Posted on 04/13/2006 11:00:08 PM PDT by FairOpinion
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Thomas Joscelyn, an expert on the international terrorist network. Much of his research has focused on the role that nations such as Saddam's Iraq and the mullah's Iran have played in providing support, training and funding for terrorist entities such as al Qaeda, al Qaeda's affiliates, Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. He has written extensively about these connections for the Weekly Standard and in several other publications. Currently, he is organizing a research project to review and translate the millions of documents captured from the fallen Iraqi regime and the Taliban.
Joscelyn: For the past several years, American forces have been collecting documents and other pieces of media from the fallen regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the Iraqi documents were authored by Saddam’s intelligence apparatus, the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence Service), while many of the documents captured in Afghanistan were authored by al Qaeda operatives or the Taliban. To date, less than 5% of the documents have been reviewed. So, out of a total of 2 million documents, only about 100,000 documents (give or take) have been reviewed.
One IIS document, in particular, has received significant attention. The document was apparently authored in early 1997 and summarizes a number of contacts between Iraqi Intelligence and Saudi oppositionist groups, including al Qaeda, during the mid 1990’s. The document says that in early 1995 bin Laden requested Iraqi assistance in two ways. First, bin Laden wanted Iraqi television to carry al Qaeda’s anti-Saudi propaganda. Saddam agreed. Second, bin Laden requested Iraqi assistance in performing “joint operations against the foreign forces in the land of Hijaz.” That is, bin Laden wanted Iraq’s assistance in attacking U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Prewar Docs PING
Come on, President Bush. Get up there, make the case, and shut the traitors up. Then, send the illegals home and close the border.
Then get gas back down to $.99/gallon.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
In related news, recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It appears that the duo had jointly written a script for a TV sitcom called "Osama bin Saddamized." The plot is autobiographical and features the hijinks of a wacky terrorist and his stern, but lovable mentor who is also the president of a Middle Eastern country called Quirkistan.
read more at...
http://www.azconservative.org/Column_Archives.htm
GWB absolutely does not want any restraint on our southern border. WE DO NOT HAVE A SOUTHERN BORDER!
ping
bookmark
This article is an excellent read, fills in some gaps and maybe you could use your "prewardocs" ping list.
Saddam and Osama: The New Revelations
Release/Translation of Classified PreWar Docs ping. If you want to be added or removed to the ping list, please Freepmail me.
Please add the keyword prewardocs to any articles pertaining to this subject.
Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents
I should have read down; you're getting double pings, I see :-)
That's alright, because I'd rather get pinged one or more times, than not at all!
Ping!
::ducks!::
Well, we are not potted plants. Maybe there is a strategy to empowering the citizens. The Minutemen got a wink and a nod...now the docs were released to us.
Just in case you missed some of the translations
http://www.freerepublic.com/~jveritas/
Might be useful for your column.
April 13, 2006
Coalition Forces Kill AQIZ Ambassador
**********************************AN EXCERPT ***********************************
al-Kurdi also had extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization which spawned the modern terrorist organizations such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, HAMAS, and al-Qaeda.
Strangely enough, it appears al-Kurdi was detained by the Kurdish Peshmerga in the spring of 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq, and divulged connection between al-Qaeda and Ansar Al-Islam,and Saddam Hussein:
"Halabja [Northern Iraq] – Local security officials in Al-Suleimaniya warn that some members of 'Ansar Al-Islam' [previously named 'Army of Islam,' i.e. Jund Al-Islam], Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban who were driven out of Afghanistan by Operation Anaconda, have now joined the battle-front in northern Iraq… New information surfaces daily about ties between Ansar Al-Islam, bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One of the security officials said that the Iraqi government has been providing secret financial support and training to Ansar Al-Islam in order to weaken the Kurdish opposition…" "Some Kurdish commanders are minimizing the danger of Ansar Al-Islam…" "The organization has only a few hundred fighters, but it controls several Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, close to the Iranian border and on the fringes of the area protected by the U.S.""The information about the ties between Ansar Al-Islam and Al-Qa'ida came from Rafid Ibrahim Fattah {aka Abu Umar al-Kurdi , an Iraqi who was arrested by the forces of Jalal Al-Talabani [in northern Iraq]… He had fled from Baghdad in the mid 1980's and lived in a refugee camp in Tehran…"
Apparently al-Kurdi slipped the Kurdish net and was able to join al-Qaeda's terror campaign in Iraq. al-Kurdi joins the long list of experienced al-Qaeda 'middlemen' killed or captured, such as Suliman Darwish (Syrian), Abdullah al-Rashood (Saudi) and Abu Azzam and Abu Tahla (Iraqis).
