Overwhelming evidence of connection between al-Qaida, Iraq before attack

[igloo]

So how smart do you have to be to cut and paste. You see i have a problem with using what happened on 9/11 as reason to invade iraq. The 9/11 problem is one of fanatical Islamic terrorism. There are a number of countries where this type of fanaticism was flourshing pre-9/11: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc. Iraq was not one of them. Saddam was a sicko fuckbag, but he was by no means a fanatical Islamist. In fact, he was keeping a tight lid on Islamic fanatacism in his country. Now we’ve gone and taken that lid off. And in the process, we’ve overextended our military, spent hundreds of billions of dollars that we can’t afford, and fomented an unprecedented level of anti-American hatred throughout the Islamic world. Not to mention the lives lost. And all for what?

More and more conservatives and bush supporters are realizing that Iraq was a monumental mistake concocted by a small group with fucked up views and a president with almost no knowledge of the world (I wonder if he’s gotten the difference between Sunni and Shia down yet ). I really wish you would take your blinders off and look beyond the slogans from right-wing radio, you might start to realize just what a horrendous tragedy this whole episode is for our country. We are less safe, weaker, and poorer and we have gained next to nothing. Could anyone really say, if they could turn back the clock, that we should go through this again? So come on and cut and paste some more of right wing bullshit. Oh and you "multiple sources "are all well known pro-bush right wingers.

Bush is not as bad as the liberals would have you beleve but he is not as good as the conservatives tout him as. I said I did not know if the shit on that site was right or wrong but from the tone and content of the site I will not believe it.

Are you fucking kidding me with this tired bullshit.....you talk about pro-Bush propoganda and right wing bullshit, and your vomit is left-wing, anti-Bush 101....

The least you could have done was come up with something original..after all, you are a blowhard full of shit....dig deep douchebag, I am sure you can come up with something new....

What a pile of shit you offered up

And I repeat, read--you may actually learn something simpleton....Come down of this delusionary high horse that you are trying to position yourself on as somehow "objective" and above the partisan bullshit....your shit is transparent and lame

You want to say all the articles are pro-Bush, yet you ignore the actual content, facts, accuracy and sources within the articles...you are a schmuck.....and exposed yourself as a complete moron....and if even if articles are written with bias, are you that dumb that you can't separate out the bullshit? Because you think O' Reilly is right wing, does that mean Zarqawi and Salman Pak are myths?

Interesting too how you brought up the 9/11 commission report (one person in actuality), which suited your needs, because it seemed to go against administration claims (and how the media recklessly jumped on it), yet discount what was really said, and when another 9/11 commission member supported Al Qaeda-Iraq links, it automatically becomes a "pro-Bush source"...

Fucking laughable....you are just another fucking imbecile exposed as a blowhard....nice job jerkoff

And since you used the 9/11 report that was ridiculously reported because it suited your bullshit, and you are absurdly attacking the articles and data on this thread as being biased and pro-Bush, I leave you with this from a known right-winger, pro-Bushie:

Now Who's Lying?

David Limbaugh (archive)

June 22, 2004 | Print | Send

One of the most reprehensible things about the past year's campaign against President Bush is that his accusers have repeatedly lied in calling him a liar -- and they've marshaled nonexistent evidence to support their fraudulent claims.

One of the principal complaints against President Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror is that he distorted the facts to tie Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks against the United States in order to strengthen his case for attacking Iraq.

Indeed an interim report by the 9/11 commission staff stated there is no credible evidence that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda on any attacks against America. A salivating partisan media, Senator Kerry and other assorted Bush-haters seized on that headline as if it were one of the final nails in the president's electoral coffin.

But just like almost every other wished-for smoking gun against President Bush, this "finding" has ended up being an embarrassing, impotent little water pistol.

The Bush administration is guilty of no misrepresentations on this issue. If someone sets about to prove another person lied, at the very least he should accurately quote the accused. After all, if you don't even know what the alleged liar said, how can you begin to determine whether he lied?

In all their gotcha-mania the accusers failed to meet this threshold requirement. They, including the New York Times, accused the administration of misrepresenting something it never said. You've got to have a representation before you can have a misrepresentation.

But now the Times has belatedly admitted that the Bush administration never claimed there was a specific connection between Saddam and 9/11 attacks, "only that there were ties, however murky, between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Don't just brush over this as if it's a minor detail. The Times just confessed that neither Bush nor his team ever said Saddam was tied to 9/11. The Times even provided statements from various administration officials claiming there were connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, but never positing a 9/11 conspiracy. This is a major, painful admission by the Times. Suffice it to say that if administration officials had made such an assertion, the Times would have discovered it in their frantic Nexis searches.

But true to form, the Times refused to remove the Bush smear completely, ending its paragraph with this tacky little bit of innuendo: "although whether there was a deliberate campaign to create guilt by association is difficult to say." Translation: "While we grudgingly concede the Bush team made no express claims tying Saddam to 9/11, it may well have tried to imply there was such a connection by confusing the issue."

What a cheap shot! Not only do we not get an apology from the Times for its own misrepresentations on this very issue, we get a parting shot trying to negate its lame pretense of correcting the record.

But we deserve an apology from the Times for just recently attributing statements to the administration it didn't make and then accusing it of lying about those statements. A scathing, rush-to-judgment Times editorial the day after the release of the commission's interim report makes the point.

The Times editors wrote, "It's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11. Now President Bush should apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different."

So one week the Times said Bush fraudulently alleged a link between Saddam and September 11, and just a week later, they admit he made no such allegation. But the Times didn't apologize, nor did it withdraw its demand for the president's apology.

