striker_29
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2001
Ewe r difenitly smart enuf to talk about the precidence brains
Impeach Bush
- Thread starter Black Death
- Start date
- Status
Ewe r difenitly smart enuf to talk about the precidence brains
Red Regal T
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 24, 2001
Originally posted by Randy Greenoe
Originally posted by lburou
At least Bush gets his at home.
No doubt he will take care of that single handidly also!
FIRST.......THAT'S A LIE AND YOU KNOW IT. MORE FOR, THAN AGAINST.
SECOND..........WE ARE THE COUNTRY UNDER THREAT. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT ANY OTHER COUNTRY THINKS. IT REALLY GALLS THEM THAT WE COULD DO IT ALONE IF NEED BE.
THIRD..........YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!
OH, AND THIS AUTOMORPH CREEP. HE'S ALREADY STATED IN A PREVIOUS POST THAT WE HAD 9/11 COMING. I DON'T EVEN THINK LIBERALS BELIEVE THAT SO WHAT'S THAT MAKE HIM....
striker_29
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2001
At this point, if you still cant see the truth about Saddam and his WMD's, its because you simply dont want to. Your either so Anti Bush that you go against anything he says, or you just cant face reality. There are tons of biological and chemical weapons we KNOW he has. Hell we gave many of them to him! But he cant (won't) show us where they are now. He says "trust me they're gone"
I choose to trust President Bush. Not to mention the missilles, the chemical spraying drone, etc the inspectors happened to find. All the intelligence Colin Powell presented a couple of weeks ago. If you dont believe it now, you simply dont want to.
JDSfastGN
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2001
Originally posted by striker_29
At this point, if you still cant see the truth about Saddam and his WMD's, its because you simply dont want to. Your either so Anti Bush that you go against anything he says, or you just cant face reality. There are tons of biological and chemical weapons we KNOW he has. Hell we gave many of them to him! But he cant (won't) show us where they are now. He says "trust me they're gone"
I see that he is a bad person and a horrible dictator but you can tell me "HE HAS WMD" all you want but that does not make them there. Show me where. Bush kept saying we know he has them, and was going to show us this conclusive proof. Yet when it came down to it, the proof was a joke. You can't tell me a satalite photo of a building and a few truck convinces you, if so then I have some swamp land for sale. The drone they have found is a nothing special at all, it can not go very far and has not been proven to be anykind of WMD, maybe it can hold a chemical weapon, but so can a glass jar. If you want to base a decision on whats there and whats not based on "we know he has them" you do that. But for me I need something more solid for me to say its all for the good of the people to send our soldiers into Iraq. It will not prevent more terrorist attacks. The truth to me is something I want to see first hand. The government spends all this money on the CIA and other intelligence technology and they can not show me where the WMD are but oh they are there. Telling me there are WMD is not proof, its called propaganda. And I love how the term WMD keeps evolving into what we want it to be. A drone aircraft is not a WMD. If so i guess they better ground any cropdusters they have over there. I never said I was completely against war over there, i made my case as to why I thought we should be a little more careful, and you picked one sentence out of my whole paragraph to ridicule. You people telling anybody they are un-American and should leave are being more un-american than anybody. Also some of you hard core Republicans that vote a straight ticket sure are starting to sound like you want this country to be a dictatorship, saying there shoud only be one party and we should kick out people that have a different veiw than us. The government has lied to go to war before (Vietnam, anybody watch the Pentigan papers on FX?) why shouldn't people be sceptical when it involves the lives of 200,000 soldiers?
JD's, we know he has them because HE ADMITTED TO HAVING THEM. He has since not showed proof that they were destroyed. Oh yea, he only admitted to having them, after UN inspectors scoured Iraq looking for 8 years an found nothing, Sadaams son defected and told the world, and then Iraq admitted to it. In 8 years the inspectors fund nothing!!!!!. They are lookingfor needle in a haystack.
Funny how some people wuld beleive Sadaam beforethey would beleive George W.......
