The Saddam Hussein - Al Qaeda Connection

The Saddam Hussein - Al Qaeda Connection
June 20, 2004

9-11 COMMISSION UPDATE: This week, the 9-11 Commission issued a staff report concluding, “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” The term “credible evidence” (such as would be sufficient in a court of law) exemplifies the fundamental flaw of the terrorism-is-a-crime-not-war approach of the Clinton administration, and advocated by John Kerry. The media has misrepresented the Commission’s report to claim there was no connection at all between Iraq and al Qaeda (the New York Times: the report “refuted the Bush administration’s claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden”; that on the same day the Times compared the United States and the terrorists who beheaded Paul Johnson). Media outlets making such claims are either stunningly incompetent, or believe their readers are too stupid to read the report and consider the evidence for themselves, or believe their readers are so brain-dead that they are willing to allow others to do their thinking for them. It’s easy to set up a straw man only to knock it down, if your goal is to seek partisan political gain and cover-up mistakes of entrenched bureaucracies and previous administrations, rather than defend the nation. Nobody ever said that bin Laden and Hussein planned 9-11 together, any more than that Hitler and Tojo planned Pearl Harbor together. Nevertheless, the media now has a new weapon to further undermine our national resolve. Perhaps the ultra-pure ‘I’m-not-voting-for-Bush’ conservatives will enjoy President Kerry’s first Supreme Court nominee, Jamie Gorelick.

The New York Times demanded, “Show us the Proof”. OK – the following proof, uncovered by investigators and reporters around the world, has been public for months, or years (and this summary is by no means exhaustive):

The Salman Pak training camp near Baghdad, which had an airplane but no runway. Defectors stated that fundamentalists were taught methods of aircraft hijacking using utensils or short knives. Some of the trainees were said to be non-Iraqi Arabs. James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, said that it is illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborated with Islamist terrorism, and that he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. “At Salman Pak we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives. I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, ‘Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese’?” The fuselage was visible in satellite photos; U.N. inspectors confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707; and it has since been found;

According to the Czech intelligence service, a meeting (some sources indicate there may have been as many as four meetings) occurred in Prague in April 2001, between Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackings, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence agent, Al Ani Ahmed Khalin Ibrahim Samir. Five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that meetings, and to this day Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by this information (despite the American media's efforts to discredit it);

The ruling of Clinton-appointed federal Judge Harold Baer (May, 2003): “I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, by evidence satisfactory to the court, that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda.” Baer ordered Iraq to pay $104 million in damages to the families of two men killed in the Twin Towers;

A Malaysia-based Iraqi national, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport, facilitated the arrival of two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi (who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon), for an operational-planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January, 2000. Shakir helped them through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel. Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Hayes says that Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for intelligence operations; sometimes more than half of the alleged diplomats were intelligence operatives.) Another man at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole. Also in attendance was Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks. The meetings lasted three or four days. Documents uncovered in Iraq listing the rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen (the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday) include the name of Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir;

In March 1998, an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad, a meeting that was initiated by the Saddam regime. A document discovered in the rubble of one of the rooms of the destroyed Iraqi intelligence headquarters is marked “Top Secret and Urgent”, is signed by the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat (one of Saddam's security forces), and refers to the planned trip. The purpose of the trip was “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 Mukhabarat agreed to pay for “all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq”. The meeting, originally planned for one week, apparently went so well that it was extended by a week;

In its November 16, 2002 edition Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam's Iraq, run by his son Uday, 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”;

Abdul Rahman Yasin (one of the main perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993) returned to Baghdad after the bombing and Iraq provided him safe haven. Another, Ramsey Yusef arrived in the United States on an Iraqi passport. U.S. forces discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, showing that Iraq gave Yasin both a house and a monthly salary;

According to the CIA, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in December 1998. Two of the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, met with Mukhabarat (one of Saddam's security forces) officers in the months before 9-11 in the United Arab Emirates;