But the Times is not the only guilty party here. Senator Kerry, feeling his oats upon release of the commission's interim report, demanded that the president provide "a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose it now turns out is not supported by the facts."

Well, President Bush did not lie about the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection. There is so much material on this it would take a full chapter in a book to do it justice. Regardless, it was just one of many reasons offered to go to war against Iraq.

And since we're on the subject of mea culpas, the commission itself might want to consider sending one President Bush's way. After all its hindsight-based judgmentalism, it can't even get its own story straight about the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, as witnessed by panel member John Lehman's statements on "Meet the Press."

The next time the chorus of Bush-haters begins its incessant refrain, "Bush lied, Bush lied," perhaps more people will consider the source.

[igloo]

There They Go Again

From the June 28, 2004 issue: The 9/11 Commission and the media refuse to see the ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

by Stephen F. Hayes

06/28/2004,

IT'S SETTLED, APPARENTLY. Saddam Hussein's regime never supported al Qaeda in its "attacks on America," and meetings between representatives of Iraq and al Qaeda did not result in a "collaborative relationship." That, we're told, is the conclusion of two staff reports the September 11 Commission released last Wednesday.

But the contents of the documents have been widely misreported. Together the new reports total 32 pages; one contains a paragraph on the broad question of a Saddam-al Qaeda relationship, the other a paragraph on an alleged meeting between the lead hijacker and an Iraqi agent. Nowhere in the documents is the "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link...Dismissed," as Washington Post headline writers would have us believe. In fact, Staff Statement 15 discusses several "links." It never, as the Associated Press maintained, "bluntly contradicted" the Bush administration's prewar arguments. The Los Angeles Times was more emphatic still: "The findings appear to be the most complete and authoritative dismissal of a key Bush administration rationale for invading Iraq: that Hussein's regime had worked in collusion with al Qaeda."

A complete dismissal? Only for someone determined to find a complete dismissal. The major television networks and newspapers across the country got it wrong.

By Thursday afternoon, the misreporting had become too much for some members of the 9/11 Commission. Its vice chairman, former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, defended Vice President Dick Cheney against his attackers in the media:

I must say I have trouble understanding the flak over this. The Vice President is saying, I think, that there were connections between

al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is just what [Republican co-chairman Tom Kean] just said: We don't have any evidence of a cooperative or collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me that sharp differences that the press has drawn, that the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.

Hamilton is half-right. The report was far more nuanced and narrowly worded than most news reports suggested. But while nuance is a close cousin of precision, it is not the same thing. And the two paragraphs on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship are highly imprecise. Statement 15 does not, in fact, limit its skepticism about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection to collaboration on "the attacks on the United States." It also seems to cast doubt on the existence of any "collaborative relationship" (while conceding contacts and meetings) between the two.

This ambiguity, which provided reporters the opening they needed to go after the Bush administration, was a departure from earlier reports of the 9/11 Commission. Most of the staff's investigative work--its careful examination of pre-September 11 air safety procedures, for example--has been both thorough and illuminating. By contrast, the analysis of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection comes off as incomplete, forced, and unreliable. Indeed, at least as regrettable as the misreporting of the newly released staff documents are the gaps in their contents.

Here in full is the relevant portion of Staff Statement 15:

Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi Intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.

This brief passage raises more questions than it answers--a point we'll come back to. But it also shatters the myth that religious and ideological differences precluded cooperation between bin Laden and Saddam. Osama bin Laden's 1994 meeting with the "Iraqi intelligence officer"--Farouk Hijazi--is important.

The U.S. intelligence community has long believed that Saddam was willing to use Islamic militants--including al Qaeda--to exact revenge on the United States for his humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War. This belief was more than theoretical. Saddam played host to

a wide range of Islamic militants through "Popular Islamic Conferences" his regime sponsored in Baghdad. He gradually Islamicized his rhetoric, incorporated harsh elements of Islamic law into the Iraqi legal code, and funded a variety of Islamic terrorist groups--some quite openly, including Hamas. On August 27, 1998, Uday Hussein's state-run newspaper, Babel, proclaimed bin Laden an "Arab and Islamic hero." Jabir Salim, an Iraqi intelligence agent stationed in Prague who defected in 1998, reported to British intelligence that he had received instructions from Baghdad, and $150,000, to recruit an Islamic militant to attack the broadcast headquarters of Radio Free Iraq in the Czech capital. And virtually no one disputes that Saddam offered bin Laden safe haven in Iraq in late 1998 or early 1999.

The chief obstacle to Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration, according to this reasoning, was bin Laden's presumed unwillingness to work with Hussein. Osama had, after all, publicly labeled the Iraqi dictator an "infidel." But in 1993--according to testimony provided by top al Qaeda terrorist Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl and included in the Clinton administration's formal indictment of bin Laden in the spring of 1998--the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda reached an "understanding," whereby al Qaeda would not agitate against the Iraqi regime and in exchange the Iraqis would provide assistance on "weapons development." The following year, according to Staff Statement 15, bin Laden took the Iraqis up on their pledge. Hijazi told his interrogators in May 2003 that bin Laden had specifically requested Chinese-manufactured antiship limpet mines as well as training camps in Iraq.

It's never a good idea to take detainee testimony as gospel, but Hijazi's account of the meeting has been assessed as credible. As early as 1994, then, Osama bin Laden had expressed a willingness to work with Saddam Hussein. It was the Iraqis, per the 9/11 Commission report, who were reluctant to work with al Qaeda.

