grunchley wrote: * Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
He lived as a free man for a year, but the authorities in Iraq tell CBS News they put him in prison in 1994. - source CBS in May 2002. * Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
This was the same meeting where Powell was talking about the "bio-weapon trucks" which did not exist. While some people have talked about meetings, I have yet to hear anyone not associated with the administration say they went anywhere. This argument is the same as saying that we are complicit in Russia's actions in Chechnya because people in our government have contact with people in the Russian government. Because of the problems with the statements of the administration, they cannot be considered a reliable source. * Sudanese intelligence officials told us that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.
"Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army." 9/11 Commission report. This is a reference to Ansar al-Islam, and when those connections start, when bin Ladin was in Sudan. * Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell. * An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
This needs another source. * In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.
This comes straight from Sean Hannity's discussion list, and there are still two problems. One he didn't go, and two, he (bin Laden) was putting himself behind an anti-Saddam group, Ansar al-Islam. * In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man. (Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")
Concerning Zawahiri, his actual history is that he was head of al-Jihad until 1998 when he rolled his organization in under the Al Q banner. That move splintered his own organization because others thought they would get too much attention from the US, and broke away. That he's now #2 means he's moved up because the people between him and bin Ladin are dead or in cells somewhere. * As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
Considering that the #2 location for Al Q prior to Afghanistan was Pakistan, this sounds reasonable, except Iraq isn't supporting them. On the other hand, if you're going to act like the Saudi's and pay them off so they blow crap up in other places, not yours, that would also make sense. In any case, this only works if there's some sort of connection, and the only one available is bin Laden acting against Saddam. * Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.
If you read the original source, Galan also has connections to ETA, and was described as someone who robbed banks to get money fr Al Q. On the other hand, I have no idea why he'd be invited to a party. This actually originated in The Observer, not the Independent. * An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"
Also part of what he said, "They were trained to put materials into small containers and study the biological effects. In the training areas there is a field especially for weapons of mass destruction. Here, experts hold lectures and conduct biological experiments - theoretical experiments, of course - on how to place explosives or how to pollute specific areas, water and public places and ventilation systems as well as power stations. They had maps of the USA, Britain, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia." And of course we know Iraq had all those WMD's that they are claimed to have been training with. * In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
After a lot of work, I've found transcripts of the interviews with Abbas al-Janabi, and found no mention of Al Q in them. More about where I DID find this this allegation at the end. *The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.
Zawahiri had been previously discussed and the two groups got together in 98 not 89. This connection is just wrong. * Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.
They also went all sorts of other places too, notably Pakistan, Indonesia and across the rest of the middle east. Does this mean all of those governments are also allied with Al Q? Also, this is also from the infamous "slam-dunk" speech at the UN, this needs another source. * In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.
See the previous notes on Powell at the UN. * That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.
Well if they're going west, by let's say car, and they're coming from Afghanistan/Pakistan, the main stronghold for Al Q before we sent in troops, then They're going to get to Saudi via either Iraq, or Kuwait. Considering Kuwait would be out of the way, I find this as surprising as someone driving to Mexico from Canada hitting the Mexican border from the US. This means absolutely nothing. * Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq. *Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.
al-Zarqawi's connections to Al Q pre the invasion of Iraq are shaky at best. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3483089.stm for more, and his connections to Saddam, are non-existant. * Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."
Back to Powell at the UN. And you know what, Iraq didn't have the WMDs that are being talked about. Did they go there at all? * Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
Does this guy even exist? I can't find this name anywhere except the UN speech and George Tenet's talk with Jeffery Goldberg in the New Yorker. * Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
A note from the Christian Science Monitor concerning precisely this incident. "If this Iranian smuggler is telling the truth, it would represent the first information in nearly a decade directly linking Baghdad to terrorist plans." An Iranian smuggler caught by Kurds, taking weapons to Al Q for Saddam? That's a bit much for me to buy. * Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.
I'm not sure how this is anything beyond six degrees of Kevin Bacon. * Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad." * After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.
Ansar al-Islam I've already discussed, they are an Al Q organization, but were made up out of Islamist groups that were fighting against Saddam, not for him. And now for a final note:
If you're going to use Richard Miniter, at least give him credit for the list. As noted above, I was looking for attribution about Abbas al-Janabi saying that Saddam (or Uday) was linked to bin Laden, and the only person I found saying the was Miniter. Not one other source. He's quoted in dozens on places, but no one else says it. Miniter's argument doesn't stand up under even cursory research. RE: Today's Ugly Question | 