American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-1990’s, when an Al Qaeda operative – a native-born Iraqi named Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi – was sent by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi's mission was apparently successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists;

According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda (9-11 Commission staff statement #15 itself stated, “By early 1998, Bin Laden was also in the early stages of what would become a merger of his al Qaeda and another major terrorist group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad). The first meeting between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda took place in 1992. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri were at the meeting, the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan;

Bin Laden received training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in September-October 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his cover for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi;

One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, “said that the last contact between the IIS and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam's office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda.” But according to Stephen F. Hayes, the bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that “in late 1999” al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that “was operational as of 1999”;

Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997;

A personal memo to Saddam, in the hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti and signed by Habbush, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), dated July 1, 2001, discussed “Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, [who] came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre – his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision. We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him.” In December, 2003, a secret memo to Saddam was discovered that gives details of a visit by Atta to Baghdad just weeks before the 9-11 attacks;

In the Philippines, an Abu Sayyaf (al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia) commander named Hamsiraji Ali bragged that his group received almost $20,000 annually from Iraqis close to Saddam Hussein. “It's so we would have something to spend on chemicals for bomb-making and for the movement of our people.”

According to the State Department's May 21, 2002 “Patterns of Global Terrorism”, the Abu Nidal Organization, the Arab Liberation Front, Hamas, the Kurdistan Worker's party, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization and the Palestinian Liberation Front all operated offices or bases in Hussein's Iraq. Hussein also paid cash bonuses to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. Abu Abbas, mastermind of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer; and Khala Khadr al-Salahat, accused of designing the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, also lived in Saddam’s Iraq. It would be curious indeed if al Qaeda were the only Middle Eastern terrorist organization that was not accommodated by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

There is a shared hatred for Western civilization among the fanatical followers of radical Islam around the world. Their objectives are: (1) Divide the enemy. The West is now fractured and squabbling – count one success for our enemies; (2) Isolate the primary enemy by making a separate (temporary) peace with lesser threats. The U.S. and the U.K. are isolated, while the appeasers continue trying to appease (when not actively encouraging) the fanatics – count another success for our enemies; (3) Undermine the enemy’s resolve, and thus limit his ability to bring to bear his overwhelming military and economic power. When we look at our decades-long fixation with multiculturalism (and the moral equivalency that goes with it), self-hatred, national guilt, and the denigration of the moral foundations of our nation, inculcated into our youth by effete left-wing elites, we can count another growing success for our enemies.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson: “If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing – but quickly point to the U.S. and scream ‘Iraq!’ And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch. … While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it – let alone defending it – is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party. … The billionaire capitalist George Soros – who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors – now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war. … Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats – Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry – employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. ‘Lies,’ ‘worst,’ and ‘betrayed’ are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon – precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. …

No, bin Laden is quite sane – but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.”

A FEW QUESTIONS: According to CBS reporter Bill Plante, because of Iran-contra “U.S. efforts to deal with the tough issues in the Middle East went on hold, helping to set the stage for the first Iraq war and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.” In other words, Reagan is responsible for Osama bin Laden (and perhaps for 9/11?). Left-wing columnist Robert Scheer charges, “The CIA…originally helped train Osama bin Laden and many of the other terrorists who have turned against us… following a policy proclaimed by President Reagan…”. The underlying accusation (made explicit by other radical leftists) is that we, or at least Reagan and the CIA, are responsible for 9/11. Leftists also claim that American support for Iraq in its war with Iran makes us responsible for all of Saddam’s subsequent depredations. Then don’t we also have to say that Franklin Roosevelt is responsible for the estimated 62 million civilians slaughtered by Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union? After all, Roosevelt supported Stalin during World War Two (and sent him millions of tons of military equipment); and Roosevelt’s actions at Yalta granted the Soviets free reign over Central and Eastern Europe for decades – until, of course, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and demolished the evil empire.

If America does not experience any major terrorist attacks between now and the November election, will leftists credit the heightened security of the Bush administration pursuant to the Patriot Act; or will leftist claim that the threat was overblown to begin with, and demand the defeat of Bush and repeal of the Patriot Act?

