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Banned
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We offer here, mostly what Bozell branded as, reporting of the "Liberal Media".
With a member of our family in the military, and now about to be deployed to the M.E., we wanted to know who to believe.
The "news" is, that it is not Mr. Cheney:
On sunday, he was saying this, during a prominent news program, telecast:
(From my last post, at the bottom)
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060910.html
.....Q Then why in the lead-up to the war was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's a different issue. Now, there's a question of whether or not al Qaeda -- whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11; separate and apart from that is the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet's testimony before the Senate intel committee in open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern, a relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al Qaeda......
........we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went into 9/11 -- then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02......
.........Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, a poisons facility run by an Ansar al-Islam, an affiliate of al Qaeda......
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<b>Cheney was saying it, even though this was reported, just two days before:</b>
Quote:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060908/...iraq_report_12
By JIM ABRAMS, AP Writer Fri Sep 8, 12:17 PM ET
WASHINGTON - There's no evidence
Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on
Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts
President Bush's justification for going to war.....
.....It discloses for the first time an October 2005
CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."......
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<b>On May 2, 2006, I posted this:</b>
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...8&postcount=63
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council
Posted Feb. 5, 2003
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0030205-1.html
POWELL: There is ample evidence that Iraq has dedicated much effort to developing and testing spray devices that could be adapted for UAVs.....
....But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associated in collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida lieutenants.....
....One of his specialities and one of the specialties of this camp is poisons. When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqaqi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern....
......With this track record, Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take the place alongside the other Iraqi denials of weapons of mass destruction. It is all a web of lies.
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Quote:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...61575#continue
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The, February, 2003 by GREG MILLER
SHOWDOWN ON IRAQ
Why not hit terrorist camp?
Lawmakers question lack of military action
By GREG MILLER Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 7, 2003
Washington -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where al-Qaida affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.
But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?
Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for <b>why the U.S. has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the al-Qaida terror network.</b>
The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration on Thursday to explain its decision to leave the facility unharmed.
"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. <b>"Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"</b>
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.
"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said.
Absent an explanation from the White House, <h3>some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.</h3>
<b>"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."....</b>
......A White House spokesman said Thursday he had no immediate comment on the matter.
The administration's handling of the issue has emerged as one of the more curious recent elements of the war on terrorism. Failing to intervene appears to be at odds with President Bush's stated policy of pre-empting terrorist threats, and the facility is in an area where the U.S. already has a considerable presence.
U.S. intelligence agents are said to be operating among the Kurdish population nearby, and U.S. and British warplanes already patrol much of northern Iraq as part of their enforcement of a "no- fly" zone.
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<b>A year later, along comes an MSNBC reporter, "revealing" the training camp story, as if it was "new" news</b>
Quote:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/
By Jim Miklaszewski
Pentagon Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 2, 2004
With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
<h3>But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.</h3>
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but <b>the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.</b>
The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.
And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today.
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Quote:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2108880/
Holy Zarqawi
Why Bush let Iraq's top terrorist walk.
By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 2:08 PM PT
Why didn't the Bush administration kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when it had the chance?
February 2003 speech to the UN...In those remarks, which were given to underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Powell dwelt at length on the terrorist camp in Khurmal, in the pre-invasion Kurdish enclave. It was at that camp that Zarqawi, other jihadists who had fled Afghanistan, and Kurdish radicals were training and producing the poison ricin and cyanide.
Neither the Khurmal camp nor the surrounding area were under Saddam's control, but Powell provided much detail purporting to show Zarqawi's ties to the Baghdad regime. His arguments have since been largely discredited by the intelligence community. Many of us who have worked in counterterrorism wondered at the time about Powell's claims. If we knew where the camp of a leading jihadist was and knew that his followers were working on unconventional weapons, why weren't we bombing it or sending in special operations forces—especially since this was a relatively "permissive" environment?
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Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6189795/
CIA report finds no Zarqawi-Saddam link
No evidence former Iraqi leader harbored Jordanian radical
Updated: 8:59 a.m. ET <b>Oct. 6, 2004</b>
WASHINGTON - A CIA report has found no conclusive evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein harbored Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which the Bush administration asserted before the invasion of Iraq.
“There’s no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored Zarqawi,” a U.S. official said on Tuesday about the CIA findings.
But the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed that the report, which was a mix of new information and a look at some older information, did not make any final judgments or come to any definitive conclusions.
“To suggest the case is closed on this would not be correct,” the official said in confirming an ABC News story about the CIA report that the network said was delivered to the White House last week.