Funny how some people wuld beleive Sadaam beforethey would beleive George W.......
striker_29
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2001
JDSfastGN,
If you want to take the gloves off we can. I did not say you are un american, those were YOUR words. So do not put words in my mouth. Being a misinformed, whinny, liberal doesnt necessarily make you un American. Now once again, I will tell you that we KNOW he has WMD's. VX gas, ricin, anthrax. He gassed his own people, killing thousands of kurds. We gave him these weopons when he was in a war with Iran, who was a bigger enemy of ours at the time. Remember the hostages?? No of course not, you werent around then. You say you need solid proof, which obviously means you want to see a truck load of vx out in the open for everyone to see. How do expect Bush to do that right now (ie before the war). The inpectors are useless for that, Saddam certainly isnt going to produce that evidence himself is he? How exactly do YOU suggest we produce a truckload of gas thats buried in the desert so that we may satisfy you? I mean after all thats whats important right, we need to satisfy you You'll see the PROOF when our soldiers go in and get it. If the truth to you is "something you must see first hand", you better catch the next flight to Baghdad. Be sure to stand next to any military installation, you'll get a good whif of the Ricin, when our jdam hits the compound. Thanks for your knowledgable contribution to this worthless thread
If you want to take the gloves off we can. I did not say you are un american, those were YOUR words. So do not put words in my mouth. Being a misinformed, whinny, liberal doesnt necessarily make you un American. Now once again, I will tell you that we KNOW he has WMD's. VX gas, ricin, anthrax. He gassed his own people, killing thousands of kurds. We gave him these weopons when he was in a war with Iran, who was a bigger enemy of ours at the time. Remember the hostages?? No of course not, you werent around then. You say you need solid proof, which obviously means you want to see a truck load of vx out in the open for everyone to see. How do expect Bush to do that right now (ie before the war). The inpectors are useless for that, Saddam certainly isnt going to produce that evidence himself is he? How exactly do YOU suggest we produce a truckload of gas thats buried in the desert so that we may satisfy you? I mean after all thats whats important right, we need to satisfy you
You'll see the PROOF when our soldiers go in and get it. If the truth to you is "something you must see first hand", you better catch the next flight to Baghdad. Be sure to stand next to any military installation, you'll get a good whif of the Ricin, when our jdam hits the compound. Thanks for your knowledgable contribution to this worthless thread- Joined
- May 9, 2002
Sadam has been involved....From non-US sources
From: GuardianUnlimitedArchive
'Saddam controlled the camp'
The Iraqi connection
As evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to the 11 September hijackers begins to emerge, David Rose gathers testimony from former Baghdad agents and the CIA to reveal the secrets of Saddam's terror training camp
War on Terrorism: Observer special
David Rose
ObserverSunday November 11, 2001
His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre. Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer has learnt that Atta's talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has 'credible information' that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. They are believed to be Atta's closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the 'German cell ' who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s. In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: 'Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure. In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers have responded to this prospect with 'horror', arguing that an attack on Saddam Hussein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western anger across Middle East. Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, heads a clique of determined, powerful hawks, most of them outside the administration - among them James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. The doves argue that an al-Qaeda-Iraq link is improbable, given the sharp ideological differences between Saddam's secular Baathism and Islamic fundamentalism. They also say that claims of Iraqi involvement are being driven by the agenda of the hawks - a group which has for years been seeking to finish the job left undone at the end of the Gulf war in 1991. Nevertheless, Saddam does not lack a plausible motive: revenge for his expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, and for the continued sanctions and Western bombing of his country ever since. In this febrile atmosphere, hard information about who ordered the 11 September attacks remains astonishingly scarce. US investigators have traced the movements of the 19 hijackers going back years, and have amassed a detailed picture of who did what inside the conspiracy. Yet what lay beyond the hijackers is an intelligence black hole. If they had a support network in America, none of its members has been traced, and among the hundreds of telephone records and emails the investigators have recovered, nothing gets close to identifying those ultimately responsible. It still seems almost certain, intelligence sources say, that parts of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network actively backed the conspiracy: about half of the estimated $500,000 the hijackers used reportedly came from al-Qaeda sources, while some of the terrorists are believed to have passed through bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, evidence is emerging of direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers in particular, and with radical Islamic terror groups in general. In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.' Last night, Whitehall sources made clear that parts of British intelligence had reached the same conclusion. Uncomfortable as it may be, this reassessment is having a political impact. Last month, when the CIA was still telling him it did not believe Iraq was involved in 11 September, Powell said there were 'no plans' to attack Iraq. Last Thursday, speaking in Kuwait, he abruptly reversed his earlier pronouncements. He promised that after dealing with bin Laden and Afghanistan, 'we will turn our attention to terrorism throughout the world, and nations such as Iraq'. The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000 of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means. Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details. 'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one source said. The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations), gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing. According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses. Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists such as Mohamed Atta. Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad, expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi, presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan. Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings] happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.' Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg, only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely 24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience. On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two further such meetings in the months before 11 September. The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers, al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest 'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted to oil exports and busting economic sanctions. The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years. He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden. The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle', Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer - codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known - Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad. However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs. Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.' Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.' One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five. In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims: 'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak".' Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners' part of the camp. Yesterday their story received important corroboration from Charles Duelfer, former vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team. Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. 'Of course we automatically took out the word "counter",' he said. 'I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very good at recognising long-term strategic threats.' At the end of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence Secretary, told reporters there was 'no evidence' that Iraq was involved in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten. Many still suspect the anthrax which has so far killed four people in America has an ultimate Iraqi origin: in contrast to recent denials made by senior FBI officials, CIA sources say there simply is not enough material to be sure. However, it does not look likely that the latest anthrax sample, sent to a newspaper in Karachi, can have come from the source recently posited by the FBI - a right-wing US militant. 'The sophistication of the stuff that has been found represents a level of technique and knowledge that in the past has been associated only with governments,' Duelfer said. 'If it's not Iraq, there aren't many alternatives.' If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a State Department spokesman after Powell's briefing by the Czech leader on Friday: 'If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Centre attacks to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.' At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush's closest advisers - his father, Powell and Vice President **** Cheney, to name but three - made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war without toppling Saddam. The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two months would seem like a trivial prelude.
Additional reporting by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Kate Connolly in Berlin.
From: GuardianUnlimitedArchive
'Saddam controlled the camp'
The Iraqi connection
As evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to the 11 September hijackers begins to emerge, David Rose gathers testimony from former Baghdad agents and the CIA to reveal the secrets of Saddam's terror training camp
War on Terrorism: Observer special
David Rose
ObserverSunday November 11, 2001
His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre. Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer has learnt that Atta's talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has 'credible information' that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. They are believed to be Atta's closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the 'German cell ' who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s. In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: 'Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure. In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers have responded to this prospect with 'horror', arguing that an attack on Saddam Hussein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western anger across Middle East. Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, heads a clique of determined, powerful hawks, most of them outside the administration - among them James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. The doves argue that an al-Qaeda-Iraq link is improbable, given the sharp ideological differences between Saddam's secular Baathism and Islamic fundamentalism. They also say that claims of Iraqi involvement are being driven by the agenda of the hawks - a group which has for years been seeking to finish the job left undone at the end of the Gulf war in 1991. Nevertheless, Saddam does not lack a plausible motive: revenge for his expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, and for the continued sanctions and Western bombing of his country ever since. In this febrile atmosphere, hard information about who ordered the 11 September attacks remains astonishingly scarce. US investigators have traced the movements of the 19 hijackers going back years, and have amassed a detailed picture of who did what inside the conspiracy. Yet what lay beyond the hijackers is an intelligence black hole. If they had a support network in America, none of its members has been traced, and among the hundreds of telephone records and emails the investigators have recovered, nothing gets close to identifying those ultimately responsible. It still seems almost certain, intelligence sources say, that parts of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network actively backed the conspiracy: about half of the estimated $500,000 the hijackers used reportedly came from al-Qaeda sources, while some of the terrorists are believed to have passed through bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, evidence is emerging of direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers in particular, and with radical Islamic terror groups in general. In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.' Last night, Whitehall sources made clear that parts of British intelligence had reached the same conclusion. Uncomfortable as it may be, this reassessment is having a political impact. Last month, when the CIA was still telling him it did not believe Iraq was involved in 11 September, Powell said there were 'no plans' to attack Iraq. Last Thursday, speaking in Kuwait, he abruptly reversed his earlier pronouncements. He promised that after dealing with bin Laden and Afghanistan, 'we will turn our attention to terrorism throughout the world, and nations such as Iraq'. The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000 of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means. Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details. 'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one source said. The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations), gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing. According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses. Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists such as Mohamed Atta. Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad, expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi, presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan. Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings] happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.' Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg, only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely 24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience. On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two further such meetings in the months before 11 September. The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers, al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest 'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted to oil exports and busting economic sanctions. The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years. He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden. The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle', Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer - codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known - Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad. However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs. Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.' Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.' One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five. In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims: 'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak".' Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners' part of the camp. Yesterday their story received important corroboration from Charles Duelfer, former vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team. Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. 'Of course we automatically took out the word "counter",' he said. 'I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very good at recognising long-term strategic threats.' At the end of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence Secretary, told reporters there was 'no evidence' that Iraq was involved in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten. Many still suspect the anthrax which has so far killed four people in America has an ultimate Iraqi origin: in contrast to recent denials made by senior FBI officials, CIA sources say there simply is not enough material to be sure. However, it does not look likely that the latest anthrax sample, sent to a newspaper in Karachi, can have come from the source recently posited by the FBI - a right-wing US militant. 'The sophistication of the stuff that has been found represents a level of technique and knowledge that in the past has been associated only with governments,' Duelfer said. 'If it's not Iraq, there aren't many alternatives.' If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a State Department spokesman after Powell's briefing by the Czech leader on Friday: 'If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Centre attacks to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.' At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush's closest advisers - his father, Powell and Vice President **** Cheney, to name but three - made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war without toppling Saddam. The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two months would seem like a trivial prelude.
Additional reporting by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Kate Connolly in Berlin.
MeanBuicks
Scaring the neighbors!
- Joined
- May 24, 2001
Hmmm. Anybody with opposing views is a moron, huh? That's the same attitude Saddam has. If his cronies, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't agree with him, he has them killed. You're two peas in a pod.
lyonsd
Active Member
- Joined
- May 24, 2001
Originally posted by automorph
Yeah
How did Bush #$%@ up the economy? It started going bad before Clinton left office. Please explain to me how Bush is responsible.
It's been 12 YEARS since the UN passed a resolution for Saddam to disarm. He still has not. It's been 2½ YEARS since 9/11. Tell me how we're "rushing too qucikly". PLEASE.
How many "1 last chances" are we supposed to give him?
We are a sovereign nation. We do not need the permission of the UN for anything - especially our own defense. Plus the UN has pretty much shown itself to be a joke.
Then why don't you tell us how Dubya deceived everybody to be President.
It's a given that Saddam has them. He's used them. He's admitted to having them. It's not up to us to "find" them. It's up to Saddam to prove that he no longer has them. That's what the resolution is about.
Countries like Iraq can supply terrorists with weapons, funding, a "base", etc... That's why there's no longer a Taliban. In fact, Saddam even pays Palestinian suicide bombers' families large sums of money.
Isn't it better to PREVENT something like 9/11 than letting it happen and then reacting to it?
It'll do them more harm. We send a lot of money to Russia. We buy a lot of crap from China. We're not going to lost them as "allies".
Then where are they? Saddam has not given us any evidence that he has destroyed them. Don't you get it? The burden of proof is not on the US or the UN. It's on Saddam. We don't have to prove he has them - that's already an established fact. Saddam has to prove that he no longer has them. And after 12 years of defiance and thumbing his nose at us and the UN, he has not held up his end of the deal.
So after 12 years, why should we give him any more time? Especially when he's been linked to terrorists groups? Time is exactly what he wants.
Black Death
New Member
- Joined
- May 27, 2001
One other thing city boy, I'd be careful calling people hicks just because they live outside the city limit. I'd like to arrange a come to jesus meeting with you out behind the barn. Grow up. [/B][/QUOTE]
I thaught hicks keep it in the family?
I live on long island
Yet agian you people dont know how to read.