If America does experience a major terrorist attack between now and the November election, will leftists blame the Bush administration for a failure of sufficient vigilance, and trumpet the attack as proof that the Patriot Act is useless, and use the attack as another excuse to demand the defeat of Bush and repeal of the Patriot Act?

And if America does experience a major terrorist attack between now and November, and if some terrorist in custody in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo boasts of knowing about the plot ahead of time, how quickly will leftists – who are now hyperventilating over prison “abuse” at Abu Ghraib and over the “rights” of Guantanamo terrorists – condemn the Bush administration for not using sufficient “pressure” (i.e.: torture) against the terrorists to uncover the plot?

Oh, that’s right – leftists are great champions of human rights and would never advocate torturing poor defenseless little terrorists. After all, aren’t leftists at this very moment hysterically attacking Bush over legal memos regarding the applicability of the Geneva Convention to captured terrorists? The memos concluded that prohibitions against torture do not apply to those captured terrorists, but President Bush rejected the use of torture. But as for leftists:

“In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren't talking at all. Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly ‘Sept. 10’ – living in a country that no longer exists.” – left-wing journalist Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, November 5, 2001

“When, if ever, is it justified to resort to unconventional techniques such as truth serum, moderate physical pressure and outright torture? … what if it were limited to the rare ‘ticking bomb’ case – the situation in which a captured terrorist who knows of an imminent large-scale threat refuses to disclose it? Would torturing one guilty terrorist to prevent the deaths of a thousand innocent civilians shock the conscience of all decent people? … Judges should have to issue a ‘torture warrant’ in each case.” – Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2001.

“[We could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came dose to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.” – left-wing Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, on CNN News, March 4, 2003, discussing the then-recent capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

MICHAEL MOORE CONNECTS THE DOTS:

“One of Moore's chief accusations is Bush allowed planes to pick up 24 members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the US in the days following the attacks – when all other aircraft were grounded.” – BBC, May 17, 2004.

“…it started with me thinking it was kind of strange that the bin Laden family that was here in the U.S. at the time (of 9/11) got assistance from the White House in collecting members of their family and getting them out of the country.” – Michael Moore quoted by the Hollywood Reporter, in a May 17, 2004 interview.

“Not a single one of them was interrogated by the FBI.” – January, 2002 interview on Fox News.

Got the scenario, according to Moore? Bush orchestrated the flight out of the country by bin Laden family members after the 9/11 attacks, when all other aircraft were grounded. And the FBI never interrogated any of them. However…

“Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush's chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. … Clarke said, ‘I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again.’ … ‘It didn't get any higher than me,’ he said. ‘On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.’” – The Hill newspaper, May 26, 2004

“National air space was closed on September 11. Fearing reprisals against Saudi nationals, the Saudi government asked for help in getting some of its citizens out of the country. We have not yet identified who they contacted for help. But we have found that the request came to the attention of Richard Clarke and that each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its departure. [emphasis added]

No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened [emphasis added], six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.

The Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the FBI [emphasis added], to ensure that people on these flights did not pose a threat to national security, and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country.” – The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the “9-11 Commission”); Staff Statement # 10; April 13, 2004.

Yet there are millions of people who will watch Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911 and believe every word of it, and then vote on that belief. Worse, however, are those conservatives who, because Bush isn’t sufficiently “pure”, will not vote or will vote for some third party, and thereby magnify the votes of the dupes of the left-wing propaganda machine.

The latest terrorist atrocity, the beheading of an American in Saudi Arabia, emphasized that we are in a world war, to the death, against barbarians. Only fools think that war started with President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It did not start on September 11 either – that was just the day we woke up to the fact that we were already in a war, against fanatics who are trying to destroy western civilization. Hate-filled Americans, cosseted in this nation’s freedom, who deliberately lie and twist every aspect of this war for political gain, treat all this as a game. By doing so they betray this country.

