I voted yes, going into Iraq was the right thing to do. After the Saddam tapes were released I don't see how any intelligent person can say it was the wrong thing to do.
http://www.nysun.com/article/29746?page_no=1
Quote:
CAIRO, Egypt - A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Quote:
...the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that "Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States." Mr. Kerrey said he believed America's understanding of the deposed tyrant's relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed.
Quote:
It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States.
http://www.nysun.com/article/27110
Quote:
Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes
By ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 7, 2006
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.
Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.
The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.
Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.
"I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said.
He added, "Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again."
Mr. Hoekstra is one of many who believe the question of what happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is still unresolved. Last week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld voiced similar doubts at the National Press Club. "We have not found them. We also have found a number of things we didn't imagine. We found a bunch of jet airplanes buried in Iraq. Who buries airplanes? I mean, really. So I don't know what we'll find in the months and years ahead. It could be anything," he said.
The former chief of the State Department's Iraq Intelligence Unit, Wayne White, and Mr. Rumsfeld's former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, have told the Sun they believe the question of what happened to the weapons is still open. The former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, Moshe Ya'alon, told the Sun in December that he believed Saddam sent chemical weapons to Syria before the war in 2002. The last chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, said in the preamble to his final report that looting of sites may have severely weakened his team's ability to piece together a complete picture of Iraq's weapons program.
Mr. Hoekstra said he is not yet prepared to say President Bush was premature in calling off the hunt for the weapons last year, but conceded that his inquiries may lead him to that conclusion if some of the leads offered to his committee check out. He also said the White House has been supportive of his inquiry.
The chairman of the House intelligence panel said he is frustrated with the American intelligence community's lack of curiosity on following up these leads, particularly the story from Mr. Sada. "I talked to one person relatively high up in DNI, and I asked him about this and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, 'No we don't think so.' At this point, I guess you guys don't get it.
"I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our pre-war intelligence, " Mr. Hoekstra said."
-What these Saddam tapes reveal are the following:
-Saddam Discussed New Nuclear Program Activity Post 2000
-Saddams Regime had terrorist ties, including ties to Al-qaeda
-Lets not forget about one of Saddams former head honchos of his Airforce claiming before we invaded in 03, some of Saddams WMD were moved to Syria.
Iraq's WMD Secreted in Syria, Sada Says
http://www.nysun.com/article/26514
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Saddam tapes
http://www.intelligencesummit.org/WMD/Tapes.ppt
Was the American led invasion of Iraq right?
Your Government sold the war on WMDs. That's how Blair sold it to us.
You also had no UN approval:
The US is also very selective about what it gets involved in. Didn't see the US in Rwanda or hundreds of other conflicts and genocides.The attempt of the United Kingdom and the United States to obtain a further Resolution authorizing force failed. Thus, the U.S.-led invasion began without the express approval of the United Nations Security Council, and most legal authorities regard it as a violation of the UN Charter.
It also stands happily by as Israel violates any number of UN resolutions.
The war in Iraq has been a spectacular failure and was driven by Bush, and many think he lied about WMD, certainly it seems Blair did with inflated claims of WMDs deployable in the famous 45 minutes.
What is a Just War? Was Iraq going to invade you?
Are you going to invade every Middle Eastern country that sponsers terrorism. Good luck.
If anyone thinks I am being Anti-American then they are wrong. There is a lot that is good about America. I am disgusted with my own (English) government for going to war in Iraq. I think they have made the world much more dangerous - their unilateral actions are creating an endless supply of Muslim terrorists who are deeply unhappy with the slaughter of so many civilian Iraqis.
Blacknad.
President Bush DID NOT LIE. The intelligence at the time all agreed we need to do something with Iraq.
My answers would be that the reason the last resolution failed was because of the French and the Russians, who were up to their necks in oil-for-food scandals, and were supporting the Iraqis both at the UN and with weapons - right up to the day we invaded, because of it.
It is precisely because of this sort of uselessness that I care nothing for the UN.
