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Banned
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Originally Posted by blktour
me being in the military (army) and being deployed, we do not look that deep into it.
we dont look at the cause or that stuff. we look at it, as we are all in "shit" together, so we all make the best of it. we all take care of eachother.
how to make our lives easier in that place.
the only ones that really felt that they were "doing great things." were the younger troops, the ignorant troops, that took all that the higher ups told them. not having a mind thier own.
i NEVER saw any of my fellow troops that said, "man it feels good to be here" or "man i liked helping this haji." "we are doing great things here."
they wanted to do their time. that was it. everyone i know in the military doesnt believe what we are over there for, but we understand that we signed that paper that says they can do with us, what they want. so we try to make the best of it.
it has nothing to do with him going over there or not. it has to do with his opened mind. if he is stubborn, (like most military men are.) then do not show him. it will just get him mad.
what the ones that got sent over there hate the most is when someone that didnt see what they saw, tell them anything about what they think about it.
we have a right to say things about what we saw and did and how we felt about being over there. why? because we had to suffer through it.
we dont want anything but to know you respect our way of seeing it. thats it.
we are not better than the next man. we made a choice and we made the best of it.
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Thank you, blktour. I think I am going to take your advice.
You met your obligations in your enlistment contract, and you supported the people who you served with.
I respect your inclination to sign up to "serve your country", your discipline and accomplishments during training and in your subsequent service, just as I do that of my stepson. His mother (my wife) and I are extremely proud of him and what he accomplished during his 30 months of training.
I hope that you have not let your experience make you too cynical to go out of your way to offer what you described in your post to a wider audience.
I cannot accept that there is not more outrage in our country in reaction to the info posted below, and the quotes in my earlier posts that "our leaders" so brazenly maintain, to this day. on our government websites.
Could this be why nothing has happened?
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature...ice/index.html
We are the Thought Police
Orwell's Big Brother never showed up. Instead of centralized Iraq war propaganda, we have an America in which the public and the press jointly impose their own controls.
Editor's note: This essay is excerpted from the anthology <a href="http://www.thereyougoagain.org/book.html">"What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics,"</a> edited by András Szántó. A related <a href="http://www.thereyougoagain.org/conference.html">conference on journalism and public discourse takes place at the New York Public Library on Nov. 7.</a>
By Michael Massing
Nov. 06, 2007 | At first glance, the war in Iraq would seem to represent the realization of George Orwell's darkest fears. In "Politics and the English Language," he expressed alarm over how political speech and language, degraded by euphemism, vagueness, and cliché, <h3>was used to defend the indefensible, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.</h3> Three years later, in "1984," Orwell offered an even grimmer vision, one in which an all-powerful Party, working through an all-seeing Ministry of Truth, manipulates and intimidates the public by pelting it with an endless series of distorted and fabricated messages.
The Bush administration, in pushing for the war in Iraq, seems to have done much the same. It concocted lurid images to stir fear ("weapons of mass destruction," the prospect that the "smoking gun" could become a "mushroom cloud"). It asserted as fact information known to be false (the purported ties between Iraq and al Qaeda). It clipped and cropped intelligence data to fit its policy goals (dropping important qualifiers from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). It worked up snippets and scraps of unsubstantiated evidence into a slick package of deception and misrepresentation <h3>(Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations).</h3> And it created a whole glossary of diversionary terms -- "preemptive war" for unprovoked aggression, "shock and awe" for a devastating bombing campaign, "coalition" for an invading force that was overwhelmingly American -- all of which helped win the White House broad domestic support for a war that most of the rest of the world had decisively rejected.
Yet in many key respects, the Iraq war has diverged from Orwell's dystopic vision. Orwell had expected advances in technology to allow the ruling elite to monopolize the flow of information and through it to control the minds of the masses. In reality, though, those advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources, making efforts at control all the harder to achieve. The 24-hour cable news channels, the constantly updated news Web sites, news aggregators like Google News, post-it-yourself sites such as YouTube, ezines, blogs, and digital cameras have all helped feed an avalanche of information about world affairs. In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field. Through "milblogs," soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground. Even as the war has dragged on, it has given rise to a shelf-full of revealing books, written by not only generals and journalists but also captains, lieutenants, privates, national guardsmen, and even deserters.