The Saddam Hussein - Al Qaeda Connection

The Saddam Hussein - Al Qaeda Connection
June 20, 2004

9-11 COMMISSION UPDATE: This week, the 9-11 Commission issued a staff report concluding, “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” The term “credible evidence” (such as would be sufficient in a court of law) exemplifies the fundamental flaw of the terrorism-is-a-crime-not-war approach of the Clinton administration, and advocated by John Kerry. The media has misrepresented the Commission’s report to claim there was no connection at all between Iraq and al Qaeda (the New York Times: the report “refuted the Bush administration’s claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden”; that on the same day the Times compared the United States and the terrorists who beheaded Paul Johnson). Media outlets making such claims are either stunningly incompetent, or believe their readers are too stupid to read the report and consider the evidence for themselves, or believe their readers are so brain-dead that they are willing to allow others to do their thinking for them. It’s easy to set up a straw man only to knock it down, if your goal is to seek partisan political gain and cover-up mistakes of entrenched bureaucracies and previous administrations, rather than defend the nation. Nobody ever said that bin Laden and Hussein planned 9-11 together, any more than that Hitler and Tojo planned Pearl Harbor together. Nevertheless, the media now has a new weapon to further undermine our national resolve. Perhaps the ultra-pure ‘I’m-not-voting-for-Bush’ conservatives will enjoy President Kerry’s first Supreme Court nominee, Jamie Gorelick.

The New York Times demanded, “Show us the Proof”. OK – the following proof, uncovered by investigators and reporters around the world, has been public for months, or years (and this summary is by no means exhaustive):

The Salman Pak training camp near Baghdad, which had an airplane but no runway. Defectors stated that fundamentalists were taught methods of aircraft hijacking using utensils or short knives. Some of the trainees were said to be non-Iraqi Arabs. James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, said that it is illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborated with Islamist terrorism, and that he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. “At Salman Pak we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives. I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, ‘Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese’?” The fuselage was visible in satellite photos; U.N. inspectors confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707; and it has since been found;

According to the Czech intelligence service, a meeting (some sources indicate there may have been as many as four meetings) occurred in Prague in April 2001, between Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackings, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence agent, Al Ani Ahmed Khalin Ibrahim Samir. Five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that meetings, and to this day Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by this information (despite the American media's efforts to discredit it);

The ruling of Clinton-appointed federal Judge Harold Baer (May, 2003): “I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, by evidence satisfactory to the court, that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda.” Baer ordered Iraq to pay $104 million in damages to the families of two men killed in the Twin Towers;

A Malaysia-based Iraqi national, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport, facilitated the arrival of two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi (who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon), for an operational-planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January, 2000. Shakir helped them through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel. Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Hayes says that Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for intelligence operations; sometimes more than half of the alleged diplomats were intelligence operatives.) Another man at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole. Also in attendance was Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks. The meetings lasted three or four days. Documents uncovered in Iraq listing the rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen (the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday) include the name of Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir;

In March 1998, an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad, a meeting that was initiated by the Saddam regime. A document discovered in the rubble of one of the rooms of the destroyed Iraqi intelligence headquarters is marked “Top Secret and Urgent”, is signed by the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat (one of Saddam's security forces), and refers to the planned trip. The purpose of the trip was “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 Mukhabarat agreed to pay for “all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq”. The meeting, originally planned for one week, apparently went so well that it was extended by a week;

In its November 16, 2002 edition Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam's Iraq, run by his son Uday, 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”;

Abdul Rahman Yasin (one of the main perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993) returned to Baghdad after the bombing and Iraq provided him safe haven. Another, Ramsey Yusef arrived in the United States on an Iraqi passport. U.S. forces discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, showing that Iraq gave Yasin both a house and a monthly salary;

According to the CIA, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in December 1998. Two of the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, met with Mukhabarat (one of Saddam's security forces) officers in the months before 9-11 in the United Arab Emirates;