We went to the UN in order to find any possible diplomatic solution, not to gain their imprimatur. We went to help in the effort to build as big a coalition as possible, but we had already stated our right to pre-emptive strike.
We were not waiting for the UN to tell us it was okay, because we have had too much experience in the past with total UN failure to act in any way useful.
Of course we were selective! Rwanda wasn't threatening us, or anyone else! Rwanda wasn't a state sponsor of international terrorism, with possible access to WMD. We have just so many resources. Where were the French or Germans on Rwanda, if it was more important? Why is it always up to us to fight every fight?
Israel, the only true democracy in the region, is fighting for its very existance. We sympathize, and we cannot see how a body which happily elects the likes of Cuba to the human rights commission has any power to persuade us otherwise.
Until the UN stops such nonsense, we could really care less about the UN's pique. It is a meaningless joke.
we went to Iraq to do three things immediately:
To ensure that we would never have to face WMD from Saddam, or his lackies - ever again.
To destroy a regime which was a state sponsor of terrorism
To free 25 million people from horrible oppression.
Only our invasion could accomplish these goals.
We feel it was extremely just, considering the three tactical goals I stated above. You should read Dulfer Report, and then tell us how else we could assure our safety into perpetuity, vis-a-vis Iraq.
Are we going to invade every country? No, because we won't have to invade every country. That is the point of the strategic goal - Once we successfully introduce democracy in the Middle East, it is very likely that the rest of the Arab countries, currently under the thumbs of strongmen, will turn to them and say, "Hey, where's ours??"
We are trying to prove to the Arab street that they have been lied to; that we are not their enemy; that their enemies are the very people who are denying them the freedom we are now trying to give the Iraqis.
It is precisely the example of democracy in Iraq which will change, one by one, the states which currently sponsor terrorism. Don't you think the Iranian youth are looking at Iraq - with free, and true elections - with envy?
It is already bearing fruit - There have been local elections in Saudi Arabia, the first ever; there have been real opposition candidates in Egypt's presidential election, the first in their history; the Lebanese went to the polls and threw out the Syrians; even the Palestinians changed their leadership at the ballot box, instead of at the point of a gun...
Fits and starts, yes, but none of this would have been possible without showing the Middle East with the very real example of purple thumbs in the air.
As to Iraqis dying, it should be noted that it is a very small number of Iraqis - around 20,000 or so, (about 0.1% of the population,) which is doing most of the killing of other Iraqis, not us! They are being aided by outsiders who see a burgeoning Iraqi democracy as their very worst nightmare - For the reason I stated above - Democracies beget other democracies.
Even the Iraqis know who is doing the killing, and why. And yet, they are going to the polls in incredible numbers, often at great risk. If they are so unhappy with the prospect of real democracy, why are they doing that?
Freedom is infectious.
Here is more info for those still in denial that Saddams Regime had ties to Al-qaeda.
Iraqi Terrorists Detail Ties To Bin Laden
Dave Eberhart,
Monday, March 18, 2002
A terrorist group operating in northern Iraq told the New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg that their organization "has received funds directly from al-Qaeda."
In interviews conducted in a prison in Kurdish-controlled territory, captured members of Ansar al-Islam also alleged:
The intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam.
Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992.
A number of al-Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam.
Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.
If these charges are true," Goldberg writes in the current issue, "it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda is far closer than previously thought."
The prisoners Goldberg spoke to last month are kept in a jail that is run by the intelligence service of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose director told Goldberg that American intelligence officials had not visited the site. "The FBI and the CIA haven't come out yet," the director said.
According to Kurdish officials, Goldberg reported, "Ansar al-Islam grew out of an idea spread by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Osama bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaeda."
One official explained, "Zawahiri's philosophy is that you should fight the infidel even in the smallest village, that you should try to form Islamic armies everywhere. The Kurdish fundamentalists were influenced by Zawahiri."