ABC quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official as saying that the CIA document raises “serious questions” about Bush administration assertions that Zarqawi found sanctuary in pre-war Baghdad.
“The official says there is no clear cut evidence that Saddam Hussein even knew Zarqawi was in Baghdad,” ABC reported.
Medical trip doubted
<b>The CIA report concludes Zarqawi was in and out of Baghdad, but cast doubt on reports that Zarqawi had been given official approval for medical treatment there as President Bush said this summer, ABC said.</b>
Earlier on Tuesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan reasserted that there was a relationship between Saddam and Zarqawi.
“He was in contact from Baghdad with Ansar al-Islam in the northeastern part of Iraq. He had a cell operating from Baghdad during that period, as well. So there are clearly ties between Iraq and — between the regime, Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida,” McClellan told reporters.
Before last year’s invasion to topple Saddam, the Bush administration portrayed Zarqawi as al- Qaida’s link to Baghdad.
Following Saddam’s capture in December and waves of suicide attacks on U.S. and Iraqi security forces which followed, Zarqawi quickly became America’s top enemy in Iraq. The United States placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
The Jordanian-born Zarqawi and his militant Tawhid and Jihad group have claimed responsibility for a string of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings.
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Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192327/site/newsweek/
Rewriting History
In his debate with John Edwards, Dick Cheney had a brand-new version of the events that led to war
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 4:32 p.m. ET Oct. 6, 2004
...Cheney, for example, called the claim of an Atta meeting with an Iraqi official in Prague “pretty well confirmed” in a Dec. 9, 2001,.....Cheney was still referring to it in a Sept. 14, 2003 “Meet the Press” appearance. “....</b>
....<b>The claim that Saddam's agents had instructed Al Qaeda terrorists in making "poisons and gasses" had in fact been a prominent feature of the administration's prewar assertions, highlighted by Powell in his Security Council speech and Cheney repeatedly in his TV appearances and speeches. <b>But the allegation was almost entirely based on the claims of one high-level Al Qaeda detainee—first identified by NEWSWEEK as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi—who, according to the 9/11 commission, has since recanted</b> his story.</b> Asked if Duelfer's team had found any evidence that Iraq had provided such training for terrorists, the U.S. official familiar with Duelfer's report shook his head and said simply: "No."
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....
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<b>...And there's more, and if it's not enough, and more would make a difference in persuading you that you've been lied to, I'll find and post more</b>
Quote:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...n/14503836.htm
Posted on Fri, May. 05, 2006
Pointed queries stall talk
A war opponent who interrupted Rumsfeld's speech accused him of lying on Iraq. Associated Press
...McGovern: This is America.
Rumsfeld: You're getting plenty of play, sir.
McGovern: I'd just like an honest answer.
Rumsfeld: I'm giving it to you.
McGovern: Well we're talking about lies and your allegation there was bulletproof evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Rumsfeld: Zarqawi [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaeda in Iraq] was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.
McGovern: Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That's also...
Rumsfeld: He was also in Baghdad.
McGovern: Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital.
Come on, these people aren't idiots. They know the story.........
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9831216/site/newsweek/
<b>Fabricated Links?</b>
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Oct. 26, 2005 - A secret draft CIA report raises new questions about a principal argument used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq: the claim that Saddam Hussein was "harboring" notorious terror leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi prior to the American invasion...............
........No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence, according to two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
An intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that the current draft says that "most evidence suggests Saddam Hussein did not provide Zarqawi safe haven before the war. It also recognizes that there are still unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge about the relationship."....
....The new report is only the latest chink in the armor of the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Last year, the September 11 Commission found there was no "collaborative" relationship between the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden; one high-level Al Qaeda commander—who had been cited by Powell as testifying to talks about chemical- and biological-warfare training—later recanted his claims. But the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case....
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Quote:
http://prairieweather.typepad.com/th...npr_danie.html
<b>To Listen:</b> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5076745
12/30/05:NPR: Daniel Benjamin: Links Between the Iraq War and 'The Next Attack'
Interviewer: Robert Siegel
Robert Siegel: A disquieting answer to the question, Are we winning the war against terrorism? Daniel Benjamin used to work on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. He and Steven Simon have written their second book about counter-terrorism post-9/11. It's called "The Next Attack" and Daniel Benjamin's answer to the question, Are we winning against the terrorists is an emphatic "no"!
Daniel Benjamin: We know we're not winning the war by looking at a variety of factors that suggest, in fact, that there is a gathering storm out there of jihadist antipathy and, in fact, violence. For example, we see a growing number of groups that have essentially picked up the Al Qaeda ideology without being connected directly, either organizationally or even........