American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-1990’s, when an Al Qaeda operative – a native-born Iraqi named Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi – was sent by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi's mission was apparently successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists;

According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda (9-11 Commission staff statement #15 itself stated, “By early 1998, Bin Laden was also in the early stages of what would become a merger of his al Qaeda and another major terrorist group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad). The first meeting between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda took place in 1992. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri were at the meeting, the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan;

Bin Laden received training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in September-October 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his cover for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi;

One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, “said that the last contact between the IIS and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam's office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda.” But according to Stephen F. Hayes, the bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that “in late 1999” al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that “was operational as of 1999”;

Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997;

A personal memo to Saddam, in the hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti and signed by Habbush, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), dated July 1, 2001, discussed “Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, [who] came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre – his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision. We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him.” In December, 2003, a secret memo to Saddam was discovered that gives details of a visit by Atta to Baghdad just weeks before the 9-11 attacks;

In the Philippines, an Abu Sayyaf (al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia) commander named Hamsiraji Ali bragged that his group received almost $20,000 annually from Iraqis close to Saddam Hussein. “It's so we would have something to spend on chemicals for bomb-making and for the movement of our people.”

According to the State Department's May 21, 2002 “Patterns of Global Terrorism”, the Abu Nidal Organization, the Arab Liberation Front, Hamas, the Kurdistan Worker's party, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization and the Palestinian Liberation Front all operated offices or bases in Hussein's Iraq. Hussein also paid cash bonuses to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. Abu Abbas, mastermind of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer; and Khala Khadr al-Salahat, accused of designing the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, also lived in Saddam’s Iraq. It would be curious indeed if al Qaeda were the only Middle Eastern terrorist organization that was not accommodated by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

There is a shared hatred for Western civilization among the fanatical followers of radical Islam around the world. Their objectives are: (1) Divide the enemy. The West is now fractured and squabbling – count one success for our enemies; (2) Isolate the primary enemy by making a separate (temporary) peace with lesser threats. The U.S. and the U.K. are isolated, while the appeasers continue trying to appease (when not actively encouraging) the fanatics – count another success for our enemies; (3) Undermine the enemy’s resolve, and thus limit his ability to bring to bear his overwhelming military and economic power. When we look at our decades-long fixation with multiculturalism (and the moral equivalency that goes with it), self-hatred, national guilt, and the denigration of the moral foundations of our nation, inculcated into our youth by effete left-wing elites, we can count another growing success for our enemies.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson: “If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing – but quickly point to the U.S. and scream ‘Iraq!’ And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch. … While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it – let alone defending it – is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party. … The billionaire capitalist George Soros – who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors – now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war. … Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats – Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry – employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. ‘Lies,’ ‘worst,’ and ‘betrayed’ are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon – precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. …

No, bin Laden is quite sane – but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.”

A FEW QUESTIONS: According to CBS reporter Bill Plante, because of Iran-contra “U.S. efforts to deal with the tough issues in the Middle East went on hold, helping to set the stage for the first Iraq war and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.” In other words, Reagan is responsible for Osama bin Laden (and perhaps for 9/11?). Left-wing columnist Robert Scheer charges, “The CIA…originally helped train Osama bin Laden and many of the other terrorists who have turned against us… following a policy proclaimed by President Reagan…”. The underlying accusation (made explicit by other radical leftists) is that we, or at least Reagan and the CIA, are responsible for 9/11. Leftists also claim that American support for Iraq in its war with Iran makes us responsible for all of Saddam’s subsequent depredations. Then don’t we also have to say that Franklin Roosevelt is responsible for the estimated 62 million civilians slaughtered by Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union? After all, Roosevelt supported Stalin during World War Two (and sent him millions of tons of military equipment); and Roosevelt’s actions at Yalta granted the Soviets free reign over Central and Eastern Europe for decades – until, of course, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and demolished the evil empire.

If America does not experience any major terrorist attacks between now and the November election, will leftists credit the heightened security of the Bush administration pursuant to the Patriot Act; or will leftist claim that the threat was overblown to begin with, and demand the defeat of Bush and repeal of the Patriot Act?

