Welcome to ASFN Fan Forums! We're glad to have you here. Please feel free to browse the forum. We'd like to invite you to join our community; doing so will enable you to view additional forums and post with our other members.
Registered Members don't see these ads. Register now it's free!
Saddam, Al Qaeda Did Collaborate, Documents Show
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 24, 2006
CAIRO, Egypt - A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a 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.
In an interview yesterday, the current president of the New School University, Bob Kerrey, was careful to say that new documents translated last night by ABC News did not prove Saddam Hussein played a role in any way in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Nonetheless, the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that "Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States." Mr. Kerrey said he believed America's understanding of the deposed tyrant's relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed.
Last night ABC News reported on five recently declassified documents captured in Iraq. One of these was a handwritten account of a February 19, 1995, meeting between an official representative of Iraq and Mr. bin Laden himself, where Mr. bin Laden broached the idea of "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia.
The document, which has no official stamps or markers, reports that when Saddam was informed of the meeting on March 4, 1995 he agreed to broadcast sermons of a radical imam, Suleiman al Ouda, requested by Mr. bin Laden.
The question of future cooperation is left an open question. According to the ABC News translation, the captured document says, "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation." ABC notes in their report that terrorists, believed to be Al Qaeda, attacked the Saudi National Guard headquarters on November 13, 1995.
The new documents suggest that the 9/11 commission's final conclusion in 2004, that there were no "operational" ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, may need to be reexamined in light of the recently captured documents.
While the commission detailed some contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 1990s, in Sudan and Afghanistan, the newly declassified Iraqi documents provide more detail than the commission disclosed in its final conclusions.
For example, the fact that Saddam broadcast the ser mons of al-Ouda at bin Laden's request was previously unknown, as was a conversation about possible collaboration on attacks against Saudi Arabia.
"This is a very significant set of facts," former 9/11 commissioner, Mr. Kerry said yesterday. "I personally and strongly believe you don't have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm.
This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States."
Mr. Kerry also answered affirmatively when asked whether or not the release of more of the documents captured in Iraq could possibly shed further light on Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda. The former senator was one of the staunchest supporters of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made the policy of regime change U.S. law.
However, Mr. Kerry has also been a critic of how the administration has waged the campaign in Baghdad, which he calls the "third Iraq war," meaning that the period between the invasions of 1991 and 2003 was a prolonged military engagement.
The directorate of national intelligence with the U.S. Army foreign military studies office has begun to make over 50,000 boxes of documents and some 3,000 hours of audio tape captured in Iraq available on the Web at http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm.
The release of these files comes after the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, threatened to introduce legislation that would force the federal government to make the new information available.
A reporter for the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayes, yesterday said he thought the memorandum of the 1995 meeting demolishes the view of some terrorism experts that bin Laden and Saddam were incapable of cooperating for ideological and doctrinal reasons.
"Clearly from this document bin Laden was willing to work with Saddam to achieve his ends, and clearly from this document Saddam did not immediately reject the idea of working with bin Laden," Mr. Hayes said. "It is possible that documents will emerge later that suggest skepticism on the part of Iraqis to working with bin Laden, but this makes clear that there was a relationship."
Mr. Hayes's story this week makes the case that the Iraqi embassy in Manila was funding and keeping close tabs on the Al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf.
Registered Members don't see these ads. Register now it's free!
By this logic, I guess we should just attack Langley too?
Quote:
Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialized in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujaheddin.
The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country's pro-US royal family.
Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia's minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam's holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world's largest private construction company.
Osama bin Laden's father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business empire.
(Bin Laden junior's oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today's value of the bin Laden family net worth — estimated to be US$5 billion — by the number of bin Laden senior's sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)
Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.
Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, “Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.”
In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built “training camps”, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.
These camps, now dubbed “terrorist universities” by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.
Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, “The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism — car bombing and so on — so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.”
Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organization, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with “legitimate” business operations.
Bin Laden had simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980's — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilized primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.
Bin Laden only became a “terrorist” in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden's anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes — such as Egypt — in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.
He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.
After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services — and thousands of his mercenaries — to the Taliban, which took power that September.
Today, bin Laden's private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key
prop of the Taliban regime.
Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.
In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying he would make “the same call again”, even knowing what bin Laden would become.
“It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.”
Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.
Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of “counter-terrorism operations”.
Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their “work”. He was in charge of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980's. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan mujaheddin for the US National Security Council.
The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Doesn't surprise me to find some connections -- I imagine AQ made contacts with almost any Sunni-run, anti-Zionist nation in the M.E. that had potential to provide either funds, munitions, or secrecy for training, smuggling, money-laundering, etc. For all that he was a secularist, Saddam's party was Sunni-led, and he was a megalomaniac enough to think, I'm sure, that he could co-opt or steer AQ at some point. (That's definitely what the Saudis thought.)
Now, if they turn up having tea in Iran, I'll be a tad surprised.
For that matter, just to pre-empt the righties' self-righteousness, I wouldn't be surprised to eventually find that Saddam indeed had some primitive chemical WMD which he shipped over the line to Syria.
It still, in my book, did not warrant going to war, and especially in the deceitful, high-handed manner in which it was done.
__________________ When the body has a cancer - even a very small one - physicians use every means at their disposal to eradicate it. There is no talk of proportionality. Healthy tissue may suffer the treatments, but radiation, chemotherapy and anything else that works is sent into the battle when dealing with a disease that will, sooner or later, snuff out life.
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Hey, I started reading the new book 'A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror' and as soon as we finish nuking Afghanistan, we damn well should take out Langley.
My GOD, what our tax dollars have supported over the last 55 years - I almost threw up last night, reading about some of the psycho-physiological torture techniques they tried at various points and how they justified it, hid it from internal oversight, etc. Pure, unvarnished, totally calculated sadism.
I honestly cannot remember ever being so embarrassed to be a US citizen as reading this stuff -- or a psychologist, for that matter, because my profession did a lot of the early research and testing and knowingly lied about the source of research funds and the purpose.
__________________ When the body has a cancer - even a very small one - physicians use every means at their disposal to eradicate it. There is no talk of proportionality. Healthy tissue may suffer the treatments, but radiation, chemotherapy and anything else that works is sent into the battle when dealing with a disease that will, sooner or later, snuff out life.
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Hey, I started reading the new book 'A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror' and as soon as we finish nuking Afghanistan, we damn well should take out Langley.
My GOD, what our tax dollars have supported over the last 55 years - I almost threw up last night, reading about some of the psycho-physiological torture techniques they tried at various points and how they justified it, hid it from internal oversight, etc. Pure, unvarnished, totally calculated sadism.
I honestly cannot remember ever being so embarrassed to be a US citizen as reading this stuff -- or a psychologist, for that matter, because my profession did a lot of the early research and testing and knowingly lied about the source of research funds and the purpose.
I hear you. What's truly funny is how the Black Chopper types look under every rook for a conspriacy theory but don't seem to care about some of the real abuses or nefarious plots. Northwoods anyone?
I also could care less if WMDs turn up, or if there is a casual connection to the Bin Laden camp. Outside of some operational control of AQ or emminent threat there was no good justification to go in to Iraq.
Would they be the same ones who ran the Southeast Aisan Conflicts, i.e. Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia... Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Panama, Granada, Chile, Guatemala, Iran/Iraq, The Congo, Cuba ??????
Morons, I think not. Quite unhealthy, yes. Dangerous, you bet.
__________________
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." --Voltaire
Shrub and his minnions would say anything to get us to believe there wasa connnection betwen Iraq and 9/11.
Tetris Champion!
Linear Mode