But were they?

According to numerous intelligence reports dating back to the Clinton administration, Iraq provided chemical weapons training (and perhaps materials) to the Sudanese government-run Military Industrial Corporation--which, along with Sudanese intelligence, also had a close relationship with al Qaeda. (Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl and Ali A. Mohamed, two high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists who cooperated with U.S. authorities before 9/11, said Sudanese intelligence and military officials provided security for al Qaeda safehouses and training camps, and al Qaeda operatives did the same for Sudanese government facilities.)

William Cohen, secretary of defense under Clinton, testified to this before the September 11 Commission on March 23, 2004. Cohen was asked about U.S. attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory on August 20, 1998. The strikes came 13 days after al Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing some 257 people (including 12 Americans) and injuring more than 5,000. The Clinton administration and the intelligence community quickly determined that al Qaeda was behind the attacks and struck back at the facility in Sudan and at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Almost immediately, the decision to attack the plant outside Khartoum was controversial. The Clinton administration, in its efforts to justify the strikes, told reporters that the plant had strong links to Iraq's chemical weapons program. No fewer than six top Clinton administration officials--on the record--cited the Iraq connection to justify its strikes in response to the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies. (Some of these officials, like James Rubin and Sandy Berger, now hold top advisory positions in John Kerry's presidential campaign. Kerry, however, now says he was misled about an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.)

Here is Cohen's response to the 9/11 Commission in its entirety:

But to give you an example, this particular facility [al Shifa], according to the intelligence we had at that time, had been constructed under extraordinary security circumstances, even with some surface-to-air missile capability or defense capabilities; that the plant itself had been constructed under these security measures; that the--that the plant had been funded, in part, by the so-called Military Industrial Corporation; that bin Laden had been living there; that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this Military Industrial Corporation; that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program; and that the CIA had found traces of EMPTA nearby the facility itself. According to all the intelligence, there was no other known use for EMPTA at that time other than as a precursor to VX.

Under those circumstances, I said, "That's actionable enough for me," that that plant could, in fact, be producing not baby aspirin or some other pharmaceutical for the benefit of the people, but it was enough for me to say we're going to take--we should take it out, and I recommended that.

Now, I was criticized for that, saying, "You didn't have enough." And I put myself in the position of coming before you and having someone like you say to me, "Let me get this straight, Mr. Secretary. We've just had a chemical weapons attack upon our cities or our troops, and we've lost several hundred or several thousand, and this is the information, which you had at your fingertips--you had a plant that was built under the following circumstances; you had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least, the corporation; and you had traces of EMPTA; and you did what? You did nothing?" Is that a responsible activity on the part of the Secretary of Defense? And the answer is pretty clear.

So I was satisfied, even though that still is pointed as a mistake--that it was the right thing to do then. I believe--I would do it again based on that kind of intelligence.

Given this intelligence--and telephone intercepts cited by unnamed Clinton officials between the plant manager and Emad al-Ani, the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program--one wonders why the Iraq war did not take place in the wake of the embassy bombings in 1998.

The 9/11 Commission staff statement also states that "two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq." Leaving aside the fact that this claim plainly contradicts the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda cited in the same paragraph, why are these bin Laden associates deemed credible? As noted, detainee debriefings are best viewed skeptically unless they are corroborated by other sources. In this case, numerous other sources have directly contradicted these claims. Did the commission staff have access to these detainees? Are the two al Qaeda detainees mentioned in the staff statement more credible than those who have reported Iraq-al Qaeda ties? That's certainly possible. But the staff report leaves out any description--to say nothing of names--of these al Qaeda detainees.

Information from al Qaeda detainees is attributed to named sources elsewhere in the 9/11 Commission report, but not in this instance. Why? Readers are left wondering.

STAFF STATEMENT 16 briefly assesses the alleged meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001. It says, "Based on the evidence available--including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting--we do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

The report makes no mention of the fact that five senior Czech officials are on record confirming the meeting. In private conversations, some of these officials are less emphatic than their public statements would suggest. Yet when reporters ask about the meeting, the Czechs refer them to their previous public statements confirming the meeting.

And what is the evidence upon which the commission staff bases its conclusion? Articles in the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post had reported that the U.S. intelligence community has rental car records and hotel receipts that place Atta in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting. According to senior Bush administration officials, no such records exist, and the commission's report mentions no such documentation. "The FBI's investigation," it says, "places [Atta] in Virginia as of April 4, as evidenced by this bank surveillance camera shot of Atta withdrawing $8,000 from his account. Atta was back in Florida by April 11, if not before. Indeed, investigation has established that on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone was used numerous times to call Florida phone numbers from cell sites within Florida. We have seen no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again or reentered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain and back under his true name."

So contrary to previous reporting, Atta cannot be definitively placed in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting. Cell phone records are interesting, but hardly conclusive. It is entirely possible that Atta would leave his cell phone behind if he left the country. In any case, the hijackers are known to have shared cell phones.

More disturbing, however, is what the commission staff left out. Staff Statement 16, which purportedly provides the "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," offers a painstakingly detailed account of Atta's whereabouts in the months leading up to 9/11. But it contains a notable gap: The report makes no mention of a confirmed trip--technically, two trips--that Atta made to Prague. (This omission comes despite the fact that the report notes other travel by the hijackers--even trips of unknown significance. Marwan al Shehhi, we are told, took "an unexplained eight-day sojourn to Casablanca.")

