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The Big Five Questions of Ultimate Iraqi Wisdom!
Finish one or more of the following sentences and show us the boffo supra-genius reasoning that lead you to it:
1. Iraq was not a terrorist state, and my case for this assertion is...
2. Even though Iraq harbored, trained and funded terroists, it was not a legitimate target because...
3. We should not be fighting the War on Terror at all because...
4. The current level of military casualties in a 3 year war that started with the slaughter of 3,000 noncombatants on our home soil in 90 minutes is a huge problem because...(Note: Before answering this question, you may want to review the number of casualties experienced by the U.S. in WWII, or at Shiloh or Cold Harbor, or in any particular week of the Tet Offensive.)
5. If we leave terrorist states up and running, I foresee the next major terrorist attack will be prevented by...
Ron Paul lies.
You see, he couldn't possibly be dumb enough to believe that a few uniform features for drivers licenses makes a national ID card at all, much less that it is the equivalent of the Gestapo stopping people on the street and sneering, "Papers, please."
He cannot possibly be dumb enough to believe that the same law enforcement techniques used against Mafiosos, major drug dealers and Nazi spies have no place in the War on terror and are an effort by this administration to install fascism.
When I call Ron Paul a liar, I give him the benefit of the doubt, because all the other people who believe the things he professes about the War on Terror and the Iraq theater of that war are only believed by those who are dumb as dirt, drug-addled, insane or ignorant of foreign affairs in a way no Congressman could be without violating his Constitutional oath. People like Paul are the reason I will never vote for a libertarian candidate, because to much of the Libertarian movement simply can't deal with reality.
ping
It demonstrates an unbelievably short-sighted ignorance of what the situation really was in Iraq pre-OIF, particularly coming from an elected official who has the information resources to know better.
Ron Paul for President in 2008!
You are beneath contempt
All, this miserable unworthy piece of zotbait started a 170-post flamefest and NEVER ONE responded.
Ping!!
VK's stand too!!
Even those on the Right are sometimes wrong. Like Rep. Paul is now.
If we don't confront the evil that is Islamic terrorism , and a cruel and evil dictator who I don't care what anyone says helped those who attacked us, then we are doomed. The left, and those like Ron Paul are going to help bring this nation down if they don't wake up and smell the coffee. I suspect Paul, like the left, is doing this for his own political ambition.
- In the late 1970's, Carlos the Jackal a "terrorist for hire" met with and was openly supported by Saddam Hussein. click
- Abu Abbas was the mastermind of the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murderer of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Manhattan retiree who Abbas's men rolled, wheelchair and all, into the Mediterranean. On April 14, 2003, Abbas was captured by U.S. Special Forces during a raid near Baghdad. Abbas had lived in Baghdad since 1994, where he was living under protection of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. click
- Before the rise of Osama bin Laden, Abu Nidal was widely regarded as the world's most ruthless terrorist. Abu Nidal entered Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya by Muammar Gadaffi. As the AP's Sameer N. Yacoub reported on August 21, 2002, he entered Iraq "with the full knowledge and preparations of the Iraqi authorities." There he lived until August, 2002 when he died of between one and four gunshot wounds. It is believed by many that Abu Nidal was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein although the Iraqi government claimed Abu Nidal committed suicide. click
- Khala Khadr al-Salahat, accused of designing the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 (259 killed on board, 11 dead on the ground), also lived in Iraq. He surrendered to U.S. Marines in Baghdad on April 18, 2003. click
- During the 1992 presidential campaign, Al Gore criticized the first Bush administration for a "blatant disregard" of Iraq's ties to terrorism. On September 29, 1992 Al Gore said, "The Reagan/Bush Administration was also prepared to overlook the fact that the terrorist who masterminded the attack on the Achille Lauro and the savage murder of American Leon Klinghoffer fled with Iraqi assistance. Nor did it matter that the team of terrorists who set out to blow up the Rome airport came from Baghdad with suitcase bombs." Gore went on to say, "There might have been a moment's pause for reflection when Iraqi aircraft intentionally attacked the USS Stark in May 1987, killing 37 sailors -- but the Administration smoothed it over very fast." click