Your all praising bush like hes the right man for the job, hes jsut going to do what his father did, no action at all if anything. If we were going to fight we didnt have to wait an almost 2 years since 9/11. 9/11 should have been the retaliation date.
I like French fries
i like French kissing
and i sure as hell like French toast
plus im Italian, normally i would have a nasty attitude towards the them, but they have nothing to do to why we have been getting hit. The government is to weak. The terrorists know it. If it were up to me the whole middle east would have been a pile of rubbish already. Did the japanese have to declare war? They jsut attacked, why does the US government have to consult the UN to attack? But they still do it, and you people cant see how weak they are. If your going to take action do it at the right time. and right now isnt the right time, Disarm them as much as possible. (AND KEEP THEM DISARMED)Most muslims in iraq sleep with an AK under thier pillow. That means everyone there is a threat regardless if there is innocence. I dont care. The job should have already been done. You cant just rush in and expect to come out alive. lot of people are going to die because of stupid decisions.
Dont blame them for the governments incomitance. They and many other countrys have they're own problems (economic or domestic) and what do they have to offer, im sure if they were as strong as the US or England they would help.
RIGHT Now , march 17th shouldnt be rushed, and the if it was going to be done it should have been done at a better time . yes we gave him to much time but. this "war" is going to be another waste to put us in debt. I bet you anything Bush is a whimp like his father.
i say hit saddam where it actually hurts, in the wallet. Take his weapons, stop trade routes for smuggling, leave him defencless. If we go to war now it will all be for nothing
Bush also wants to raise taxes. The poor have no money at all, the middle class the taxes will be raised so high, and during war, personal freedom is greatly deminished. So whats left. the opinion of the upper class( the rich) They will be our voice? excuse me. Not going to happen while im still alive.
I thaught hicks keep it in the family?
I live on long island
Yet agian you people dont know how to read.
Your all praising bush like hes the right man for the job, hes jsut going to do what his father did, no action at all if anything. If we were going to fight we didnt have to wait an almost 2 years since 9/11. 9/11 should have been the retaliation date.
I like French fries
i like French kissing
and i sure as hell like French toast
plus im Italian, normally i would have a nasty attitude towards the them, but they have nothing to do to why we have been getting hit. The government is to weak. The terrorists know it. If it were up to me the whole middle east would have been a pile of rubbish already. Did the japanese have to declare war? They jsut attacked, why does the US government have to consult the UN to attack? But they still do it, and you people cant see how weak they are. If your going to take action do it at the right time. and right now isnt the right time, Disarm them as much as possible. (AND KEEP THEM DISARMED)Most muslims in iraq sleep with an AK under thier pillow. That means everyone there is a threat regardless if there is innocence. I dont care. The job should have already been done. You cant just rush in and expect to come out alive. lot of people are going to die because of stupid decisions.
Dont blame them for the governments incomitance. They and many other countrys have they're own problems (economic or domestic) and what do they have to offer, im sure if they were as strong as the US or England they would help.
RIGHT Now , march 17th shouldnt be rushed, and the if it was going to be done it should have been done at a better time . yes we gave him to much time but. this "war" is going to be another waste to put us in debt. I bet you anything Bush is a whimp like his father.
i say hit saddam where it actually hurts, in the wallet. Take his weapons, stop trade routes for smuggling, leave him defencless. If we go to war now it will all be for nothing
Bush also wants to raise taxes. The poor have no money at all, the middle class the taxes will be raised so high, and during war, personal freedom is greatly deminished. So whats left. the opinion of the upper class( the rich) They will be our voice? excuse me. Not going to happen while im still alive.
Randy Greenoe
Member
- Joined
- May 24, 2001
Originally posted by Red Regal T
FIRST.......THAT'S A LIE AND YOU KNOW IT. MORE FOR, THAN AGAINST.
SECOND..........WE ARE THE COUNTRY UNDER THREAT. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT ANY OTHER COUNTRY THINKS. IT REALLY GALLS THEM THAT WE COULD DO IT ALONE IF NEED BE.
THIRD..........YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!
OH, AND THIS AUTOMORPH CREEP. HE'S ALREADY STATED IN A PREVIOUS POST THAT WE HAD 9/11 COMING. I DON'T EVEN THINK LIBERALS BELIEVE THAT SO WHAT'S THAT MAKE HIM....