Atta applied for a Czech visa in Bonn, Germany, on May 26, 2000. He was apparently one day late. His subsequent behavior suggests that he needed the visa for a trip scheduled for May 30, 2000. Although his visa wasn't ready by that date, Atta took a Lufthansa flight to Prague Ruzyne Airport anyway. Without a visa, Atta could go no farther than the arrival/departure terminal; he remained in this section of the airport for nearly six hours. After returning to Germany, Atta picked up his new visa in Bonn and on June 2, 2000, boarded a bus in Frankfurt bound for Prague. After the approximately seven-hour trip, Atta disappeared in Prague for almost 24 hours. Czech officials cannot find evidence of his staying in a hotel under his own name, suggesting he registered under an assumed name or stayed in a private home. Atta flew from Prague to Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 2000. Al Shehhi, a fellow hijacker, had arrived in Newark on May 29, 2000.

What was Atta doing? That's unclear. But he went to some lengths to stop in Prague before traveling to the United States. By leaving this out, the 9/11 Commission report seems to suggest that it is irrelevant.

Another omission: Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Shakir, as WEEKLY STANDARD readers may recall, is an Iraqi who was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. U.S. intelligence officials do not know whether Shakir was an active participant in the meeting, but there is little doubt he was there.

In August 1999, Shakir began working as a VIP greeter for Malaysian Airlines. He told associates he had gotten the job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. In fact, Shakir's embassy contact controlled his schedule--told him when to report to work and when to take a day off. The contact apparently told Shakir to report to work on January 5, 2000, the same day September 11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar arrived in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir escorted al Mihdhar to a waiting car and then, rather than bid his guest farewell, jumped in the car with him. The meeting lasted from January 5 to January 8. Shakir reported to work twice after the meeting broke up and then disappeared.

He was arrested in Doha, Qatar, on September 17, 2001. Authorities found both on his body and in his apartment contact information for a number of high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists. They included the brother of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend." Despite this, Shakir was released from custody. He was detained again on October 21, 2001, in Amman, Jordan, where he was to have caught a flight to Baghdad. The Jordanians held Shakir for three months. The Iraqi regime contacted the Jordanian government and either requested or demanded--depending on who you ask--his release. The Jordanians, with the apparent acquiescence of the CIA, set him free in late January 2002, at which point he returned to Baghdad. Then earlier this spring, Shakir's name was found on three lists of the officers of Saddam's Fedayeen.

It's possible, of course, that there is more than one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. And even if the Shakir listed as an officer of the Saddam Fedayeen is the same Shakir who was present at the 9/11 planning meeting, it does not mean that the Iraqi regime helped plan or even had foreknowledge of those attacks.

But how can the 9/11 Commission staffers dismiss any potential Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks without even a mention of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?

By week's end, several 9/11 panel commissioners sought to clarify the muddled report. According to commissioner John Lehman on Fox News, "What our report said really supports what the administration, in its straight presentations, has said: that there were numerous contacts; there's evidence of collaboration on weapons. And we found earlier, we reported earlier, that there was VX gas that was clearly from Iraq in the Sudan site that President Clinton hit. And we have significant evidence that there were contacts over the years and cooperation, although nothing that would be operational."

Commissioner Slade Gorton supports Lehman's comments, adding, "The Democrats are attempting to say that this gives the lie to the administration's claim that there was a connection between 9/11 and Saddam," he said. "But the administration never said that."

The 9/11 Commission will be releasing its report later this summer. Let's hope that that final product is more thorough and convincing than the latest staff statements. What it must do is credibly address the events that are plainly within the commission's purview--including any evidence, from Prague or Kuala Lumpur or elsewhere, of potential Iraqi involvement in 9/11.

When it comes to the broader question of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, the commission cannot be expected to write the definitive history. In the end, it will be up to the Bush administration to make available to the public as much intelligence as possible without jeopardizing sources and methods. Americans are not idiots. They can be expected to grasp the difference between circumstantial evidence and proof; between shared goals and methods and a proved operational alliance. They can accept that not all analysts will agree, and some facts will remain elusive. What they should not have to settle for is the current confusion.

Stephen F. Hayes, a staff writer at The Weekly Standard, is the author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.

[jtk4]

holy shit you didn't just cut and paste something. Did it take you all day to write that?

Zarqawi has been linked to Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist terrorist outfit that claimed it was opposed to Hussein and that (prior to the war) operated out of northern Iraq, in territory not controlled by Hussein’s regime.

Earlier this year, when Zarqawi asked al Qaeda for assistance in fomenting civil war in Iraq, al Qaeda, according to US intelligence officers, rejected his request.

NBC reported that in 2002 and 2003, the Pentagon wanted to attack Zarqawi's camp in northern Iraq, and the White House said no. If Zarqawi was indeed an al Qaeda partner and in league with Hussein, why not?

CIA chief George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that while Zarqawi had received funds from bin Laden, he "conceives of himself as being quite independent" from al Qaeda and was not under al Qaeda's control or direction. Tenet also said that Zarqawi and his associates were in Baghdad, but that Hussein's regime did not operate, control or sponsor his network.

This is not to say that there was no relationship at any time between Zarqawi and al Qaeda or that Zarqawi had no contacts with the Iraqi regime. The key issue is whether there was, as Bush melodramatically claimed, a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq before the invasion. The Zarqawi story--murky as it is-- does not prove Bush's assertion that al Qaeda and Hussein's government were operational allies.

"and if even if articles are written with bias, are you that dumb that you can't separate out the bullshit"

If it is written with bias then it is all bullshit. sorry.