...<b>RS: You write about the enclave in the north of Iraq where, prior to the US invasion, a terrorist group had set up. And the debate went on, what does it do about Anser al-Islam operating from this little nook of what we think of as the Kurdish north of Iraq.
DB: Yes. There was a <b>camp in a place called Kermal</b> and the camp belonged to a Kurdish jihadist group but the person who had affiliated with them was none other than Abu Musab al-Zarkawi who has gone on to be the face of the insurgency in Iraq. <b>We had very good intelligence about what was going on there. We know that they were, for example, making ricin, the biological agent which has been used in a number of conspiracies.
RS: And this was happening on Iraqi soil, but with a big proviso.
DB: Well, it was Iraqi soil in a technical sense, but it was the autonomous Kurdish enclave under our protection from the air. As a result the Pentagon, the uniformed military, was eager to strike at this enclave and thought that was the war on terror was about. <b>And twice the proposal was put forward to strike it, and twice the Administration declined.</b>
RS: When was this happening? What years are we talking about?
DB: Well, it happened I believe in 2002 and again, I believe, in 2003. The first time, 2002, was the critical moment because it hadn't leaked to the press yet that we were watching this. But the curious thing was not that first the Administration declined to take out this camp and second of all that we were just watching Zarkawi completely misunderstanding what he was doing there.....we just gave them a pass...
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Quote:
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_frien...,83047,00.html
New Evidence May Link Northern Iraq Militants to Al Qaeda
Thursday , April 03, 2003
WASHINGTON — <b>Evidence has been found in the Kurdish-controlled regions of northern Iraq</b> that the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam was working on three types of chlorine gas and ricin and has ties to Al Qaeda, U.S. officials told Fox News.
Officials said that between 75 and 150 Al Qaeda members have been captured or killed in northern Iraq in recent days.
U.S. sources told Fox News that documents and equipment were found in the rubble of an Ansar facility that had been built into a cliff near Sargat. The material was described as "a cookbook and kitchen" for chemical weapons.
Other items included latex gloves, penicillin, a freezer and lab equipment. Sources said additional tests are planned.
Two suspected Al Qaeda members escaped into Iran but surrendered to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Iran has said it will hand over captured Ansar members. U.S. officials are waiting for them.
<b>There were indications earlier that Ansar al-Islam was getting help from inside neighboring Iran.
Kurdish and Turkish intelligence officials said many of Ansar's 700 members have slipped out of Iraq and into Iran.</b>....
....."We asked the Iranian authorities to hand over to us any of the Afghan Arabs or Islamic militants hiding themselves inside the villages of Iran," said Boorhan Saeed, a member of the pro-U.S. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "We asked them about it Sunday, and still don't have a response."
Among the evidence found inside Ansar compounds were passports and identity papers of Ansar activists indicating that up to 150 of them were foreigners, including Yemenis, Turks, Palestinians, Pakistanis, Algerians and Iranians.
Coalition forces also found a phone book containing numbers of alleged Islamic activists based in the United States and Europe as well as the number of a Kuwaiti cleric and a letter from Yemen's minister of religion....
Fox News' Carl Cameron and The AP contributed to this report.
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Quote:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/ar...24/24ansar.htm
Northern Iraq's Other War
Secular Kurds fight their own battle against the militant Ansar al-Islam
By Bay Fang 3/24/03
ANAB, NORTHERN IRAQ--The Kurdish peshmerga in baggy pants squat behind sandbags and gesture with ancient Kalashnikov guns toward the snowcapped mountains towering above their base. Every night, say these militiamen, mortar rounds come from those mountains, striking with unnerving accuracy at their forward bases. But, they say, the end is near.
War may be coming to this part of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, but the enemy here is not Saddam Hussein; it is a group of militant Islamist Kurds called Ansar al-Islam. These fundamentalist fighters number fewer than 1,000 by most estimates, but they have terrorized the secular Kurds who control this region, and in recent weeks they have reportedly set their sights on American targets. Last week, they shelled the peshmerga headquarters near the front lines, in an attack believed to be aimed at the party leader's son and his American military guests, who were visiting the area.
Al Qaeda connection. Ansar has staged attacks from a base in the mountains along the Iranian border since it split off from more moderate Islamic groups in September 2001. The group was joined early last year by about 100 Arab fighters believed to be al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. The world took notice of this fundamentalist pocket of northern Iraq when... Colin Powell, in his report to the United Nations Security Council last month, cited Ansar as being a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime, and said the group has been developing chemical weapons.....