The group has between five hundred and six hundred members, according to Kurdish officials, including Arab Afghans and at least thirty Iraqi Kurds who were trained in Afghanistan.
Last September, the officials said, representatives of Osama bin Laden gave Ansar al-Islam $300,000. These officials added that the real leader of Ansar al-Islam is an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, who has spent a great deal of time in bin Laden's training camps but is also, they said, an officer of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's principal intelligence service.
"A man named Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat," one official told Goldberg. "And he is Abu Wa'el's control officer."
Smuggling Al-Qaeda Members
Kurdish intelligence officials said that there is no proof that Ansar al-Islam has ever been involved in international terrorism or that Saddam Hussein's agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. But they claimed that several men associated with al-Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near the city of Halabja.
Two of these men, who go by the names Abu Yasir and Abu Muzaham, are high-ranking al-Qaeda members, they say. An Iraqi intelligence officer, Qassem Hussein Muhammad, one of the prisoners with whom Goldberg spoke, said that his own involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri after being assigned to help guard him.
After reports surfaced that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American agents, Qassem says, he was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find out what was going on. "That's when I was captured," he said. Asked if he was sure that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side, Qassem said, "He's an employee of the Mukhabarat. He's the actual decision-maker in the group -- Ansar al-Islam -- but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat."
In the prison, Goldberg also spoke to a young Iraqi Arab named Haqi Ismail, whom Kurdish officials described as a middle-to high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, who was captured as he tried to get into Kurdistan three weeks after the start of the American attack on Afghanistan.
Jawad, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab who is a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz, and whom Kurdish intelligence officials said was most recently employed by bin Laden, told Goldberg that he began to smuggle for bin Laden in the late 1990s.
Liquid Might Be Bio-Weapon
In 2000, Jawad's al-Qaeda contact told him to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad told Goldberg that he had no idea what liquid was inside the motors, but he assumed that it was some type of chemical or biological weapon.
"There's been a relationship between the Mukhabarat and the people of al-Qaeda since 1992," Jawad said.
In the articel,"The Great Terror," Goldberg also provided a comprehensive account of Saddam's massive conventional, chemical, and possibly biological attacks on the Kurds in the late 1980s, during which as many as 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq were killed, out of a population of about four million.
Christine Gosden, an English geneticist who has been studying the attacks on the Kurds since 1998, says, "The Iraqi government was using chemistry to reduce the population of Kurds. The Holocaust is still having its effect. The Jews are fewer in number now than they were in 1939. That's not natural. Now, if you take out 200,000 men and boys from Kurdistan, you've affected the population structure. There are a lot of widows who are not having children."
Gosden believes that it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience serious chemical- and biological-weapons attacks. "Please understand," she said, "the Kurds were for practice."
Gosden told Goldberg that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. "It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA," she says, pointing out that, "for Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."
Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who was formerly a high official in Saddam's nuclear program, told Goldberg that he had direct knowledge of the Army's plans for Halabja. "The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as 'How far are the dead from the cannisters?'"
Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist in Kurdistan who led Goldberg on his tour of Halabja, and other experts "now believe that Halabja and other places in Kurdistan were struck by a combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin (the agent used in the Tokyo subway attack) and VX, a potent nerve agent."
Baban told Goldberg that the Iraqis could conceivably have used aflatoxin as well; aflatoxin is a biological agent that causes long-term liver damage. Baban said, "Here is a civilian population exposed to chemical and possibly biological weapons, and people are developing many varieties of cancers and congenital abnormalities."
In 1995, the Iraqis admitted that they had weaponized aflatoxin, Charles Duelfer, then the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission weapons-inspection team in Iraq, told Goldberg. "This was the first time Iraq actually agreed to discuss the Presidential origins of these programs," Duelfer said.
Although "it is unclear what biological and chemical weapons Saddam possesses today," Goldberg wrote, August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, provided information on another type of weapon. "It is our estimate," he said, "that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years."