Really though both these people, saddam and Zarqawi, are fuckin scumbags, both should die.

But should really try and not be such a fuckin asshole to everyone that does not suck bush's balls like you.

Niether of us know for a fact what the fuck happened and it seems that not many people do.

[jtk4]

see this is the problem right here:

"Americans are not idiots. They can be expected to grasp the difference between circumstantial evidence and proof; between shared goals and methods and a proved operational alliance. They can accept that not all analysts will agree, and some facts will remain elusive. What they should not have to settle for is the current confusion."

For the most part ameicans are idiots, when they read things that say there was a connection in big letters on top of a lot of words they do not bother to read the rest.

"The Times just confessed that neither Bush nor his team ever said Saddam was tied to 9/11"

I agree they really never said there was a connection but everytime bush would say something about Iraq he would mention 9/11. Now smart people could come to seperate the 2 knowing there really was not a lot of proof. Unlike afganastan and the taliban. Stupid people hear the two together and assume they were conected.

[igloo]

holy shit you didn't just cut and paste something. Did it take you all day to write that?

Zarqawi has been linked to Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist terrorist outfit that claimed it was opposed to Hussein and that (prior to the war) operated out of northern Iraq, in territory not controlled by Hussein’s regime.

Earlier this year, when Zarqawi asked al Qaeda for assistance in fomenting civil war in Iraq, al Qaeda, according to US intelligence officers, rejected his request.

NBC reported that in 2002 and 2003, the Pentagon wanted to attack Zarqawi's camp in northern Iraq, and the White House said no. If Zarqawi was indeed an al Qaeda partner and in league with Hussein, why not?

CIA chief George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that while Zarqawi had received funds from bin Laden, he "conceives of himself as being quite independent" from al Qaeda and was not under al Qaeda's control or direction. Tenet also said that Zarqawi and his associates were in Baghdad, but that Hussein's regime did not operate, control or sponsor his network.

This is not to say that there was no relationship at any time between Zarqawi and al Qaeda or that Zarqawi had no contacts with the Iraqi regime. The key issue is whether there was, as Bush melodramatically claimed, a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq before the invasion. The Zarqawi story--murky as it is-- does not prove Bush's assertion that al Qaeda and Hussein's government were operational allies.

"and if even if articles are written with bias, are you that dumb that you can't separate out the bullshit"

If it is written with bias then it is all bullshit. sorry.

Really though both these people, saddam and Zarqawi, are fuckin scumbags, both should die.

But should really try and not be such a fuckin asshole to everyone that does not suck bush's balls like you.

Niether of us know for a fact what the fuck happened and it seems that not many people do.

Nice attempt retard...I give you an A for effort, and F for content.

In short, I suggest you do some research on why the camp was not hit earlier retard, instead of justing posting babble (it may actually require actual reading- don't hurt yourself) I suggest you do more research on Ansar AL-Islam, with their ties to AL Qaeda, their training in Bin Laden camps, weapons trining in Iraq, and their ties to Iraq, including a liasion in Iraqi intelligence. BTW schmuck--their share a common enemy....hint, hint....

Wait, spare yourself the pain...I already posted some information for you to learn something

Just end it already...you are going nowhere....Bottom line AL Qaeda and Iraq had ties and relationships, many of them. Some murky and shady, of course. Would it be any other way retard? Can you understand that retard?

Jerkoffs like you with limited brain capacity are expecting a picture of Bin Laden and Hussein together watching American Idol with Michael Moore t-shirts on sipping WMD cocktails....

And lastly retard, with your unbelievable moronic reference to cut and paste.....it is called proof, facts, and data ...to support the position there was a relationship, to support the original post that their is overwhelming evidence of ties, to counter the biased, twisted way the media reported on what the 9/11 commission said, and in the feint hope that moronic blowhards like you had some reading comprehension skills and may actually learn something...understand something.....grasp something...wishful thinking

Oh wait, that's right...it is just right wing, pro-Bush commentary and opinion...

You really make a jerkoff out of yourself with that bullshit

[igloo]

see this is the problem right here:

For the most part ameicans are idiots, when they read things that say there was a connection in big letters on top of a lot of words they do not bother to read the rest.

/QUOTE]

On the first sentence, agreed...but it works BOTH ways, and unfortunately, it is slanted big time in one way.....headlines have been overwhelming negative, biased, and innaccurate AGAINST Bush....if you do not see that, you are blind....

In addition, that first sentence PROVES the point of how the media distorted what the 9/11 commission member recently said, and instead produced a headline NO IRAQ-AL Qaeda ties......get it? Understand? Hence, all of the articles I posted.......light bulb pop up yet?

[bigpoppanils]

holy shit you didn't just cut and paste something. Did it take you all day to write that?.

hey, leave him alone. Googling key words and phrases is very hard work.

[igloo]

hey, leave him alone. Googling key words and phrases is very hard work.

Blow away douchebag....as usual you have nothing to contribute, other than your usual one line of nothingness...

And as usual, you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about....

Now all of a sudden, because I cut/paste relevant articles with a purpose, there is something wrong with that....are you fucking kidding me you dumb shithead....

You have stooped in moronic levels before, but this one may make history...

Fucking bafoon

BTW jerkoff...the clubplanet logs are filled with sessions of me dishing out ass kickings to you and your retarded clones....do you think that would be difficult to "search" ...