...And officials report that vehicles of Ansar fighters have been scouting out areas frequented by American teams in the regional capital of Sulaymaniyah. Gen. Sheikh Jafar, commander of the frontline fighters, stands on the roof of his headquarters and squints up at the mountains. "There, on that mountain, is Ansar al-Islam. On the left is the Islamic Movement; on the right is the Islamic Group. Behind them is Iran, and in front is all bombs and mines. That is why we have not been able to get rid of them." It is this base that was the target of shelling last week, causing townspeople to close up shop and run for cover, believing the big battle between Ansar and the peshmerga had begun.
Jafar and his 6,000 troops have been repeatedly frustrated in their attempt to rout the Islamic fighters from their mountain stronghold, as he has not been able to negotiate an arrangement with the more moderate Islamic groups that hold the peaks on either side. He believes the fighters have been helped by both Iran and the Iraqi regime, as their ammunition seems to be endless and their aim uncannily accurate.......They are preparing themselves for when the American and British armies come into Kurdistan," he says......
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Quote:
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/tran...03.watson.html
Profile: Islamist Radical Group Ansar Al-Islam in Northern Iraq
All Things Considered: March 3, 2003
Iraqi Kurds Want Terror Group Vanquished
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In a speech to the UN Security Council last month, Secretary of State Colin Powell brought international attention to a little-known group of violent Islamists in northern Iraq. Powell accused the movement, called Ansar al-Islam, of having ties to both al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In the Kurdish enclave, where the Islamist faction has waged a terrorist campaign against the secular Kurdish administration, Ansar has long been a much-feared group. NPR's Ivan Watson reports from Halabja in northern Iraq.
IVAN WATSON reporting:
......WATSON: It's been more a year since Ansar al-Islam occupied these peaks along the border with Iran and declared war on northern Iraq's ruling Kurdish administrations. Artillery exchanges now ring out on an almost nightly basis here, where thousands of PUK fighters have laid siege against what was once one of the region's most popular tourist resorts. This major from the PUK's Bedouin battalion says his men are getting tired of the standoff.
Unidentified Major: (Through Translator) We can fight them, but we are fed up of waiting. We want to kill them now.
WATSON: Barham Salih, one of the PUK's highest officials, says his party is under increasing public pressure to finish off Ansar once and for all.
Mr. BARHAM SALIH (PUK): The pressures are overwhelming on the political leadership here to really deal with this problem.
WATSON: Last year, Salih narrowly survived an assassination attempt by Ansar fighters. Three weeks ago, his colleague, General Shawkat Hjii Mushir, wasn't so lucky. The senior PUK official was gunned down after being lured to what was supposed to be a meeting to negotiate the surrender of more than 100 Ansar members.
The movement itself is estimated to number less than a thousand fighters, mostly Arab and Kurdish Iraqis, as well as some so-called Afghan Arabs who fled here from Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban. American and Kurdish officials says Ansar is a wing of al-Qaeda that has produced and tested crude chemical weapons in its mountain stronghold. Again, Barham Salih.
Mr. SALIH: What we have from our own independent sourcing, that they were experimenting on farm animals in that location, were using a cyanide-based cream.
WATSON: Ansar spokesmen have denied these accusations, but residents from the handful of villages under Ansar's control aren't taking any chances. Anticipating a major assault on Ansar, perhaps even involving US forces, most of them are packing up and leaving. This woman, who preferred not to give her name, fled her home in the village of Bayara last week.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
WATSON: She describes the group's members as men with long beards who banned women from stepping outside of their homes and prominently displayed portraits of Osama bin Laden. She adds that it won't be easy to defeat them.
Ansar has fortified its front-line defenses with minefields. Directly at its back stands the border with Iran. The Washington and the Kurdish leadership have frequently said Ansar is supported by Saddam Hussein; Kurdish field officers here say it is Iran that is backing the movement. How, they ask, could these besieged fighter continue to hold out for a year and a half unless supplies, weapons and ammunition were coming from across the Iranian border? Ivan Watson, NPR News, Halabja, in northern Iraq.
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Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...004196,00.html
Monday, Feb. 10, 2003
Saddam's al-Qaeda Connection?
ANSAR AL-ISLAM
By ANDREW PURVIS/VIENNA AND JOSHUA KUCERA/ERBIL.
Until Sept. 11, 2001, the radical Islamic group <b>Ansar al-Islam was considered a local problem. Based in the Kurdish controlled areas of northern Iraq,</b> with a membership of militant fundamentalists determined to impose Islamic rule, the group raised its profile three years ago by blowing up beauty parlors and sloshing acid in the faces of unveiled Kurdish women. Ansar, like Saddam Hussein, is arrayed against the separatist Kurds of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdestan Democratic Party (KDP), whose ragtag forces lie between it and Baghdad. Ansar hates all infidels, but mainly the ones in its neighborhood. "If they could get to Americans, they would spare no effort to do so," says a senior Kurdish intelligence official, "but since they cannot, they are happy to kill us instead."