If America does experience a major terrorist attack between now and the November election, will leftists blame the Bush administration for a failure of sufficient vigilance, and trumpet the attack as proof that the Patriot Act is useless, and use the attack as another excuse to demand the defeat of Bush and repeal of the Patriot Act?

And if America does experience a major terrorist attack between now and November, and if some terrorist in custody in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo boasts of knowing about the plot ahead of time, how quickly will leftists – who are now hyperventilating over prison “abuse” at Abu Ghraib and over the “rights” of Guantanamo terrorists – condemn the Bush administration for not using sufficient “pressure” (i.e.: torture) against the terrorists to uncover the plot?

Oh, that’s right – leftists are great champions of human rights and would never advocate torturing poor defenseless little terrorists. After all, aren’t leftists at this very moment hysterically attacking Bush over legal memos regarding the applicability of the Geneva Convention to captured terrorists? The memos concluded that prohibitions against torture do not apply to those captured terrorists, but President Bush rejected the use of torture. But as for leftists:

“In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren't talking at all. Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly ‘Sept. 10’ – living in a country that no longer exists.” – left-wing journalist Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, November 5, 2001

“When, if ever, is it justified to resort to unconventional techniques such as truth serum, moderate physical pressure and outright torture? … what if it were limited to the rare ‘ticking bomb’ case – the situation in which a captured terrorist who knows of an imminent large-scale threat refuses to disclose it? Would torturing one guilty terrorist to prevent the deaths of a thousand innocent civilians shock the conscience of all decent people? … Judges should have to issue a ‘torture warrant’ in each case.” – Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2001.

“[We could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came dose to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.” – left-wing Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, on CNN News, March 4, 2003, discussing the then-recent capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

MICHAEL MOORE CONNECTS THE DOTS:

“One of Moore's chief accusations is Bush allowed planes to pick up 24 members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the US in the days following the attacks – when all other aircraft were grounded.” – BBC, May 17, 2004.

“…it started with me thinking it was kind of strange that the bin Laden family that was here in the U.S. at the time (of 9/11) got assistance from the White House in collecting members of their family and getting them out of the country.” – Michael Moore quoted by the Hollywood Reporter, in a May 17, 2004 interview.

“Not a single one of them was interrogated by the FBI.” – January, 2002 interview on Fox News.

Got the scenario, according to Moore? Bush orchestrated the flight out of the country by bin Laden family members after the 9/11 attacks, when all other aircraft were grounded. And the FBI never interrogated any of them. However…

“Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush's chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. … Clarke said, ‘I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again.’ … ‘It didn't get any higher than me,’ he said. ‘On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.’” – The Hill newspaper, May 26, 2004

“National air space was closed on September 11. Fearing reprisals against Saudi nationals, the Saudi government asked for help in getting some of its citizens out of the country. We have not yet identified who they contacted for help. But we have found that the request came to the attention of Richard Clarke and that each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its departure. [emphasis added]

No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened [emphasis added], six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.

The Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the FBI [emphasis added], to ensure that people on these flights did not pose a threat to national security, and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country.” – The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the “9-11 Commission”); Staff Statement # 10; April 13, 2004.

Yet there are millions of people who will watch Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911 and believe every word of it, and then vote on that belief. Worse, however, are those conservatives who, because Bush isn’t sufficiently “pure”, will not vote or will vote for some third party, and thereby magnify the votes of the dupes of the left-wing propaganda machine.

The latest terrorist atrocity, the beheading of an American in Saudi Arabia, emphasized that we are in a world war, to the death, against barbarians. Only fools think that war started with President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It did not start on September 11 either – that was just the day we woke up to the fact that we were already in a war, against fanatics who are trying to destroy western civilization. Hate-filled Americans, cosseted in this nation’s freedom, who deliberately lie and twist every aspect of this war for political gain, treat all this as a game. By doing so they betray this country.