[jtk4]

It does work both way i agree there is no way the commision could have enough time to fully explore the possibility, and the liberal media just used certain phrases to make their point. I understand this. Like I said about rolling stone mag and other liberal media. I do not trust it. Same with right wing radio.

now can you please stop calling me names.

i am not here to fight, maybe to have some sort of discussion. Lets try and act civil, present ideas, and understand there is alot of info we do not know.

Since 9/11 there has not been another attack on US soil. Someone is doing something right.

[obby]

Since 9/11 there has not been another attack on US soil. Someone is doing something right.

Some get it. Some don't. This guy obviously gets it.

[igloo]

now can you please stop calling me names.

i am not here to fight, maybe to have some sort of discussion. Lets try and act civil, present ideas, and understand there is alot of info we do not know.

Since 9/11 there has not been another attack on US soil. Someone is doing something right.

Cleaned up version of a previous post

Nice attempt ..I give you an A for effort....disagree with the content

In short, I suggest you do some research on why the camp was not hit earlier ... I suggest you do more research on Ansar AL-Islam, with their ties to AL Qaeda, their training in Bin Laden camps, weapons trining in Iraq, and their ties to Iraq, including a liasion in Iraqi intelligence. They do share a common enemy (Kurds)

I already posted some information for you that you may find insightful....

Bottom line AL Qaeda and Iraq had ties and relationships, many of them. Some murky and shady, of course. Would it be any other way ? That is simply how it works.....

There are some who are expecting a picture of Bin Laden and Hussein together watching American Idol with Michael Moore t-shirts on sipping WMD cocktails....that is simply not going to happen

Examples of ties will simply be like the many that have been posted on this thread, not in a pretty little Hollwood movie.....

And lastly with reference to cut and paste.....I did it to provide proof, facts, and data ...to support the position there was a relationship, to support the original post that there is overwhelming evidence of ties, to counter the biased, twisted way the media reported on what the 9/11 commission said, and in the feint hope some would get a little more informed and a better understanding of how state sponsors/terrorist groups operate

It is not just right wing, pro-Bush commentary and opinion...

[igloo]

To repeat a past post of mine:

What I also find amazing is that every link or claim of Iraqi-terrrorism ties is diminished, devalued, discounted, or completely ignored by the left and the anti-Bushies.....irrespective of source, information, or proof.......to them, these are just conspiracy theories cooked up by the pro-war mongers...

Yet, when it came to "what Bush knew" prior to 9/11 in his 7 months of office.......they overblow and misrepresent information (i.e. August PDB), lob baseless accusations at Bush for "what he knew" , they point to the weakest, flimsiest data and cause absurd hysteria over it, outright lie, and they believe every conspiracy theory bomb thrown out by the Michael Moore clones.....

They want to kill Bush for connecting the dots in Iraq but kill Bush for not connecting the dots before 9/11 (when giving 8 years of Clinton a pass)...it is a fucking joke, made worse by the disgraceful behavior of the media...

And for those clueless wonders out there who still like to moan that Arab secularists and Islamic terrorists do not cooperate, I suggest you shut your fucking ignorant mouths and do some research.....plenty of examples where "my enemy is your enemy" prevails........read a fucking book jerkoffs instead of Yahoo headlines or recent AL Gore speeches (unless of course, you want to read AL Gore speeches during the 2000 campaign, when he continually spoke about Iraqi WMD, ties to terrorism, and Iraq is a grave threat to national security).

Thought I would throw one more cut/paste on hear to support something I have been saying, like my above rant

They still don't get it

Paul Greenberg (archive)

June 23, 2004 | Print | Send

Which has become more politicized - the major media or the 9/11 Commission?

The answer was clear last week: The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, the television troika (Jennings, Brokaw and Rather), the "news'' columns of the Wall Street Journal . . . in short, all the usual suspects in the media.

Note the big headline on the front page of Thursday's New York Times: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."

The Times wasn't the only one to get out the big type. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link is Dismissed," proclaimed the Washington Post. "No signs of Iraq-Al-Qaeda Ties Found," reported the Los Angeles Times. And so loudly on. (And earnest liberals wonder why folks increasingly turn to the Fox channel or talk radio.)

As for the "discovery" that Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus had no direct connection with 9/11, well, the administration has never claimed that it did. ("No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th." - George W. Bush, September 17, 2003.)

What the administration did claim was that Saddam's ties to terrorism go back at least a decade, which is when Iraq made the State Department's list of terrorist-supporting states. The administration also pointed out that Saddam's agents established contacts with al-Qaida, a fact that no one seriously disputes - including the 9/11 Commission, however its actual findings may have been distorted by the major media, or anybody with an interest in hunting this president.

Indeed, the commission's investigators confirmed that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Osama bin Laden himself in the Sudan as early as 1994.

All this editorializing in the guise of news was too much for even the usually patient Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission and Mr. Integrity himself:

"I must say I have trouble understanding the flak over this. The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is . . . we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al-Qaida operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me."

Indeed, they are not apparent at all - unless you're a believer in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, et al. "Challenges Bush," blared the subhead on the New York Times story about the 9/11 Commission's report.

Once again straw men are strewn about everywhere as the major media all agree that a claim the Bush administration never made now has been refuted!

Remember the fuss over the small but critical word "imminent" some time back? Not too long ago everybody who was anybody in The Media or the opposition (or do I repeat myself?) was claiming that the administration had taken us to war to avert an "imminent" threat that never really existed!

The only problem was that the administration had never claimed the threat represented by Saddam Hussein's rogue regime was imminent - more like grave and growing. Even today the occasional critic who never got the word may still throw that old canard into the election-year cauldron.