'Proof' of Iraq/Bin Laden links
Weekend Austrailian ^ | November 04, 2001 | From AFP
Posted on 11/04/2001 7:33:53 PM PST by concerned about politics
'Proof' of Iraq/Bin Laden links
A FORMER Iraqi special forces officer has given new proof of links between Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and Iraq, according to a report.
The newspaper said that it was told by a leading member of the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Nabeel Musawi, of the testimony of the 36-year-old former officer, identified only as A.S.
The INC is one of the main opposition groups to Saddam Hussein's government.
The newspaper said that the former officer told of a training camp called Salman Pak in Iraq where members of bin Laden's terror network had trained as pilots and on how to seize control of aircraft.
Musawi said that the former officer told him: "There were also women pilots who were trained and I believe that the next time, if there is a next time, it could be a woman who takes over an airplane."
The source also told of a meeting on the Pakistani border in December 1998 between an Iraqi diplomat working in Turkey and Osama bin Laden.
He further claimed that Iraq had sent a tonne of anthrax bacteria to bin Laden.
The former officer was said to have been in a poor physical state after being tortured and poisoned while in prison."
"IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials met with BIN LADEN in Afghanistan several more times. A second group of BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives from Saudi Arabia were then trained by IRAQI INTELLIGENCE in IRAQ to smuggle weapons and explosives into Saudi Arabia and other countries, which they later accomplished in an effort to carry out future terrorist acts of violence. A third group of BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives received a month of sophisticated guerrilla operations training from IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials later in the Summer of 1998."
"Despite philosophical and religious differences with SADDAM HUSSEIN, BIN LADEN continually sought to strengthen and reinforce the support he and AL QAEDA received from IRAQ. In mid-July 1998, BIN LADEN sent Dr. AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the Egyptian co-founder of AL QAEDA, to IRAQ to meet with senior Iraqi officials, including Iraqi vice president TAHA YASSIN RAMADAN. Upon information and belief, the purpose of this meeting was to discuss and plan a joint strategy for a terrorist campaign against the United States."
"To demonstrate IRAQ's commitment to BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA, HIJAZI presented BIN LADEN with a pack of blank, official Yemeni passports, supplied to IRAQI INTELLIGENCE from their Yemeni contacts. HIJAZI's visit to Kandahar was followed by a contingent of IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials who provided additional training and instruction to BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives in Afghanistan. These Iraqi officials included members of “Unit 999,” a group of elite IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials who provided advanced sabotage and infiltration training and instruction to AL QAEDA operatives."
"In addition to the al-Nasiriyah and Salman Pak training camps, by January 1999, BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives were being trained by IRAQI INTELLIGENCE and military officers at other training camps on the outskirts of Baghdad."
On January 22, 2001, the Arab language newspaper Al Watan Al Arabi, reported that SADDAM HUSSEIN and his sons had called for an Arab alliance to “launch a global terrorist war against the United States and its allies.” The newspaper characterized HUSSEIN's statement as calling for an uncompromising campaign and “scorched earth policy.”
On July 21, approximately six weeks before the September 11th attacks, IRAQI columnist Mulhalhal reported that BIN LADEN was making plans to “demolish the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.”
Iraqi Terrorists Detail Ties To Bin Laden
Dave Eberhart,
Monday, March 18, 2002
A terrorist group operating in northern Iraq told the New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg that their organization "has received funds directly from al-Qaeda."
In interviews conducted in a prison in Kurdish-controlled territory, captured members of Ansar al-Islam also alleged:
The intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam.
Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992.
A number of al-Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam.
Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.
If these charges are true," Goldberg writes in the current issue, "it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda is far closer than previously thought."
The prisoners Goldberg spoke to last month are kept in a jail that is run by the intelligence service of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose director told Goldberg that American intelligence officials had not visited the site. "The FBI and the CIA haven't come out yet," the director said.
According to Kurdish officials, Goldberg reported, "Ansar al-Islam grew out of an idea spread by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Osama bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaeda."