In short, no war has been more fully chronicled or minutely analyzed than this one. <h3>And, as a result, the Bush administration has been unable to spin it as it would like.</h3> The spreading insurgency, the surging violence, the descent into chaos -- all have been thoroughly documented by journalists and others, and public support for the war has steadily ebbed as a result.
Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, <h3>than to controls imposed by the public itself. Americans -- reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive..... so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them.</h3> The Press -- ever attuned to public sensitivities -- will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.
Sometimes the public defines its limits by expressing outrage. The running of a story that seems too unsettling, or the airing of an image that seems too graphic, can set off a storm of protest -- from Fox News and the Weekly Standard, bloggers and radio talk-show hosts, military families and enraged citizens -- all denouncing the messenger as unpatriotic, un-American, even treasonous. In this swirl of menace and hate, even the most determined journalist can feel cowed..
..In the Arab news media, this ongoing slaughter receives constant coverage. In the American media, it receives very little. One can watch the evening news shows for nights on end, one can scour U.S. papers week after week, and not find any acknowledgment of the many civilians who have been killed by GIs. Writing in the Washington Post in July 2006, Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author of two highly regarded studies of U.S. foreign policy, expressed dismay at the indifference shown by both the military and the American public toward the ongoing slaughter of Iraqi noncombatants by U.S. soldiers. Observing that nobody has even bothered to keep a tally of the victims, Bacevich surmised from his own readings that the number "almost certainly runs in the tens of thousands." Aside from the obvious moral questions this raises, he went on, the violence against civilians has undermined America's policies in Iraq and the Mideast generally by "suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians -- and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally -- are expendable."
How can such a critical feature of the U.S. occupation remain so hidden from view? Because most Americans don't want to know about it. <h3>The books by Iraqi vets are filled with expressions of disbelief and rage at the lack of interest ordinary Americans show for what they've had to endure on the battlefield.</h3> In "Operation Homecoming," one returning Marine, who takes to drinking heavily in an effort to cope with the crushing guilt and revulsion he feels over how many people he's seen killed, fumes about how "you can't talk to them [ordinary Americans] about the horror of a dead child's lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end." <h3>Writing of her return home, Kayla Williams notes that the things most people seemed interested in were "beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez?</h3> How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducklings being fished out of a damn sewer drain -- while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen?" In "Generation Kill," by the journalist Evan Wright, a Marine corporal confides his anguish and anger over all the killings he has seen: "I think it's bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They're worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don't even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this -- all these women and children we're killing? Fuck no. Back home they're glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you."
"Generation Kill" recounts Wright's experiences traveling with a Marine platoon during the initial invasion. The platoon was at the very tip of the spear of the invasion force, and Wright got a uniquely close-up view of the fighting. In most U.S. news accounts, the invasion was portrayed as a relatively bloodless affair, with few American casualties and not many more civilian ones. Wright offers a starkly different tale. While expressing admiration for the Marines' many acts of valor and displays of compassion, he marvels at the U.S. military's ferocious fire-power and shudders at the startling number of civilians who fell victim to it. He writes of neighborhoods being leveled by mortar rounds, of villages being flattened by air strikes, of innocent men, women, and children being mowed down in free-fire zones. At first, Wright notes, the Marines found it easy, even exciting, to kill, but as the invasion progressed and the civilian toll mounted, many began to recoil, and some even broke down. "Do you realize the shit we've done here, the people we've killed?" one Marine agonizes. "Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."