<b>The group is being touted by Bush Administration officials as a critical link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.</b> Ansar has roughly 500 to 700 members, including several dozen so-called Arab Afghans, ethnic Arabs who trained in alQaeda camps in Afghanistan and fled to Ansar's enclave in Iraq after the fall of the Taliban. Kurds who have escaped the area say the group has set up a Taliban-like regime, under which women are veiled and Islamic law is h* Aonored--or else. According to a former Iraqi intelligence agent imprisoned by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq, a member of Ansar's ruling council, Abu Wa'el, once worked for Saddam's intelligence agency, though PUK officials cannot confirm the link. But some connection between Ansar and Iraq seems clear.
The group continues to pose a threat to the anti-Baghdad Kurds. Last year Ansar assailants attempted to assassinate the PUK's prime minister in Suleimaniya, leaving five bodyguards dead in a gun battle that coincided with a visit by U.S. officials. Interviewed in prison, the sole surviving attacker said he was working for the glory of Allah and later hanged himself with his black cotton belt. There are indications, however, that Ansar's strength may be waning. The Iranian government last November forced it to move back from the Iranian border, robbing the group of the cover of high mountains there. <b>U.S. and Turkish military officers have investigated the front line and reportedly come away unimpressed. A senior Turkish official dismissed Ansar as a "cult."</b>
A big blow came with the arrest last fall of the group's leader, Mullah Krekar, while he was passing through the Netherlands en route to Norway, where he is applying for asylum. Krekar, a Marxist turned cleric whose real name is Najmuddin Faraj and who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, flatly denies that his group has ties to al-Qaeda or Saddam. "I never had links with Saddam's family, government, party--not in the past, not now, not inside Iraq or outside," he told the BBC last week in Oslo. Ultimately, Kurdish officials are less impressed with the group's significance than the Americans are. "They're newsworthy," says a senior KDP official. "But they have no importance for the future of Iraq." Or so he hopes. --By Andrew Purvis/Vienna and Joshua Kucera/Erbil. With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington
With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington
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Quote:
Cover Story SPECIAL REPORT
The Economist. London: Feb 8, 2003. Vol. 366, Iss. 8310; pg. 26
<b>Special Report: Imaginary friends?; Iraq and al-Qaeda</b>
The weakest part of the case for war
IT SEEMS an unlikely alliance. Al-Qaeda's troops are Islamic extremists; Saddam Hussein is a secular despot. Yet the notion that these two enemies of America are in cahoots has become a plank in the case for war. Despite Colin Powell's best efforts, it is a wobbly one.
The theory is old. A reported meeting between Mohammed Atta, leader of the September 11th terrorists, and an Iraqi spook in Prague seemed to clinch the case--but it now seems to have been apocryphal. The charge now largely rests on two related bits of evidence.
Exhibit A is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda terrorist and reputed expert in poisons, known to have had medical treatment in Baghdad......
<b>Exhibit B is Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist group waging a mini-war against Kurdish forces in northern Iraq and thought to harbour al-Qaeda fighters. The region is beyond Mr Hussein's direct control; but Mr Powell said that one of the group's leaders is an Iraqi agent, and that Mr al-Zarqawi's men established a poisons training camp in the area.</b>
Mr Powell also accused Iraq of training al-Qaeda in various dark arts, providing more details of these claims than has previously been proffered. It is fair to assume that Mr Hussein's regime knew about Mr al-Zarqawi's presence in Iraq. Still, compared with the other elements of his case, Mr Powell's proof was slim. Al-Qaeda is not a conventional organisation, so meetings between its "members" and Iraqis may not be conclusive. Much of the relevant intelligence comes from captives, who may be saying what they think their captors want to hear, or may even be hoping to provoke a war.
In fact, this is a good example of how inconclusive intelligence can be. Before September 11th, the evidence of active Iraq-al-Qaeda collusion looked flimsy; since then, American sensitivity to unpredictable threats has made it seem much more alarming. British politicians have also advanced the theory, if more cautiously; but multiple leaks attest that British spooks, who claim to have given the UN weapons inspectors some of their best leads, are extremely sceptical.