- Former President George H.W. Bush visited Kuwait between April 14 and April 16, 1993, to commemorate the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War. In late-April 1993, the United States learned that terrorists had attempted to assassinate Bush during his visit to Kuwait and evidence indicated that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS ) was behind the assassination attempt. The Kuwaiti authorities arrested 17 persons suspected in the plot to kill Bush using explosives hidden in a Toyota Landcruiser. On June 26, 1993, the United States launched a cruise missile attack against a building housing the IIS in Baghdad in retaliation for the assassination attempt on former President Bush. click
- Saddam Hussein paid $25,000 bonuses to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. "President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al-Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000," Iraq's deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz declared on March 11, 2002. Mahmoud Besharat, who dispensed these funds across the West Bank, gratefully said: "You would have to ask President Saddam why he is being so generous. But he is a revolutionary and he wants this distinguished struggle, the intifada, to continue." click
- Russian President Vladimir Putin said on June 18, 2004, "I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received ... information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations." click
- The Philippine government expelled Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary at Iraq's Manila embassy, on February 13, 2003. Cell-phone records indicated that the diplomat had spoken with Abu Madja and Hamsiraji Sali, leaders of Abu Sayyaf, just before and just after this al Qaeda-allied Islamic militant group conducted an attack in Zamboanga City. Abu Sayyaf's nail-filled bomb exploded on October 2, 2002, injuring 23 individuals and killing two Filipinos and U.S. Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Wayne Jackson, age 40. click
- After the fall of Saddam's government, coalition forces found and destroyed a terrorist training camp located near Baghdad called Salman Pak. The terrorist training camp featured an airplane fuselage [said to be a Boeing 707] where Iraqi defectors had earlier reported that foreign terrorists were being trained in hijacking aircraft. click click click
- USA Today reported on September 18, 2003 - "U.S. authorities in Iraq say they have new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime gave money and housing to Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993..." Military, intelligence and law enforcement officials reported finding a large cache of Arabic-language documents in Tikrit, Saddam's political stronghold. A U.S. intelligence official said some analysts have concluded that the documents show Saddam's government provided monthly payments and a home for Yasin. click
Connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda
- On November 5, 1998 a Federal grand jury in Manhattan returned a 238-count indictment charging the Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two United States Embassies in Africa and with conspiring to commit other acts of terrorism against Americans abroad. The indictment also charged that Al-Qaeda had reached an arrangement with President Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq whereby the group said that it would not work against Iraq, and the two parties agreed to cooperate in the development of weapons. click click
- United Press International. January 3, 1999, Sunday, BC cycle. - UPI Focus: Bin Laden 'instigated' embassy bombings. - "... The Taliban government in Afghanistan says the Saudi does not have the money to finance projects in the country. Newsweek also reported that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been making new overtures to bin Laden in an attempt to rebuild his intelligence network and to create his own terror network...." click
- Newsweek magazine. January 11, 1999 issue, ran the headline "Saddam + Bin Laden?" The subheadline declared, "America's two enemies are courting." click click
- CNN (Associated Press). February 13, 1999. - "Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday. Bin Laden's whereabouts were not known....." The article goes on to state that "Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden....." click
- National Public Radio (NPR). February 18, 1999 at 10:00 AM Eastern Time. - "... There have also been reports in recent months that bin Laden might have been considering moving his operations to Iraq. Intelligence agencies in several nations are looking into that. According to Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, a senior Iraqi intelligence official, Farouk Hijazi(ph), sought out bin Laden in December and invited him to come to Iraq." ~ "Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There is a wide gap between bin Laden's fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. But some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony...." click
- Los Angeles Times. February 23, 1999, Tuesday, Home Edition. - "Where is Osama bin Laden (Feb. 14)? That should be the U.S.'s main priority. If as rumored he and Saddam Hussein are joining forces, it could pose a threat making Hitler and Mussolini seem like a sideshow...." click
