ("God is great") since 1991, the year Hussein lost Gulf War I. Terrorists often invoke this Islamic incantation before blowing themselves apart. Whatever their differences on Heaven, Hussein and bin Laden share a common foe on Earth: America.

Said Woolsey, "I've used the analogy a number of times about the Iraqi government and al Qaeda as being like two Mafia families who hate each other, kill each other's members from time to time, insult one another, but are still capable of cooperating against what they consider to be a greater enemy — namely, us."

Are these apparent ties tough to prove? You bet. Iraq's work with homicidal zealots does not resemble a municipal bond deal, with contracts registered at City Hall. As Woolsey noted, "This is putting together pieces of a puzzle in which quite likely both parties are doing everything they can to keep these pieces from being fitted together."

So why has the Bush administration not highlighted these ominous connections? One theory is that showcasing pre-9/11 evidence of Salman Pak might make people wonder why nothing was done about it before the atrocity. Another view is that federal officials who implemented President Clinton's light touch towards Iraq are in no hurry to remind Americans of how foolish their policy was.

In either case, we soon may know much more about Salman Pak — assuming it has not been thoroughly sanitized. Baghdad's liberation should snap open government file cabinets and loosen captured officials' tongues. Before long, they may reveal the extent of Saddam Hussein's complicity in the September 11 massacre.

[kittymyrib]

The Iraq-al Queda link has been proven to everyone but the Democrats and the partisan media who still wail that the Americans they poll think there is a link between the two. When will they admit that the US public has been right all along, and they have been wrong? Never. And they have the gall to want Pres. Bush to admit mistakes!

[JohnGalt]

Please link me to the speech you are citing from any of the forefathers where they call for a "global democratic revolution."


And you sound like a Communist Chickenhawk, c'est la vie.