In an interview he gave soon after the publication of his book, Wright said that his main aim in writing it was to deglamorize the war -- and war in general. The problem with American society, he said, "is we don't really understand what war is. Our understanding of it is too sanitized." For the past decade, he explained, "we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation" -- Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought in World War II -- "and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing." In "Generation Kill," he noted, he wanted to show how soldiers kill and wound civilians. In some cases, he said, the U.S. military justified such killings by the presence of Iraqi fedayeen fighters among the civilian population, but, he added, "when you see a little girl in pretty clothes that someone dressed her in, and she's smushed on the road with her legs cut off, you don't think, 'Well, you know, there were Fedayeen nearby and this is collateral damage. They're just civilians.'" The "real rule of war that you learn -- and this was true in World War II -- is that people who suffer the most are civilians," Wright said. "You're safest if you're a soldier. I'm haunted by the images of people that I saw killed by my country."
As Wright suggests, the sanitizing of news in wartime is nothing new. In most wars, nations that send their men and women off to fight in distant lands don't want to learn too much about the violence being committed in their name. Facing up to this would cause too much shame, would deal too great a blow to national self-esteem. If people were to become too aware of the butchery wars entail, they would become much less willing to fight them..
...In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don't. In the case of Iraq, the many instruments Orwell felt would be needed to keep people passive and uninformed -- the nonstop propaganda messages, the memory holes, the rewriting of history, Room 101 -- have proved unnecessary. The public has become its own collective Ministry of Truth -- a reality that, in many ways, is even more chilling than the one Orwell envisioned.
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<h3>So what do we make of the following information, fellow members? Should I stop, now, should I give it up? </h3>
Quote:
http://www.cpa-iraq.org/bios/zarqawi_bio.html
(Near the top of the page..)
....Long before the Iraq war, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was aware of a poisons and explosives training center in
northeastern Iraq that the al-Zarqawi network was running....
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Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=130169
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130169&page=1
<h3>Bush Calls Off Attack on Poison Gas Lab
Calls Off Operation to Take Out Al Qaeda-Sponsored Poison Gas Lab</h3>
By John McWethy
W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 20 (2002)
President Bush called off a planned covert raid into northern Iraq late last week that was aimed at a small group of al Qaeda
operatives who U.S. intelligence officials believed were experimenting with poison gas and deadly toxins, according to
administration officials.
The experiments were being run under orders from a senior al Qaeda official who was providing money and guidance from elsewhere in
the region.
U.S. officials familiar with the joint CIA and Pentagon operation said they were concerned they might be dealing with what could
have been a budding chemical weapons laboratory.
Intelligence sources said the al Qaeda operatives were under the protection of a small radical Kurdish group called Ansar al
Islam. It is a radical Islamic faction closely allied with al Qaeda that operates in a part of northern Iraq controlled by Kurds.
Since the Persian Gulf War, the United States has operated a so-called no-fly zone over much of northern Iraq to protect the Kurds
from Saddam Hussein's periodic crackdowns. <h3>U.S. officials say they have no evidence Saddam's government had any knowledge of the
al Qaeda operation.</h3>
Most of the experiments, sources say, involved a poison called ricin, a byproduct of the widely available castor bean plant.
"It is quite toxic, probably seven times more toxic than phosgene, which was a chemical weapon used in World War I," said Jonathan
Tucker, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterrey Institute of International
Studies.
Once a person is exposed to sufficient quantities, by inhalation or ingestion, ricin is deadly. "There is currently no treatment
and no vaccine for ricin exposure," Tucker explained.
It is especially appealing to a terrorist group because it is relatively easy to make, easy to handle and is not expensive.
As a potential weapon of terror, ricin is considered most deadly in a closed room or building, where nearly everyone could die.
In World War I, the British experimented by putting ricin in artillery shells and bombs, but they never used it on the
battlefield.
Tested on a Man
Intelligence sources told ABCNEWS there is evidence the terrorists tested ricin in water, as a powder and as an aerosol. They used
it to kill donkeys, chickens and at one point allegedly exposed a man in an Iraqi market.
They then followed him home and watched him die several days later, sources said.
As U.S. surveillance intensified, officials concluded the operation was not a major threat to the United States and definitely not
a sophisticated laboratory.
Instead, it appeared to be a few terrorists with relatively small amounts of poisons who were being encouraged to experiment by al
Qaeda managers elsewhere in the region.