- The Kansas City Star. March 2, 1999, Tuesday. - "... He (bin Laden) has a private fortune ranging from $250 million to $500 million and is said to be cultivating a new alliance with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who has biological and chemical weapons bin Laden would not hesitate to use. An alliance between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could be deadly. Both men are united in their hatred for the United States and any country friendly to the United States...." click
- The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), December 28, 1999. - "The world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, has been offered sanctuary in Iraq if his worldwide terrorist network succeeds in carrying out a campaign of high-profile attacks on the West..." click
- On April 8, 2001, an informant for Czech counter-intelligence observed an Iraqi intelligence official named al-Ani meeting with an Arab man in his 20s at a restaurant outside Prague. Following the 9/11 attacks, the Czech informant who observed the meeting saw Mohammed Atta’s picture in the papers and identified Mohammed Atta as the man who met with the Iraqi intelligence official. click click
- Able Danger, a highly-classified U.S. Army intelligence program under the command of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, supports information from the Czech Republic’s intelligence service that Atta meet with the Iraqi ambassador at the Prague airport on April 9, 2001. click click
- On July 21, 2001 [less than two months prior to 911] the Iraqi state-controlled newspaper "Al-Nasiriya" predicted that bin Laden would attack the U.S. "with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House." The same state-approved column also insisted that bin Laden "will strike America on the arm that is already hurting," and that the U.S. "will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs" - an apparent reference to the Sinatra classic, "New York, New York." click click
- After the 9/11 attacks, Saddam became the only world leader to offer praise for bin Laden, even as other terrorist leaders, like Yassir Arafat, went out of their way to make a show of sympathy to the U.S. by donating blood to 9/11 victims on camera. click
- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan, fled to Iraq after being injured as the Taliban fell (prior to the U.S./Iraq war). He received medical care and convalesced for two months in Baghdad. He then opened a terrorist training camp in northern Iraq and arranged the October 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan. click
- CIA director George Tenet wrote in a letter to Senator Bob Graham dated October 7, 2002. "We have solid reporting of senior level contact between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade. Credible information exists that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression. . . . We have credible reporting that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities." click
- Babil, an official newspaper of Saddam Hussein's government, run by his oldest son Uday, published information that appeared to confirm U.S. allegations of the links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. In its November 16, 2002 edition, Babil identified one Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad as an "intelligence officer," describing him as the "official in charge of regime's contacts with Osama bin Laden's group and currently the regime's representative in Pakistan." click
- While sifting through the Iraqi Intelligence Service's [Mukhabarat] bombed ruins on April 26, 2003 the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter, the London Daily Telegraph's Inigo Gilmore and their translator discovered a memo in the intelligence service's accounting department. Dated February 19, 1998 and marked "Top Secret and Urgent," it said the agency would pay "all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden, the Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." click
- On May 7, 2003, a federal judge in New York awarded damages against the government of Iraq after ruling that the families of two victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings had shown that Iraq had provided material support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Judge Harold Baer ruled that the two families were entitled to $104 million compensation from Iraq, bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban movement and their government of Afghanistan. "Plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, 'by evidence satisfactory to the court' that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al-Qaida." click
Why We Fight
ONE reason
Saddam's chambers of horrors
By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, November 23, 2002
Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.
For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.
Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in Toronto with his second wife, Sahar. This week, he sat down with me to relate his story. With him were his wife, a lovely Iraqi woman in her mid-30s, and a friend, Haithem al-Hassan, who helped me with Mr. Jaiyashy's mixture of Arabic and rapid English.
"Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time I went to jail," he says. "I was not tortured that much."