Watch the names or moderator will probably step in! And how did this end up wih my earlier quote?
striker_29
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2001
Dude, what planet are you on?? Put the crack pipe down at once!!!
striker_29
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2001
Perhaps you should take a look at your sig, it might be closer to the truth than you think.
Black Death
New Member
- Joined
- May 27, 2001
Thats a lyric from a song, by "suicidal tendancies" a very good band. Not saying im suicidal, cause alot of you like to make up your own truths. plus u dont think taxes are goign to be raised? where is the money for this war going to come from? the rich?!??!?! are you so blind and ignorant. that your inpervious to everything? I did not know you were jesus himself. perhaps i should bow down. Why do you think im on crack. Maybe because im considering an alternate truth? if you think about it a little does it all seem so outrageous?
I agree with Zams "close doors" policy. Alquada is all over the world. I got a strong feeling its here too. When there is a serious threat would you jsut ignore it? something is seriously wrong there. If we do go to war. Why should we be the ones to "rebuild" iraq. ugg i cant think anymore. must be that crack
I agree with Zams "close doors" policy. Alquada is all over the world. I got a strong feeling its here too. When there is a serious threat would you jsut ignore it? something is seriously wrong there. If we do go to war. Why should we be the ones to "rebuild" iraq. ugg i cant think anymore. must be that crack
JDSfastGN
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2001
Oh boy and the childish name calling begins If you would read my post with out blinders on you would stop manipulating words that I did not say.
Here are a few Quotes from my paragraph
("What Bush has done in Afganistan is great, and he has handled it well."
"I am a sceptic that thinks saddam needs to be taken care of but also does not want to burn bridges and hurt our country even worse in the process.")
I do not hate Bush and am not anti-war, I simply am skeptical.
And for the record Bush is just as much a polition as any other president has been, thats how it works. I never said he lied to get into office i simply stated that he is probably not honest about everything. Is the fact that Enron was a major contributor to the campain for presidency and the fact that the head guys are still free today just a coincidence. How about how Haliburton will be one of the biggest players in the new found oil in Iraq after the war. Who was the Head guy there? **** Cheny! Bush is also a big oil man. I am not saying this is the reason for war, but they are looking out for themselves just as much as Clinton or any other president has in the past. I am done here it is getting childish with the name calling and BS.
If you would read my post with out blinders on you would stop manipulating words that I did not say.Here are a few Quotes from my paragraph
("What Bush has done in Afganistan is great, and he has handled it well."
"I am a sceptic that thinks saddam needs to be taken care of but also does not want to burn bridges and hurt our country even worse in the process.")
I do not hate Bush and am not anti-war, I simply am skeptical.
And for the record Bush is just as much a polition as any other president has been, thats how it works. I never said he lied to get into office i simply stated that he is probably not honest about everything. Is the fact that Enron was a major contributor to the campain for presidency and the fact that the head guys are still free today just a coincidence. How about how Haliburton will be one of the biggest players in the new found oil in Iraq after the war. Who was the Head guy there? **** Cheny! Bush is also a big oil man. I am not saying this is the reason for war, but they are looking out for themselves just as much as Clinton or any other president has in the past. I am done here it is getting childish with the name calling and BS.
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2001
..LMFAO, at work, almost fell out of the chair.
This thread is amazing, it is just full of opinions, and politics that can devide people into groups, similar to the racism the African Americans experienced in then 50's, 60's, and 70's, in this country. It is a rather ugly sight. The feelings expressed in this thread are the exact reason I avoid politics at all cost, because in the end a political preferences, is just that, a preference. The bottom line is we are all Americans or most of us atleast call American Home so we should back, our supreme leader, Mr. Bush, regardless of our opinion of his actions, because chances are he is looking out for the best interest of the country we live in.
Just my .02$.
Back to the daily grind.