<h3>In the final analysis, the White House, Pentagon and CIA concluded it was not worth risking American lives to go after these
people and not worth the adverse publicity that would surely follow any U.S. operation inside Iraq.</h3>
But as part of this operation, intelligence analysts did discover that al Qaeda money was again flowing, that new people had
stepped in to manage and encourage far-flung projects like this one offering glimpses of a terrorist network trying to put
itself back together again.
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Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200308060...on/6082423.htm
Posted on Sun, Oct. 27, 2002
Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy
by Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy
toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate
assessments of Iraq intelligence.
Administration hawks who have been leading proponents of invading Iraq oversee the Pentagon unit, which is producing its own
analyses of raw intelligence reports obtained from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies, the officials said.
The dispute pits hardliners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence
officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.
A major source of contention is the Pentagon's heavy reliance on data supplied by the Iraqi National Congress. The INC, the
largest group within the divided Iraqi opposition, has a mixed reputation in Washington and a huge stake in whether President Bush
makes good on his threat to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam by force. Its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, sees himself as a potential successor.
At issue in the battle are the most basic questions behind Bush's threatened invasion.
They include whether Iraq is linked to the al-Qaida terrorist network; whether Iraqi troops would fight or surrender; and under
what conditions Saddam would use chemical and biological weapons.
The feud also reveals long-standing divisions over U.S. intelligence capabilities.....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
U.S. Effort to Link Terrorists To Iraq Focuses on Jordanian
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
February 5, 2003; Page A17
Abu Musab Zarqawi, a 36-year-old, Jordanian-born Palestinian terrorist, has become the focus of the Bush administration's
allegations of a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presents his case against Saddam Hussein before the United Nations Security Council this
morning, "one small section on terrorists" will contain intelligence on links between the Iraqi leader and terrorists and will
feature Zarqawi, according to a senior administration official.
On Oct. 20, 2002, President Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati outlining the Iraqi threat. His example of high-level contacts
between Iraqi and al Qaeda leaders was "one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and
who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks." He was referring to Zarqawi, according to background
information provided by White House officials.
<h3>U.S. intelligence officials have said up to now that they had no direct evidence that Zarqawi met with Iraqi leaders, but last
October when that question was raised, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that it was "unrealistic" to assume that
Iraqi authorities did not know of Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad.</h3>
In his State of the Union speech last month, Bush said "evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements
by people now in custody" reveals that "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda." That
reference, too, was to Zarqawi, officials said.
Last Thursday, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage was asked
for evidence "about direct connections between Saddam and al Qaeda." He replied by describing a person "resident in Baghdad" who
"apparently orchestrated" the killing of Laurence Foley, a U.S. diplomat who was shot in Amman, Jordan, on Oct. 28. That, too, was
a reference to Zarqawi.
On Dec. 3, two suspects in the Foley killing were arrested by Jordanian police. Jordanian officials said the two, one a Jordanian
and the other a Libyan, confessed to killing Foley and belonging to al Qaeda. According to a senior administration official, the
two said they were "followers" of Zarqawi. Jordanian sources told reporters in Amman that the two said Zarqawi supplied them with
guns, explosives and money to carry out attacks on embassies and foreign diplomats.
Before the senators, Armitage implied that Saddam through Zarqawi was involved in the Foley killing by talking about "our belief
that if Saddam Hussein can pass them [weapons of mass destruction] to people who will do us ill without being caught, he will do
it."
Armitage added that Zarqawi "will be part of the information that Secretary Powell is going to impart in some more detail."
Zarqawi "is a significant bad guy in the al Qaeda network," a senior intelligence official said recently. But the Jordanian
appears to be the only individual named so far to make the link to Iraq after more than a year of major investigations in which "a
good deal of attention has been paid to what extent a connection may exist between al Qaeda and Iraq," another administration
official said yesterday.
Zarqawi, who was trained in Afghanistan when the fight was still against the Russians, emerged in 1999 when he was linked to a
foiled attempt by al Qaeda to bomb the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman as part of a millennium bombing plot. He was eventually
convicted in absentia and placed on Jordan's most-wanted list.