One official explained, "Zawahiri's philosophy is that you should fight the infidel even in the smallest village, that you should try to form Islamic armies everywhere. The Kurdish fundamentalists were influenced by Zawahiri."
The group has between five hundred and six hundred members, according to Kurdish officials, including Arab Afghans and at least thirty Iraqi Kurds who were trained in Afghanistan.
Last September, the officials said, representatives of Osama bin Laden gave Ansar al-Islam $300,000. These officials added that the real leader of Ansar al-Islam is an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, who has spent a great deal of time in bin Laden's training camps but is also, they said, an officer of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's principal intelligence service.
"A man named Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat," one official told Goldberg. "And he is Abu Wa'el's control officer."
Smuggling Al-Qaeda Members
Kurdish intelligence officials said that there is no proof that Ansar al-Islam has ever been involved in international terrorism or that Saddam Hussein's agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. But they claimed that several men associated with al-Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near the city of Halabja.
Two of these men, who go by the names Abu Yasir and Abu Muzaham, are high-ranking al-Qaeda members, they say. An Iraqi intelligence officer, Qassem Hussein Muhammad, one of the prisoners with whom Goldberg spoke, said that his own involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri after being assigned to help guard him.
After reports surfaced that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American agents, Qassem says, he was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find out what was going on. "That's when I was captured," he said. Asked if he was sure that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side, Qassem said, "He's an employee of the Mukhabarat. He's the actual decision-maker in the group -- Ansar al-Islam -- but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat."
In the prison, Goldberg also spoke to a young Iraqi Arab named Haqi Ismail, whom Kurdish officials described as a middle-to high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, who was captured as he tried to get into Kurdistan three weeks after the start of the American attack on Afghanistan.
Jawad, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab who is a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz, and whom Kurdish intelligence officials said was most recently employed by bin Laden, told Goldberg that he began to smuggle for bin Laden in the late 1990s.
Liquid Might Be Bio-Weapon
In 2000, Jawad's al-Qaeda contact told him to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad told Goldberg that he had no idea what liquid was inside the motors, but he assumed that it was some type of chemical or biological weapon.
"There's been a relationship between the Mukhabarat and the people of al-Qaeda since 1992," Jawad said.
In the articel,"The Great Terror," Goldberg also provided a comprehensive account of Saddam's massive conventional, chemical, and possibly biological attacks on the Kurds in the late 1980s, during which as many as 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq were killed, out of a population of about four million.
Christine Gosden, an English geneticist who has been studying the attacks on the Kurds since 1998, says, "The Iraqi government was using chemistry to reduce the population of Kurds. The Holocaust is still having its effect. The Jews are fewer in number now than they were in 1939. That's not natural. Now, if you take out 200,000 men and boys from Kurdistan, you've affected the population structure. There are a lot of widows who are not having children."
Gosden believes that it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience serious chemical- and biological-weapons attacks. "Please understand," she said, "the Kurds were for practice."
Gosden told Goldberg that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. "It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA," she says, pointing out that, "for Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."
Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who was formerly a high official in Saddam's nuclear program, told Goldberg that he had direct knowledge of the Army's plans for Halabja. "The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as 'How far are the dead from the cannisters?'"
Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist in Kurdistan who led Goldberg on his tour of Halabja, and other experts "now believe that Halabja and other places in Kurdistan were struck by a combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin (the agent used in the Tokyo subway attack) and VX, a potent nerve agent."
Baban told Goldberg that the Iraqis could conceivably have used aflatoxin as well; aflatoxin is a biological agent that causes long-term liver damage. Baban said, "Here is a civilian population exposed to chemical and possibly biological weapons, and people are developing many varieties of cancers and congenital abnormalities."
In 1995, the Iraqis admitted that they had weaponized aflatoxin, Charles Duelfer, then the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission weapons-inspection team in Iraq, told Goldberg. "This was the first time Iraq actually agreed to discuss the Presidential origins of these programs," Duelfer said.