The thought that Mr Hussein, his weapons and al-Qaeda might combine is indeed terrifying. Mr Hussein continues to give succour to various terrorist organisations, and may hope that they will rally to his cause in the event of war. Perhaps it was indeed nave to assume that al-Qaeda and Mr Hussein couldn't bury their ideological hatchet; perhaps, as Mr Powell said, ambition and hatred are enough to bring them together.............
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Quote:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1:9696...+Article).html
Newsweek. (International ed.). New York: Feb 3, 2003. pg. 4
Terrorism
Man on the Run
One of the most wanted terrorists today is a 36-year-old Palestinian Qaeda leader known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who has been linked to recent Qaeda activity and possibly even Iraq. Wanted by Jordan since 1999, when he allegedly plotted to bomb U.S. targets in Amman, Zarqawi is supposed to be one of Al Qaeda's top experts on chemical and biological weapons. Some investigators believe he is behind a recently foiled London plot to poison food at a British military base with ricin. Jordanian authorities believe Zarqawi was involved in the murder of a U.S. foreign-aid official late last year.
Zarqawi evaded capture in Afghanistan after 9-11 by crossing the border into Iran, according to intelligence reports. After sojourning under what some Pentagon officials believe was the protection of Iranian "security forces," Zarqawi supposedly went to Baghdad, where doctors amputated his leg (injured in Afghan fighting) and replaced it with a prosthesis. Later, so the story goes, Zarqawi moved farther westward, via Syria, to Lebanon. Last August, at a terrorist camp in southern Lebanon, he purportedly attended a terrorist "summit" whose participants included Hizbollah militants, Iranian secret agents and a Lebanese Islamist gang called Asbat al-Ansar. According to some reports, Zarqawi also may have traveled to Iraq's Kurdish region to visit a pro-bin Laden militia called Ansar al-Islam, and to the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, where Qaeda operatives reportedly train with Chechen militants.
Not surprisingly, reports putting Zarqawi in Iraq piqued the interest of Pentagon hardliners eager to find evidence to support their suspicion that Saddam and bin Laden are allied and may have plotted 9-11 together. But neither the CIA nor Britain's legendary M.I.6 put much stock in Zarqawi's alleged Iraqi visits, stressing such reports are "unconfirmed."
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...003152,00.html
Monday, Sep. 2, 2002
Iraq & al-Qaeda
Is there a link? The go-to-war camp would love to prove that Saddam Hussein is doing business with Osama bin Laden. They talk up suspicions, but no one's got proof
By ROMESH RATNESAR
As the world's two most nefarious villains, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein ought to have reasons to work together. They share similar interests--hatred of Israel, hostility toward the rulers of Saudi Arabia and, especially, enmity toward their common nemesis, the U.S. Both are suspected of dabbling in chemical and biological agents, and both are judged capable of using them. While al-Qaeda is still seeking weapons of mass destruction, Western intelligence experts think that Iraq already possesses some--in which case hooking up with bin Laden's network might make sense. If Saddam wants to employ his arsenal against the U.S. and its allies without getting caught, why not contract al-Qaeda to do the job for him?
That, at least, is the connect-the-dots theory that Bush Administration hawks and conservative cheerleaders are advancing in their campaign to persuade the President to take his war on terrorism to Baghdad. Assembling evidence of a direct line between Iraq and al-Qaeda--or better yet, proving that Saddam was complicit in the Sept. 11 plot--would give the war planners <b>something they don't have: a compelling do-it-now reason for war.</b>
With allies retreating to the sidelines, Republican wise men counseling restraint and the public growing jittery about the Administration's plans, the hard-liners pumped up fresh hints last week that Saddam and bin Laden have struck an unholy alliance. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, "There are al-Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq" receiving shelter from Saddam's regime. "It's very hard to imagine the government is not aware of what's taking place in the country," he said. Another Defense official told the Washington Post that among them, "there are some names you would recognize"--a remarkable claim when the only name most Americans recognize is bin Laden's. Other Pentagon aides leaked word that the Administration had recently considered but decided against sending commandos into Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq to knock out a clandestine chemical-weapons lab allegedly run by Ansar al-Islam, a tiny fundamentalist rebel group whose ranks are reportedly swelling with al-Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan.
For those looking to promote a U.S. invasion of Iraq, such assorted morsels of intelligence are tantalizing hints of a conspiracy. Many Americans already believe the worst about Saddam. According to a USA Today poll, 86% think Baghdad is giving support to terrorist groups planning to strike America, and more than half think Saddam had a hand in 9/11. Rumsfeld suggested that the Administration is merely waiting to reveal ironclad evidence of the link. "It may make sense to discuss that publicly," he said, "but not today."