In 2001 he reportedly was wounded in the leg in Afghanistan while fighting against U.S. and Northern Alliance forces and sought
sanctuary in Iran. By that time, U.S. intelligence began describing him as an expert in chemical and biological weapons.
In March 2002, Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources described meetings in Lebanon at which al Qaeda leaders talked with
representatives of the Islamic Resistance Movement and Hezbollah, two groups that carried out terrorist operations against Israel.
Israeli sources have identified Zarqawi as an al Qaeda leader who was in Iran under the protection of Iranian security forces.
In June, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran of being "a haven for some terrorists leaving Afghanistan." U.S.
officials cited Zarqawi as an example of the people Rumsfeld said were being permitted to stay in Iran.
In August 2002, Jordan learned that Zarqawi was in Baghdad, where his wounded leg was amputated and replaced with an artificial
one, according to U.S. intelligence sources. When Jordan asked Baghdad to turn Zarqawi over as a wanted criminal, the al Qaeda
leader left the country, the official said. U.S. intelligence does not know where he went, sources said.
Since that time, Zarqawi has been identified by Kurds in Northern Iraq as someone who had met with the Ansar el-Islam terrorist
groups in that area that were developing biological weapons such as ricin. In January, after the arrests in London of suspected
terrorists also turned up traces of ricin, investigators said there appeared to be links to Zarqawi.
The chief of the German Federal Intelligence Service's terrorism section in November described Zarqawi as "a man to take note of
if it concerns Germany and Europe."
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Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0030205-1.html
For Immediate Release
February 5, 2003
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council
.... My friends, the information I have presented to you about these terrible weapons and about Iraq's continued flaunting of its
obligations under Security Council Resolution 1441 links to a subject I now want to spend a little bit of time on. And that has to
do with terrorism.
Colin Powell slide 38
Slide 38
Our concern is not just about these elicit weapons. It's the way that these elicit weapons can be connected to terrorists and
terrorist organizations that have no compunction about using such devices against innocent people around the world.
Iraq and terrorism go back decades. Baghdad trains Palestine Liberation Front members in small arms and explosives. Saddam uses
the Arab Liberation Front to funnel money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in order to prolong the Intifada. And
it's no secret that Saddam's own intelligence service was involved in dozens of attacks or attempted assassinations in the 1990s.
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.
Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago. Returning to Afghanistan in 2000, he
oversaw a terrorist training camp. 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 Iraq.
Colin Powell slide 39
Slide 39
POWELL: You see a picture of this camp.
The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons. Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a
pinch--image a pinch of salt--less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by
circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure. It is fatal.
Colin Powell slide 40
Slide 40
Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled
Iraq. But Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of
Iraq. In 2000 this agent offered Al Qaida safe haven in the region. After we swept Al Qaida from Afghanistan, some of its members
accepted this safe haven. They remain their today.
Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical
treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day click to show .
During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These Al Qaida
affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network,
and they've now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.
Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaida. These denials are simply not credible. Last year an Al Qaida associate
bragged that the situation in Iraq was, quote, ``good,'' that Baghdad could be transited quickly.
We know these affiliates are connected to Zarqawi because they remain even today in regular contact with his direct subordinates,
including the poison cell plotters, and they are involved in moving more than money and materiale.
Last year, two suspected Al Qaida operatives were arrested crossing from Iraq into Saudi Arabia. They were linked to associates of
the Baghdad cell, and one of them received training in Afghanistan on how to use cyanide. From his terrorist network in Iraq,
Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond.
We, in the United States, all of us at the State Department, and the Agency for International Development--we all lost a dear
friend with the cold-blooded murder of Mr. Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan last October, a despicable act was committed that day.
The assassination of an individual whose sole mission was to assist the people of Jordan. The captured assassin says his cell
received money and weapons from Zarqawi for that murder.