Conclusion: After all this time and these investigations, the Major Media still haven't connected the dots:

No, Saddam Hussein's regime may not have had anything to do with the surprise attack on the American mainland September 11, 2001 - as opposed to various attacks on our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole, and on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. No more than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy had anything to do with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And yet they were all in it together - Japanese militarists, German Nazis, Italian fascisti, and the whole worldwide web that constituted the fascist threat to freedom in those days.

Our enemy at the time was no single regime or nation but a whole international movement that had declared war on freedom and even civilization itself. Just as today it is a radical Islamic movement that seeks to dominate the Muslim world and mobilize it against Western civilization.

Only slowly did this country awaken to the fascist threat, but even by 1941 a still largely isolationist America was drafting a citizen army, staging maneuvers, sending lend-lease shipments to Britain, and conducting an undeclared naval war against the Nazis in the North Atlantic.

Then, as now, Americans debated intensely about just how serious the threat was, and who posed it. Then, as now, a large segment of pubic opinion - and of the media - just didn't get it, and refused to connect the dots.

[igloo]

One more...

Critics are Still Confusing Proof and Evidence

By John Tabin Published 06/22/2004

"PANEL FINDS NO QAEDA-IRAQ TIE," shouted the front page of the New York Times last Thursday. This wasn't supported by the facts of the story -- the 9/11 panel had found no solid evidence of Iraqi cooperation with al Qaeda "in attacks against the United States" -- not that there was no "tie" at all between the two. But the headline reflected what seems to be the consensus in the press, that former terrorism czar Richard Clark had it right: as Clarke put it on March 21, "there's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

Clark didn't say that evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link was unpersuasive, or conflicted with other evidence; he said there was no evidence at all. This has become the conventional wisdom. It is wrong.

Stephen Hayes demonstrates as much in his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. Building on his reporting on the topic for the Weekly Standard, this volume examines the evidence surrounding the longstanding relationship between radical Islamist terror and the Iraqi regime. In the 80s, Saddam was already hosting and training terrorist from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, enemies of his rival Baathist dictator Hafez al Assad (and breeding ground for a number of future al Qaeda cell leaders). By the 90s, the "secular" Baathist regime frequently spoke in the Islamist vocabulary of jihad and infidels. The newly cordial relations between those who'd seemed ideologically incompatible was more than rhetorical. Quoting Hayes at length:

"Iraqi intelligence documents from 1992 list Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset. Numerous sources have reported a 1993 nonaggression pact between Iraq and al Qaeda. The former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence now in U.S. custody says that bin Laden asked the Iraqi regime for arms and training in a face-to-face meeting in 1994. Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Hajer al Iraqi met with Iraqi intelligence officials in 1995. The National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations between al Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program in 1996. Al Qaeda sent Abu Abdallah al Iraqi to Iraq for help with weapons of mass destruction in 1997. An indictment from the Clinton-era Justice Department cited Iraqi assistance on al Qaeda "weapons development" in 1998. A senior Clinton administration counterterrorism official told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had supported al Qaeda chemical weapons programs in 1999. An Iraqi working closely with the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur was photographed with September 11 hijacker Khalind a Mihdhar en route to a planning meeting for the bombing of the USS Cole and the September 11 attacks in 2000. Satellite photographs showed al Qaeda members in 2001 traveling en masse to a compound in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Iraqi regime. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, senior al Qaeda associate, operated openly in Baghdad and received medical attention at a regime-supported hospital in 2002. Documents discovered in postwar Iraq in 2003 reveal that Saddam's regime harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attack-- the first al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil."

The book examines each of these pieces and many more in detail. Hayes has a bevy of sources, some of them secret or based on classified reporting -- including the Feith memo that he reported on last year, which many TCS readers will remember. But he relies mostly on "open sources" -- unclassified government reports, court documents, news media, and anything else that anyone with an internet connection can find.

It's the nature of intelligence that much of what he reports is uncertain. Hayes is for the most part careful not to oversell his case -- he never claims a sponsorship or command-and-control relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, for example, only that the relationship between the two was more extensive and more dangerous than many are willing to acknowledge.

But the uncertainty of the intelligence remains a favored line of attack for Hayes's critics. At a roundtable on the book at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this month, former CIA analyst Judith Yaphe emphasized that intelligence reports are not always true or complete, and that in some cases other reporting says the opposite of what Hayes concludes. To underscore the point, David Corn of The Nation asked from the audience how, if we discount one piece of intelligence, can we believe another?

But this, Hayes responds, confuses proof and evidence. Hayes notes in his book the uproar over the failure to "connect the dots" to stop the 9/11 attacks, where the evidence amounted to "a high level of intelligence 'chatter,' ... an internal FBI memo about suspicious activities at flight schools in Phoenix, a report out of Minnesota about a Middle Eastern man with a bizarre interest in airplanes, and unspecific CIA reporting about forthcoming al Qaeda attacks." All of this was much thinner than the evidence surrounding the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. And that makes the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime that much harder to regret.

John Tabin is a Baltimore-based writer whose website is JohnTabin.com.

[bigpoppanils]

Blow away douchebag....as usual you have nothing to contribute, other than your usual one line of nothingness...

And as usual, you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about....

Now all of a sudden, because I cut/paste relevant articles with a purpose, there is something wrong with that....are you fucking kidding me you dumb shithead....

You have stooped in moronic levels before, but this one may make history...

Fucking bafoon

BTW jerkoff...the clubplanet logs are filled with sessions of me dishing out ass kickings to you and your retarded clones....do you think that would be difficult to "search" ...

you sound like a broken record

can you come up with any new ideas instead of using conservative talking points?