So far, suspicions of a Saddam-bin Laden synergy are just that. The same few data points are periodically recycled. Most of the suggestive clues come from unconfirmed charges repeated to journalists and U.S. officials by a few defectors in the hands of the opposition Iraqi National Congress and prisoners held by pro-U.S. Kurdish factions--all of whom have a vested interest in feeding anti-Saddam propaganda. CIA officials, while not ruling anything out, say meaningful ties between Saddam and bin Laden are tenuous at best. Members of Congress who have been well briefed have seen no smoking gun....
.....So what makes the hard-liners say, Oh yes, there is? A Pentagon official agrees that dozens of al-Qaeda refugees have landed in Iraq, including "some new, mid-level people." But, says a senior intelligence official, "Iraq is not replacing Afghanistan as the sanctuary for al-Qaeda." Many of the newcomers are Kurdish jihadists returning to their native habitat or Afghan Arabs who have slipped into the Kurdish north, which is beyond the control of Baghdad, under the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone established after the Gulf War. Intelligence officials told Time that while Baghdad is aware of their presence, there's no clear evidence that Saddam has made substantive contact with them. "The al-Qaeda people are not official guests of the Iraqi government," says a senior spook. "There's no indication of that."
Anti-Saddam hard-liners have lately seized on the extremist Ansar al-Islam as the organizational nexus that ties al-Qaeda to Baghdad.......
....Today Ansar may well include some al-Qaeda fighters looking for a new nest. Kurdish officials say the group has swollen to around 700, but U.S. intelligence puts the number at a little over 100.
The telling allegation, made again last week by New York Times columnist William Safire, is that Saddam secretly runs Ansar. According to Safire's unsourced pronouncement, a Saddam intelligence operative and a senior bin Laden agent helped coordinate an assault by Ansar militants to assassinate the secular, pro-American Kurdish leadership last year. Both, he claimed, were captured when Kurdish forces put down the revolt. Safire also fingered Saddam's agents as the men behind Ansar's crude attempts to make poison weapons that drew Pentagon attention.
Yet while Ansar may share Saddam's desire to destroy the Kurdish leadership--in April, Ansar unsuccessfully attempted to kill one faction's prime minister when Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker was visiting the area--the Iraqi dictator does not appear to have direct control over the Kurdish militants. Both Saddam and al-Qaeda may find Ansar's activities useful, but there's no evidence that the group serves as a link between them.
The hawks point to another piece of circumstantial evidence. Since last fall the U.S. has tried to confirm a Czech intelligence report that in April 2001, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Both the CIA and FBI have disputed the report. Their research places Atta in Florida two days before the purported meeting, and they could not uncover any travel or financial records to prove Atta had made a quick flight to Prague. But early this month several Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, met with the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism, Pat D'Amuro, to quiz the FBI again about the Czech report. Officials from both agencies who attended the meeting deny that Wolfowitz pressured the briefers to confirm that the Prague rendezvous took place. But the FBI says the Pentagon team tried, with success, to persuade the bureau to concede that reports of the meeting are at least possible.....
.....Other items the hard-liners like to list seem even longer on speculation. They point to a visit bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri supposedly made to Saddam in 1992. But Zawahiri was then the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and had not yet hooked up with al-Qaeda. Nor has the CIA been able to verify a Saddam-Zawahiri meeting, especially at a time when Baghdad was trying to improve relations with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Zawahiri's prime target.
Shahab, the imprisoned mercenary, claimed that in 1999 Iraqi officials paid him to smuggle several dozen liquid-filled refrigerator canisters into Afghanistan for the Taliban. Did they contain chemical agents or bio germs? Shahab does not know, and U.S. intelligence has been unable to confirm the report. Officials question whether the idea makes sense. Documents recovered in Afghanistan show al-Qaeda had its own blueprints for cooking up chemical weapons.
The hard-liners seem to think that by repeating this kind of unsubstantiated speculation, they can force Bush to stick to his vow to take on Saddam--even though, as White House aides insisted last week, he still does not have a plan for doing so. "Some people are, by design, trying to put him into a corner on this," says an official who works on Iraq policy. "They're arguing that if we don't attack, Saddam will win yet again because of the harm that will do to American credibility."
It's only prudent for U.S. intelligence to track any hint that Saddam may try to enlist a terrorist network in his battle against America. But the hawks are doing damage to their own cause by trumpeting unproved allegations of Saddam's links to bin Laden that could undermine more substantial reasons for taking down a dangerous dictator. The al-Qaeda connection looks too tenuous now to justify war with Iraq. If the President is truly concerned about preserving American credibility, he needs to do a more persuasive job explaining why another war against Iraq is worth the effort.