POWELL: After the attack, an associate of the assassin left Jordan to go to Iraq to obtain weapons and explosives for further
operations. Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts of Zarqawi or of any of his associates. Again,
these protests are not credible. We know of Zarqawi's activities in Baghdad. I described them earlier.
And now let me add one other fact. We asked a friendly security service to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi and
providing information about him and his close associates. This service contacted Iraqi officials twice, and we passed details that
should have made it easy to find Zarqawi. The network remains in Baghdad. Zarqawi still remains at large to come and go.
As my colleagues around this table and as the citizens they represent in Europe know, Zarqawi's terrorism is not confined to the
Middle East. Zarqawi and his network have plotted terrorist actions against countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Italy,
Germany and Russia.
Colin Powell slide 41
Slide 41
According to detainee Abuwatia (ph), who graduated from Zarqawi's terrorist camp in Afghanistan, tasks at least nine North African
extremists from 2001 to travel to Europe to conduct poison and explosive attacks.
Since last year, members of this network have been apprehended in France, Britain, Spain and Italy. By our last count, 116
operatives connected to this global web have been arrested.
Colin Powell slide 42
Slide 42
The chart you are seeing shows the network in Europe. We know about this European network, and we know about its links to Zarqawi,
because the detainee who provided the information about the targets also provided the names of members of the network.
Three of those he identified by name were arrested in France last December. In the apartments of the terrorists, authorities found
circuits for explosive devices and a list of ingredients to make toxins.
The detainee who helped piece this together says the plot also targeted Britain. Later evidence, again, proved him right. When the
British unearthed a cell there just last month, one British police officer was murdered during the disruption of the cell.
Colin Powell slide 43
Slide 43
We also know that Zarqawi's colleagues have been active in the Pankisi Gorge, Georgia and in Chechnya, Russia. The plotting to
which they are linked is not mere chatter. Members of Zarqawi's network say their goal was to kill Russians with toxins.
We are not surprised that Iraq is harboring Zarqawi and his subordinates. This understanding builds on decades long experience
with respect to ties between Iraq and Al Qaida.
POWELL: Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaida source tells us that Saddam and bin
Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad. Early Al Qaida ties were forged
by secret, high-level intelligence service contacts with Al Qaida, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with Al Qaida.
We know members of both organizations met repeatedly and have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early
1990s. In 1996, a foreign security service tells us, that bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and
later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence service.
Saddam became more interested as he saw Al Qaida's appalling attacks. A detained Al Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more
willing to assist Al Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Saddam was also impressed by Al Qaida's
attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs
in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to Al Qaida members on
document forgery.
From the late 1990s until 2001, the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan played the role of liaison to the Al Qaida organization.
Some believe, some claim these contacts do not amount to much. They say Saddam Hussein's secular tyranny and Al Qaida's religious
tyranny do not mix. I am not comforted by this thought. Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and Al Qaida together, enough
so Al Qaida could learn how to build more sophisticated bombs and learn how to forge documents, and enough so that Al Qaida could
turn to Iraq for help in acquiring expertise on weapons of mass destruction.
And the record of Saddam Hussein's cooperation with other Islamist terrorist organizations is clear. Hamas, for example, opened an
office in Baghdad in 1999, and Iraq has hosted conferences attended by Palestine Islamic Jihad. These groups are at the forefront
of sponsoring suicide attacks against Israel.
Al Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As with the story of Zarqawi and his network,
I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaida.
Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it.
This senior Al Qaida terrorist was responsible for one of Al Qaida's training camps in Afghanistan.
POWELL: His information comes first-hand from his personal involvement at senior levels of Al Qaida. He says bin Laden and his top
deputy in Afghanistan, deceased Al Qaida leader Muhammad Atif (ph), did not believe that Al Qaida labs in Afghanistan were capable
enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of
Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.
The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two Al Qaida associates
beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between
1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi
officials as successful.
As I said at the outset, none of this should come as a surprise to any of us. Terrorism has been a tool used by Saddam for
decades. Saddam was a supporter of terrorism long before these terrorist networks had a name. And this support continues. The
nexus of poisons and terror is new. The nexus of Iraq and terror is old. The combination is lethal.
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.