He was in his mid-20s then, from an intellectual family that lived in a town south of Baghdad. He had been a student of Islamic history, language and religion in the holy city of Najaf, but was forced to quit his studies after he refused to join the ruling Ba'ath party. His ambition was to write books that would show how Islam could open itself up to modernism.
In Saddam's Iraq, this was a dangerous occupation, especially for a Shiite. Shia Muslims are the majority in Iraq, but Saddam and his inner circle are Sunni. Many Shiites were under suspicion as enemies of the state.
"My father was scared for me," says Mr. Jaiyashy. " 'You know how dangerous this regime is,' he told me. 'You know how many people they kill.' "
Mr. Jaiyashy continued his studies on his own. But, eventually, he was picked up, along with a dozen acquaintances who had been involved in political activity against the regime. They were sent to Abu Ghraib. The others did not get off as lightly as he did. One was killed by immersion into a vat of acid. Ten others, he recalls, were put into a room and torn apart by wild dogs. Several prominent religious leaders were also executed. One was a university dean, someone Mr. Jaiyashy remembers as "a great man." They drove a nail through his skull.
For three decades, the most vicious war Saddam has waged has been the one against his own people. Iraq's most devastating weapon of mass destruction is Saddam himself. And the most powerful case for regime change is their suffering.
Sometimes, it is almost impossible to believe the accounts of people who survived Saddam's chamber of horrors. They seem like twisted nightmares, or perhaps crude propaganda. But there are too many survivors who have escaped Iraq, too many credible witnesses. And Mr. Jaiyashy's story, horrible as it is, is not unusual.
Saddam personally enjoyed inflicting torture in the early years of his career, and he has modelled his police state after that of his hero, Stalin. According to Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. expert on Iraq, the regime employs as many as half a million people in its various intelligence, security and police organizations. Hundreds of thousands of others serve as informants. Neighbour is encouraged to inform on neighbour, children on their parents. Saddam has made Iraq into a self-policing totalitarian state, where everyone is afraid of everybody else.
"Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine," says veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney. "The fear is so omnipresent, you could almost eat it."
To Stalin's methods of arbitrary arrests and forced confessions, Saddam has added an element of sadism: the torture of children to extract information from their parents.
In northern Iraq -- the only place in the country where people can speak relatively freely -- Mr. Sweeney interviewed several people who had direct experience of child torture. He also met one of the victims -- a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.
"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," writes Mr. Pollack in his new book, The Threatening Storm. "This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid. . . .
"This is a regime that practises systematic rape against the female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him." And if he has fled the country, it will send him the video.
After nearly two years in prison, Mr. Jaiyashy was released and sent to do military service in the north. Then the security police decided to round up the followers of one of the executed clerics. In 1980, Mr. Jaiyashy was arrested again, along with 20 friends, and taken to a military prison. He was interrogated about criticisms he was supposed to have made of the regime, and urged to sign a confession. During one session, his wrists were tied to a ceiling fan. Then they turned on the fan. Then they added weights onto his body and did it again. Then somebody climbed on him to add more weight. "It was 20 minutes, but it seemed like 20 years," he recalls.
He was beaten with a water hose filled with stones. When he passed out, he was shocked back into consciousness with an electric cable. They hung him by his legs, pulled out a fingernail with pliers, and drove an electric drill through his foot.
Mr. Jaiyashy took off his right shoe and sock to show me his foot. It is grotesquely mutilated, with a huge swelling over the arch. There is an Amnesty International report on human-rights abuses in Iraq with a photo of a mutilated foot that looks identical to his. The baby finger on his left hand is also mutilated.
He didn't sign the confession. He knew that, if he did, they would eventually kill him.
They put him in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two metres by two and a half, without windows or light. Every few weeks, they would bring him the confession again, but he refused to sign. He stayed there for a year.