By Bill Roggio | Posted April 13, 2006 |
ping to me
>>>"The information about the ties between Ansar Al-Islam and Al-Qa'ida came from Rafid Ibrahim Fattah {aka Abu Umar al-Kurdi , an Iraqi who was arrested by the forces of Jalal Al-Talabani [in northern Iraq]… He had fled from Baghdad in the mid 1980's and lived in a refugee camp in Tehran…"<<<
Ansar al-Islam is made up of subgroups such as: Tawhid and Sunnah Brigade and associated with Jaish Ansar al-Sunnah. Dozens of people with ties to Ansar al-Islam have been arrested and tried in Germany over the past several several years.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1083778/posts
Saddam's Ambassador to al-Qaeda *(The Smoking Gun)*
Excerpts:
A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al-Qaeda.
(snip)
>>>This statement echoed an independent Kurdish report from July 2002 alleging that ordnance seized from Ansar al Islam was produced by Saddam's military and a Guardian article several weeks later alleging that truckloads of arms were shipped to Ansar from areas controlled by Saddam.<<<
(snip)
>>>Muhammed told Goldberg that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for Ansar al Islam and "an employee of the Mukhabarat."<<<
(snip)
Al-Shamari also told me that the links between Saddam's regime and the al-Qaeda network went beyond Ansar al Islam. He explained in considerable detail that Saddam actually ordered Abu Wael to organize foreign fighters from outside Iraq to join Ansar. Al-Shamari estimated that some 150 foreign fighters were imported from al Qaeda clusters in Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon to fight with Ansar al Islam's Kurdish fighters.
(snip)
Al-Shamari said that there was also contact with the Egyptian "Gamaat al-Jihad," which is now seen as the core of al Qaeda's leadership, as well as with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which bin Laden helped create in 1998 as an alternative to Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Al-Shamari talked of Abu Wael's links with Turkey's "Jamaa al-Khilafa"--likely the group also known as the "Union of Islamic Communities" (UIC) or the "Organization of Caliphate State." This terror group, established in 1983 by Cemalettin Kaplan, reportedly met with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997, and later sent cadres there to train. Three years before 9/11, UIC plotted to crash a plane into Ankara's Ataturk Mausoleum on a day when hundreds of Turkish officials were present.
(snip)
Al-Shamari said that importing foreign fighters to train in Iraq was part of his job in the Mukhabarat. The fighters trained in Salman Pak, a facility located some 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. He said that he had personal knowledge of 500 fighters that came through Salman Pak dating back to the late 1990s; they trained in "urban combat, explosives, and car bombs." This account agrees with a White House Background Paper on Iraq dated September 12, 2002, which cited the "highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."
(snip)
Zarqawi, as the prisoner explained, was al-Qaeda's link to Iraq in the same way that Abu Wael was the Iraqi link to al-Qaeda. Indeed, Zarqawi (who received medical attention in Baghdad in 2002 for wounds that he suffered from U.S. forces in Afghanistan) and Abu Wael helped Ansar al Islam prepare for the U.S. assault on its small enclave last year. According to al-Shamari, Ansar was given the plan from the top Iraqi leadership: "If the U.S. was to hit [the Ansar base], the fighters were directed to go to Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul . . . Faluja and other places." This statement agreed with a prior prisoner interview I had with the attempted murderer of Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. This second prisoner told me that "Ansar had plans to go south if the U.S. would attack."
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