When we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides weapons of mass destruction and provides haven and
active support for terrorists, we are not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are
confronting an even more frightening future........
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Quote:
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=8&gl=us
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The, Feb 7, 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 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.
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. "Why
have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.
<h3>"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, some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound
in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.
"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. </h3>
"If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."....
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Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200304012...?bid=3&pid=371
Capital Games By David Corn
Powell's One Good Reason To Bomb Iraq--UPDATED
02/06/2003 @ 12:12am
.....But here's the first question that struck me after Powell's presentation: <h3>why hasn't the United States bombed the so-called Zarqawi camp shown in the slide? The administration obviously knows where it is, and Powell spoke of it in the present tense.</h3> If it is an outpost of chemical weapons and explosives development for al Qaeda, why not take it out, especially since it is situated within a part of Iraq uncontrolled by any national government? The United States has fighter jets patrolling the northern no-fly zone in Iraq. Cruise missiles can easily reach the area. This part of Powell's briefing reinforced a crucial point: al Qaeda is the pressing danger at the moment. The most direct way to strike al Qaeda would be to hit this camp, rather than invade Iraq. So bombs away, but only for this target--regardless of what the French might say.
[UPDATE: After Powell's presentation, it seemed that his information on the Iraq-Zarqawi-al Qaeda nexus indeed was slim. The Washington Post interviewed "a number of European officials and U.S. terrorism experts and reported that "Powell's description" of this link "appeared to have been carefully drawn to imply more than it actually said. 'You're left to just hear the nouns, and put them together,' said Judith S. Yaphe, a senior felow at the National Defense University who worked for 20 years as a a CIA analyst." The newspaper noted, "A senior administration official with knowledge of the intelligence information said that evidence had not yet established that Baghdad had any operational control over Zarqawi's netowork, or over any transfer of funds or materiel to it." And days following Powell's address, Ansar al Islam allowed reporters to visit the camp that Powell had connected to Zarqawi and described as a poisons and explosives factory. The New York Times' C.J.Chivers, one of the journalists permitted into the camp, reported that he and his colleagues "found a wholly unimpressive place--a small and largely undeveloped cluster of buildings that appeared to lack substantial industrial capacity. For example, the structures did not have plumbing and had only the limited electricity supplied by a generator." The State Department stuck by Powell's description. But could it be that the reason the United States has not bombed this camp is that it's not worth bombing? ]
Powell, for his purposes, made good use of the material he had. He demonstrated that Saddam was defying the United Nations. He described patterns of behavior that would allow a reasonable person to assume that Iraq has been trying to hide some kinds of chemical and biological weapons. But he shared no hard data confirming Iraq has these evil goods in dangerous supplies. (He did note that four defectors have said Saddam has developed mobile bio-weapons labs in trucks that cannot be easily detected. Defector testimony is traditionally iffy, but this claim deserves further investigation.) Powell suggested but did not substantiate the existence of an al Qaeda-Iraq collaboration. .Such a presentation should have been the start of a debate over what to do, <h3>rather than the initiation of an endgame that seems predetermined.</h3>
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Quote:
http://drezner.blogspot.com/2003_03_...r_archive.html
March 12, 2003
Posted by Daniel
IRAQ, AL QAEDA, AND A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE SECURITY COUNCIL: This <a href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12762-2003Mar11?language=printer">Washington Post story</a> provides some excellent detail on the precise link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The first few grafs:
"Most of the estimated 100 Arab extremists reported to have found a haven in this rocky corner of northern Iraq began arriving early last year, a few weeks after losing their camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
The Halabja Valley, their destination, is one of the more obscure places in the world, about 35 miles southeast of Sulaymaniyah and close to the mountainous border with Iran. A U-shaped enclave just inside Iraq had been taken over by radical Islamic Kurds, the Ansar al-Islam, who fielded an estimated 900 fighters and regarded the two secular Kurdish organizations who run the rest of northern Iraq as their enemies.