In 1981, he was sent to trial, where he persuaded a sympathetic judge not to impose the death sentence. He got 10 years instead, and was sent back to Abu Ghraib. "They put me in a cell with 50 people. It was three and a half by three and a half metres. Some stood, some sat. They took turns."
There was a small window in the cell, with a view of a tree. It was the only living thing the prisoners could see. The tree was cut down. There were informants in the cells and, every morning, guards would come and take someone and beat him till he died. "This is your breakfast!" they would say.
Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years in that cell. His parents were told he was dead.
Abu Ghraib contained many intellectuals and professional people. Among them was the scientist Hussein Shahristani, a University of Toronto alumnus who became a leading nuclear scientist in Iraq. He was imprisoned after he refused to work on Saddam's nuclear program. He spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib, most of them in solitary confinement, until he escaped in 1991.
Saddam has reduced his people to abject poverty. He wiped out families, villages, cities and cultures, and drove four million people into exile. He killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. He killed as many as 300,000 Shiites in the uprising after the Persian Gulf war. He killed or displaced 200,000 of the 250,000 marsh Arabs who had created a unique, centuries-old culture in the south. He drained the marshes, an environmental treasure, and turned them into a desert.
In a recent Frontline documentary, a woman who fled Iraq recounted how she and others had been forced to witness the public beheadings of 15 women who had been rounded up for prostitution and other crimes against the state. One of the women was a doctor who had been misreported as speaking against the regime. "They put her head in a trash can," she said.
In 1987, Mr. Jaiyashy and a thousand other inmates were transferred to an outdoor prison camp. There, they were allowed a visit with their relatives, so long as they said nothing of their lives in prison. Mr. Jaiyashy's parents came, hoping he might still be alive. He remembers the day all the families came. "There was so much crying. We called it the crying day."
In 1989, he was finally released from prison. Then came the gulf war and, after that, the uprising, which he joined. It was quickly crushed. He fled with 150,000 refugees toward the Saudi border. But the Saudis didn't want them. "They are Wahhabis," he says. "They consider the Shia as infidels." The United Nations set up a refugee camp, where Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years. He began to paint and write again.
Finally, he was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1996, and is now a Canadian citizen.
Mr. Jaiyashy has a deep sense of gratitude toward his adoptive country. Canada, he says, has given him back his freedom and his dignity. He paints prolifically, and has taken courses at the art college, and is the author of three plays about the Saddam regime. He makes his living stocking shelves in a fabric store. "I'm a porter," he says. "No problem. I'm happy."
But Saddam's spies are everywhere. After one of his plays was produced here, his father was imprisoned. His first wife and three children are still in Iraq. He hasn't seen them since his youngest, now 12, was a baby. He talks with them on the phone from time to time, but it is very dangerous. One of his brothers is in Jordan, another still in Iraq.
Sahar, his second wife, is soft-spoken. She covers her head and dresses modestly, without makeup. Her face is unlined. She arrived in Canada with her two daughters the same year as Mr. Jaiyashy; they were introduced by friends.
She, too, has a story. I learned only the smallest part of it. "I was a widow," she told me. "My husband was a doctor in Iraq. He wanted to continue his education and have a specialty. But they didn't allow him. He deserted the military service to continue his education on his own. They beat him till he died."
Today, her daughters are in high school and she teaches at a daycare centre. Her new husband pushed her to study hard here. "ESL, ESL," she says affectionately.
Like many Iraqis, they are conflicted about the prospect of war. They want Saddam gone. But they do not want more harm inflicted on their country. "I want Saddam gone -- only him," says Mr. Jaiyashy.
A few weeks ago, Saddam threw open the doors of Abu Ghraib and freed the prisoners there. Many families rejoiced, and many others, who did not find their loved ones, mounted a brief, unheard-of protest against the regime. The prison is a ghost camp now. Nothing is left but piles of human excrement that cake the razor wire.
Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."
And Ron Paul can kiss my left buttock....and that goes for the moral midgets that aree with him
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