[igloo]

you sound like a broken record

can you come up with any new ideas instead of using conservative talking points?

Wow...what insight....what originality...what brilliance...you must be so proud of yourself

Go away useless cunt....not sure if Hannity and gang use that, so I guess that does not constitute a "conservative talking point"...

Fucking idiot

[igloo]

Clinton first linked al Qaeda to Saddam

By Rowan Scarborough

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.

The issue arose again this month after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported there was no "collaborative relationship" between the old Iraqi regime and bin Laden.

Democrats have cited the staff report to accuse Mr. Bush of making inaccurate statements about a linkage. Commission members, including a Democrat and two Republicans, quickly came to the administration's defense by saying there had been such contacts.

In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

Mr. Bush cited the linkage, in part, to justify invading Iraq and ousting Saddam. He said he could not take the risk of Iraq's weapons falling into bin Laden's hands.

The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.

The 1998 indictment said: "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Shortly after the embassy bombings, Mr. Clinton ordered air strikes on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

To justify the Sudanese plant as a target, Clinton aides said it was involved in the production of deadly VX nerve gas. Officials further determined that bin Laden owned a stake in the operation and that its manager had traveled to Baghdad to learn bomb-making techniques from Saddam's weapons scientists.

Mr. Cohen elaborated in March in testimony before the September 11 commission.

He testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."

He said that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?' Is that a responsible activity on the part of the secretary of defense?"

[igloo]

The Clinton Administration's Case Against Saddam

George W. Bush wasn't the first president to understand the threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

by Daniel McKivergan

06/23/2004 6:30:00 PM

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore recently told an audience that "the [bush] administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11th, to create a political case for attacking Iraq." With this in mind, I would to like draw your attention to a Project brief entitled, The Clinton Administration's Public Case Against Saddam Hussein. Some highlights:

* The New York Times reported that at the November 14 [1997] meeting the "White House decided to prepare the country for war." According to the Times, "[t]he decision was made to begin a public campaign through interviews on the Sunday morning television news programs to inform the American people of the dangers of biological warfare." During this time, the Washington Post reported that President Clinton specifically directed Cohen "to raise the profile of the biological and chemical threat."

* On November 16, Cohen made a widely reported appearance on ABC's This Week in which he placed a five-pound bag of sugar on the table and stated that that amount of anthrax "would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C."

* In an article ("America the Vulnerable; A disaster is just waiting to happen if Iraq unleashes its poison and germs," November 24, 1997), Time wrote that "officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call 'strategic crime.' By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups,

who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them."

* In Sacramento, November 15, Clinton painted a bleak future if nations did not cooperate against "organized forces of destruction," telling the audience that only a small amount of "nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did." Effectively dealing with proliferation and not letting weapons "fall into the wrong hands" is "fundamentally what is stake in the stand off we're having in Iraq today."

* He [President Clinton] asked Americans to not to view the current crisis as a "replay" of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, "think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you."

* Cohen began his November 25, 1997 briefing on the Pentagon report by showing a picture of a Kurdish mother and her child who had been gassed by Saddam's army. A bit later, standing besides the gruesome image, he described death on a mass scale. "One drop [of VX nerve agent] on your finger will produce death in a matter of just a few moments. Now the UN believes that Saddam may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX, and this would, of course, be theoretically enough to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth." He then sketched an image of a massive chemical attack on an American city. Recalling Saddam's use of poison gas and the sarin attack in Tokyo, Cohen warned that "we face a clear and present danger today" and reminded people that the "terrorist who bombed the World Trade Center in New York had in mind the destruction and deaths of some 250,000 people that they were determined to kill."

* Under the White Paper's "nuclear weapons" section, it observed: "Baghdad's interest in acquiring nuclear or developing nuclear weapons has not diminished"; "we have concerns that scientists may be pursuing theoretical nuclear research that would reduce the time required to produce a weapon should Iraq acquire sufficient fissile material"; "Iraq continues to withhold significant information about enrichment techniques, foreign procurement, weapons design, and the role of Iraq's security and intelligence services in obtaining external assistance and coordinating postwar concealment."

* At Tennessee State on February 19, Albright told the crowd that the world has not "seen, except maybe since Hitler, somebody who is quite as evil as Saddam Hussein." In answering a question, she sketched some of the "worse" case scenarios should Saddam "break out of the box that we kept him in. . . ." "Another scenario is that he could kind of become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction--that he could be the place that people come and get more weapons."

* One of the lessons of history, Albright continued, is that "if you don't stop a horrific dictator before he gets started too far--that he can do untold damage." "If the world had been firmer with Hitler earlier," said Albright, "then chances are that we might not have needed to send Americans to Europe during the Second World War."

* Secretary Albright held a briefing on Desert Fox and was asked how she would respond to those who say that unlike the 1991 Gulf War this campaign "looks like mostly

an Anglo-American mission." She answered:

We are now dealing with a threat, I think, that is probably harder for some to understand because it is a threat of the future, rather than a present threat, or a present act such as a border crossing, a border aggression. And here, as the president described in his statement yesterday, we are concerned about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's ability to have, develop, deploy weapons of mass destruction and the threat that that poses to the neighbors, to the stability of the Middle East, and therefore, ultimately to ourselves.

[sobeton]

Some get it. Some don't. This guy obviously gets it.

why atttack the US on US soil, when you can attack the US elsewhere. i.e. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. some get it. some don't. you obviously don't.