The Ansar-run pocket, although only 10 to 15 square miles, was the ideal place to hide out. Residents at nearby Anab, just north of Halabja on the road to Sulaymaniyah, noticed how intently their new neighbors guarded their privacy but did nothing to disturb it. The newcomers, they say, kept to a village reserved for Arabs, appeared in the market only to buy provisions and buried their dead in their own cemetery.
Since then...Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have highlighted the foreign fighters' presence in the Ansar enclave in an effort to link Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and the government of President Saddam Hussein, which controls Iraq south of the Kurdish-administered zone but has little influence here. Citing interrogations of Ansar members who were taken prisoner, Kurdish political officials confirm that the group sent a steady stream of trainees to the camps that al Qaeda operated in Afghanistan until U.S. forces ended Taliban rule there at the end of 2001."
Now, this piece makes two things clear. First, contrary to many skeptics' assertions, there is an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. Second, it's also clear that Saddam Hussein has little to do with this presence. At worst, Hussein's policy on Al Qaeda might be characterized as benign neglect -- he's not helping them but he doesn't mind them being in parts of Iraq he can't control. There might be other reasons to support regime change in Iraq, but the Al Qaeda connection is a weak reed.
However, there's military action short of regime change. At a minimum, the Post story would seem to justify an offensive to knock out Ansar al-Islam and retake the Halabja Valley. This leads to an intriguing question. <h3>Given the obvious link between achieving this objective and the war on terror, and given the assertions by France and others that credible evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda would justify use of force, would the Security Council be willing to approve U.S. military action in this area?</h3> [So you think this would be an acceptable substitute to a whole-scale invasion?--ed. No, I still support an invasion. But securing Security Council support for this phase of operations might be an good stop-gap proposal].
This would be an excellent test of where exactly the French and Germans stand. Is their opposition to Iraq based on a blind determination to counter U.S. power, or is there some nuance to their stance?
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<h3>So what did Powell's Feb., 2003 UN presentation to the entire world, to justify invading Iraq, contain that was accurate?</h3>
Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/08/19/powell.un/
Former aide: Powell WMD speech 'lowest point in my life'
August 23, 2005
(CNN) -- A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.
"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."...
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Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/...awi/index.html
..A U.S. official said Tuesday that al-Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for treatment of a leg injury but, contrary to previous reports, appears not to have had a leg amputated. The official would not discuss the reason for the change in assessment.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...641717320.html
Who killed Nick Berg?
May 29, 2004
....Also, the US Secretary of State, Powell, has said that al-Zarqawi was fitted with a prosthetic leg in a Baghdad hospital, yet the tape shows no evidence of a limp. CNN staff familiar with al-Zarqawi's voice have been quoted as saying the voice does not sound like his....
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ15Ak02.html
Oct 15, 2004
Zarqawi - Bush's man for all seasons
By Pepe Escobar
.......Cheney also insisted that Zarqawi could not have had his leg treated in a Baghdad hospital without Saddam's Mukhabarat (secret service) knowing it. But the leg story is a mess. US intelligence thought that Zarqawi had lost a leg in Afghanistan in 2002. But then, last May, they concluded that he still had both legs. The Bush administration's "evidence" of an al-Qaeda-Saddam link via Zarqawi may be an intercepted phone call by Zarqawi from a Baghdad hospital in 2002, while his leg was being attended to. But then "Zarqawi" shows up in a video with both legs in the 2004 beheading of hostage Nick Berg.
The truth is more straightforward. Zarqawi had no connection either with bin Laden or with Saddam. Secular Saddam hosting an Islamic radical, of all people, at a time when the American campaign against the "axis of evil" had reached a fever-pitch is a ludicrous proposition. A newspaper editor in the Sunni triangle says Zarqawi may have gone on an underground trip to Baghdad to have his leg operated on before scurrying back to Kurdistan. And sources in Peshawar confirm to Asia Times Online that Zarqawi never took the all-significant bayat (oath of allegiance) and so never struck a formal alliance with bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership...
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Are we all dead inside? Where are the demands to bring Bush and Cheney to justice?
Last edited by host; 12-13-2007 at 03:26 AM..
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