Although "it is unclear what biological and chemical weapons Saddam possesses today," Goldberg wrote, August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, provided information on another type of weapon. "It is our estimate," he said, "that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years."
'Proof' of Iraq/Bin Laden links
Weekend Austrailian ^ | November 04, 2001 | From AFP
Posted on 11/04/2001 7:33:53 PM PST by concerned about politics
'Proof' of Iraq/Bin Laden links
A FORMER Iraqi special forces officer has given new proof of links between Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and Iraq, according to a report.
The newspaper said that it was told by a leading member of the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Nabeel Musawi, of the testimony of the 36-year-old former officer, identified only as A.S.
The INC is one of the main opposition groups to Saddam Hussein's government.
The newspaper said that the former officer told of a training camp called Salman Pak in Iraq where members of bin Laden's terror network had trained as pilots and on how to seize control of aircraft.
Musawi said that the former officer told him: "There were also women pilots who were trained and I believe that the next time, if there is a next time, it could be a woman who takes over an airplane."
The source also told of a meeting on the Pakistani border in December 1998 between an Iraqi diplomat working in Turkey and Osama bin Laden.
He further claimed that Iraq had sent a tonne of anthrax bacteria to bin Laden.
The former officer was said to have been in a poor physical state after being tortured and poisoned while in prison."
"IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials met with BIN LADEN in Afghanistan several more times. A second group of BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives from Saudi Arabia were then trained by IRAQI INTELLIGENCE in IRAQ to smuggle weapons and explosives into Saudi Arabia and other countries, which they later accomplished in an effort to carry out future terrorist acts of violence. A third group of BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives received a month of sophisticated guerrilla operations training from IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials later in the Summer of 1998."
"Despite philosophical and religious differences with SADDAM HUSSEIN, BIN LADEN continually sought to strengthen and reinforce the support he and AL QAEDA received from IRAQ. In mid-July 1998, BIN LADEN sent Dr. AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the Egyptian co-founder of AL QAEDA, to IRAQ to meet with senior Iraqi officials, including Iraqi vice president TAHA YASSIN RAMADAN. Upon information and belief, the purpose of this meeting was to discuss and plan a joint strategy for a terrorist campaign against the United States."
"To demonstrate IRAQ's commitment to BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA, HIJAZI presented BIN LADEN with a pack of blank, official Yemeni passports, supplied to IRAQI INTELLIGENCE from their Yemeni contacts. HIJAZI's visit to Kandahar was followed by a contingent of IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials who provided additional training and instruction to BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives in Afghanistan. These Iraqi officials included members of “Unit 999,” a group of elite IRAQI INTELLIGENCE officials who provided advanced sabotage and infiltration training and instruction to AL QAEDA operatives."
"In addition to the al-Nasiriyah and Salman Pak training camps, by January 1999, BIN LADEN and AL QAEDA operatives were being trained by IRAQI INTELLIGENCE and military officers at other training camps on the outskirts of Baghdad."
On January 22, 2001, the Arab language newspaper Al Watan Al Arabi, reported that SADDAM HUSSEIN and his sons had called for an Arab alliance to “launch a global terrorist war against the United States and its allies.” The newspaper characterized HUSSEIN's statement as calling for an uncompromising campaign and “scorched earth policy.”
On July 21, approximately six weeks before the September 11th attacks, IRAQI columnist Mulhalhal reported that BIN LADEN was making plans to “demolish the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.”
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led
- Recognized Member
- Posts: 91
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- Contact:
1. I believe that Saddam had WMD because he used them.
2. Saddam needed to be taken care of.
3. The UN is the only one who should go in.
4. The UN is a failure and needs to be reworked.
5. It wasn't the right thing for the US to go in without the UN.
2. Saddam needed to be taken care of.
3. The UN is the only one who should go in.
4. The UN is a failure and needs to be reworked.
5. It wasn't the right thing for the US to go in without the UN.
"To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience.” //klinkenberg.tripod.com/lifeinkorea