--Reported by Mark Thompson, Karen Tumulty and Douglas Waller/Washington and Andrew Purvis/Suleimaniya
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Hussein, Saddam
Author: Tim Judah
Section: The Reporter
The Jerusalem Report. Jerusalem: Nov 18, 2002. pg. 6
The late-October arrest in London of Abu Qatada, an Islamic cleric alleged to be a key member of the Al-Qa'eda network, will be greeted with quiet satisfaction in Iraqi Kurdistan, where Kurdish guerrillas are engaged in a campaign against a local armed Islamic group that Abu Qatada is said to have sponsored.
The Kurdish fundamentalist group Ansar al-Islam (the Companions of Islam) is said to have links with Al-Qa'eda, Iraqi intelligence and Iran. Abu Qatada, among other things, is supposed to have been a key contact for Ansar.
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main Kurdish nationalist factions in northern Iraq, has been hoping to do away with Ansar ahead of any U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, not wanting to have to fight on two fronts.....
Abu Qatada, who has been dubbed "Osama Bin Laden's ambassador to Europe," is apparently being held under Britain's new anti- terrorism laws. Otherwise known as Omar Muhammad Othman, he was convicted in absentia in Jordan in 1999 on bombing charges and is wanted in the United States and Europe...
....Lt. Col. Ahmad Chekha Omer, a senior peshmerga (Kurdish guerrilla) commander on the Ansar front, <b>says that British, then American intelligence officers visited positions around the Ansar enclave in the summer. Subsequently, unnamed U.S. officials were quoted as saying that an Al-Qa'eda-linked Islamic group in northern Iraq had been experimenting with biological weapons and cyanide gas.</b>
<h3>The officials added that the Bush administration had considered a military strike against Ansar, but had decided that the target area was too small.</h3>
The Kurdish peshmergas say that Saddam's intelligence services also provide money and backing to Ansar, but that the real problem until now has been Iran. According to Omer, Iranian military trucks were spotted in the area in June. Iran, he says, has supplied Ansar with three truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers, as well as with maps and training in firing Katyushas.
All this is acutely embarrassing for the PUK, which has itself relied heavily on Iranian support in the past, based on the principle that they were the enemy of Iran's enemy, Saddam Hussein. But Iran now fears the emergence of a democratic and especially federal Iraq that includes a large, secular Kurdish unit.
The PUK believes that Ansar has up to 700 men, including a non- Kurdish contingent of about 70 Iraqi and other Arabs. There are some 3,000 PUK peshmergas ranged against them. For now, the two exchange desultory mortar fire every evening in the mountains.
According to the Ansar prisoner in Sulaimaniya, one reason why Al- Qa'eda had wanted a foothold in Iraqi Kurdistan was its convenient location, midway between the organization's Afghan bases and Israel.
Tim Judah / Iraqi Kurdistan (See also "The Kurdish Map," page 30.)
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darashish, northern iraq
Section: International
Publication title: The Economist. London: Aug 17, 2002. Vol. 364, Iss. 8286; pg. 46
While punishing al-Qaeda elsewhere, Iran may be helping it in Kurdistan
EVERY evening Kurdish peshmergas (guerrillas) trade mortar fire with Ansar al-Islam, a radical Islamic group, believed to have close links with al-Qaeda. According to peshmerga commanders, the group, which now has some 700 armed men, about one-tenth of them Arabs or Afghans, penned into a small enclave on the Iraq-Iran border, is getting substantial help from Iran.
Villagers coming from the area under Ansar's control say that Iran brings arms and ammunition to the frontier, and that these are then brought over on horseback. The peshmergas say that the Iranians have recently given the group truck-mounted Katyusha rocket-launchers, and helped them target their artillery from positions inside Iran.
Elsewhere Iran has been helping America in its fight with al-Qaeda. It denies that it has any relations with Ansar al-Islam. But if the charges are true, how can the contradiction be explained? Perhaps because the Iranians, fearful lest federal, let alone secessionist, ambitions infect their own 8m Kurds, do not want to see the emergence of a strong, stable Kurdistan as part of a future federal Iraq.
This part of northern Iraq is controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose leaders have always had good relations with Iran.They are loth to accuse the Iranians directly, partly because they fear that Iran would then close its border to them. But peshmerga commanders argue that Ansar, sealed between PUK lines and the Iranian border, could not have got its weapons from anywhere else.
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Bozell's newsbusters.org "writer", claiming that Tim Russert had [played] "Dirty Pool With VP Cheney". IMO, Russert gave Cheney, a pass. |