-Alex
Sorry Black Death but although I do understand your concern we need to get Saddam out of power ASAP. Do you think he will disarm on his own merrits? I don't. I don't think he would disarm no matter how long the UN "tries" to put pressure on him. Did you know Saddam PAYs a suicide bombers FAMILY approx $25K if someone in their family becomes a suicide bomber and acts on it? He doesn't need his bombs to cause disaster. He pays his people to do it for him. He SUPPORTS IT and laughs at it. IF we can get him out of power so he can't pay his terrorist don't you think that that is going to help? I do.
If you feel that he would give up power without "defending" himself and causing MORE problems then I think it's because you haven't been around long enough to feel the results of all these terrorist acts. They go on all over the world and they have to be stopped asap before more people are inocently killed. Terrorist don't give up, they just keep coming and coming and coming...
ks
If you feel that he would give up power without "defending" himself and causing MORE problems then I think it's because you haven't been around long enough to feel the results of all these terrorist acts. They go on all over the world and they have to be stopped asap before more people are inocently killed. Terrorist don't give up, they just keep coming and coming and coming...
ks
This whole thing about Bush hating all stems from the election. The people who voted for Gore were just waiting for a reason to jump on Bush. They couldn't do it on 9-11 becusewe all had to come together, now that 9-11 wore off some people, they are ready to attack Bush. This baby bi-patisism crap is whats going to ruin the world. If the world cannot come together and rid 3rd world dictatoship countries from having WOMD, it is only a matter of time. The whole world should be coming together and disarming, Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan,and N. Korea. These countries have proved to be unstable at best and spycopathic at worse.
To say George Sr. was a wimp is just a ignorant statement. The WTC was bombed in Clintons term by Al Queda, The Cole was bombed on Clintons watch by Al Queda, I lost count on how many of our Barracks or embassies were bombed, or foiled at the last minute on Clintons watch, George Sr had an attempted assisinatin on his life in Kuwait, by Iraq and Clinton just sent in a couple of cruise missles and called it even, and finally 9-11 was planned during the Clinton administration. While a do nothing Democrat was in office for 7 1/2 years prior, and you had a 2 term vice president running, and you blame it on the Bushs'????? If Clinton went after Osama after say the 4th terrorist bombing of Americans, 9-11 migt not have happened. Bush jr, went in and is systematically taking apart Al- Queda, and trying to make sure a middle east county that hates our guts and has WOMD unaccounted for, does not giv these terrorists any of these weapons.
YOU ALL SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR TREATING YOUR PRESIDENT THE WAY YOU ARE!! Do you really think he's doing this to get re elected??? Didn't help his father get re-elected and doesn't seem to be helping him either. He is doing what is right, and if you are going to take Sadaams word over his, you are a traitor in my book.]
BLACK DEATH...who did you vote for??????
OBTW, like i said before, If money i more important to you than millions dying of smallpox, feel safe to know that Iraqi oil will pay for their rebuild, and i'm sure we will send them a bill for their liberation.
To say George Sr. was a wimp is just a ignorant statement. The WTC was bombed in Clintons term by Al Queda, The Cole was bombed on Clintons watch by Al Queda, I lost count on how many of our Barracks or embassies were bombed, or foiled at the last minute on Clintons watch, George Sr had an attempted assisinatin on his life in Kuwait, by Iraq and Clinton just sent in a couple of cruise missles and called it even, and finally 9-11 was planned during the Clinton administration. While a do nothing Democrat was in office for 7 1/2 years prior, and you had a 2 term vice president running, and you blame it on the Bushs'????? If Clinton went after Osama after say the 4th terrorist bombing of Americans, 9-11 migt not have happened. Bush jr, went in and is systematically taking apart Al- Queda, and trying to make sure a middle east county that hates our guts and has WOMD unaccounted for, does not giv these terrorists any of these weapons.
YOU ALL SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR TREATING YOUR PRESIDENT THE WAY YOU ARE!! Do you really think he's doing this to get re elected??? Didn't help his father get re-elected and doesn't seem to be helping him either. He is doing what is right, and if you are going to take Sadaams word over his, you are a traitor in my book.]
BLACK DEATH...who did you vote for??????
OBTW, like i said before, If money i more important to you than millions dying of smallpox, feel safe to know that Iraqi oil will pay for their rebuild, and i'm sure we will send them a bill for their liberation.
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