WMD?

“Asked to use his own words, he fails to do so.

Your robert lieber post is flawed in that it does not address the core issue of Bush's assertions, which was the point I first made.

You second article ignores that fact as well. The third, I didn't read, since it was about Madrid, and had nothing, therefore, to do with the core dispute. I'll restate it for you:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
- George W. Bush, address to the U.S., March 17, 2003

Lots of people in the intelligence community are coming forward saying there was plenty of doubt about this. He lied.”

“answer?


the article completely says it all. you are not being honest man.

that is not a lie, and you can't prove it was. many experts agreed with bush, many still do.

prove it phaeddy, don't jsut say it...prove it dood. you can't, cuz it's a leftwing lie......


sorry , please try again”

“So "no doubt" means doubt, then?

No doubt means that all the dissenting opinions within the CIA, media, other countries intel and first-hand accounts were to be ignored?

No.

No doubt means just that. He lied.”

“BUSH IS A LIAR”

“Scott Ritter had doubt, and was in a position to know. Many within the intel community agreed.

237 misleading statements constitutes one big lie.”

“Saddam's Useful Idiots
Did any Iraqi money filter back to American war critics?

BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Monday, March 15, 2004 12:01 a.m.

A year ago John Kerry described the nations that would liberate Iraq as a "coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted." It turns out that may be a better description of his own antiwar camp. From Jacques Chirac's and Vladimir Putin's political cronies to Tony Blair's own Labour Party, many of the most vocal opponents of enforcing U.N. resolutions turn out to have been on the take.
Were some of the most vehement and prominent American critics of the war similarly bought and paid for? There's no hard evidence to support such a conclusion, but it's a possibility worthy of investigation following the appearance of a politically connected Detroit-area businessman on a recently published list of individuals receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein.

Shakir al-Khafaji's close ties to Iraqi Baathists and Michigan Democrats are a matter of public record. In late January the al Mada newspaper in Baghdad published his name on a list of 270 individuals, companies, churches and political parties that Iraqi Oil Ministry documents allege benefited from Saddam's largesse. The Iraqi Governing Council has hired a team of professional auditors to investigate; some of the alleged beneficiaries have already confessed.

This wasn't the first time I'd heard Mr. al-Khafaji mentioned in connection with clandestine oil profits. In Baghdad last May, a man I'll call Omar, a newly unemployed officer of the Iraqi intelligence service (the Mukhabarat), leveled the same accusation. He also alleged that some of the money had been intended to finance a documentary film by former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter and to influence Democratic congressmen, including former House Minority Whip David Bonior.

When I met Omar he was armed with references (which checked out) from foreigners he'd known in his last post, working for Mohammed al-Sahaf--a k a "Baghdad Bob"--at the Ministry of Information. He accurately described Mr. al-Khafaji's service as chairman of regular pro-Saddam Iraqi "Expatriate" conferences. He noted his close contacts with high-level Baath officials such as Tariq Aziz, and told me how Mr. al-Khafaji had brought Mr. Ritter to Iraq in 2000 to make a documentary about the damaging effects of economic sanctions and how Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

But Omar went further, saying Iraqi authorities had arranged for oil transfers to Mr. al-Khafaji to finance all this activity. Omar said proceeds from the sales were to be transferred to an account controlled by one of Mr. al-Khafaji's brothers in Jordan, where they would be less likely to attract the scrutiny of U.S. authorities. Some of the money was intended for Mr. Ritter's film. Other funds, Mr. al-Khafaji allegedly told Tariq Aziz, would go to finance the elections of Democratic congressmen in order that they "would be a lobbyist for Iraq." Omar named Mr. Bonior and Rep. John Conyers. I pressed him as to whether he could be certain any transfers were ever made. No, he conceded, "maybe he was plotting to take the money for himself."

Mr. al-Khafaji denied receiving any oil allocations as alleged by Omar and the Iraqi Oil Ministry documents when I spoke with him last month and again last Wednesday. He also denied making any improper political contributions. "All these allegations have been investigated by the federal government to death and they found nothing wrong," he said. But he did acknowledge having two brothers by the names Omar gave me in relation to the alleged Jordanian bank account, as well as his relationships with Mr. Ritter and the congressmen. In fact, much of the picture Omar painted for me--entirely unprompted; the name al-Khafaji meant nothing to me at the time--is backed up by publicly available information. Other details have been confirmed by interviews and research over the past 10 months. At a minimum, it seems some of Mr. al-Khafaji's U.S. associates were useful idiots for a close ally of a totalitarian regime.





Let's start with Mr. Ritter, the former weapons inspector who resigned in 1998 to protest the Clinton administration's weakness in the face of the cat-and-mouse games Saddam was playing with his team. Sometime thereafter Mr. Ritter did an about-face on the nature of the Iraqi weapons threat. Not only has he never explained his change of views, he implausibly maintains they have been consistent all along.
Mr. Ritter acknowledges taking $400,000 from Mr. al-Khafaji to produce the documentary in question, "In Shifting Sands." He acknowledges Mr. al-Khafaji's "instrumental" role in arranging his visit and interviews, as well his September 2002 address to Saddam's rubber-stamp parliament. He acknowledges that Mr. al-Khafaji was "openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad." But Mr. Ritter says he took extensive precautions to satisfy himself that Mr. al-Khafaji's investment in his film came from clean money and was not regarded as some sort of "quid pro quo."

Omar is not the only Iraqi intelligence source to suggest some of that money may have come courtesy of Saddam. At about the same time I was talking to Omar, London's Daily Telegraph reported the discovery at Iraqi intelligence headquarters of a file referring to the "Scott Ritter Project." The file referred to the purchase of gold jewelry intended for Mr. Ritter's wife and daughter, jewelry that was to be delivered by--guess who?--Shakir al-Khafaji. "The correspondence discussed further ways to come up with money to offer to Mr. al-Khafaji to cover his travel costs," reported the Telegraph. "One letter requests approval to make funds available by siphoning profits from an oil deal, apparently controlled by Iraqi intelligence."

Mr. Ritter spoke with me cooperatively and at length last month. He acknowledged an incident like the one described in the Telegraph, though he says the gifts were offered by someone other than Mr. al-Khafaji, and that he refused them and reported the incident to the FBI on his return. He described the $400,000 not as a grant but as an "interest-bearing loan" from Mr. al-Khafaji's Falcon Management to his own Five Rivers Productions. He said none of the money will probably be repaid because the movie failed to make money. He said the deal was carefully lawyered and information regarding the loan was "voluntarily and proactively provided" to the FBI and Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, who at no time expressed any concern about a violation of U.S. law.

As to the documentary's content, Mr. Ritter is unrepentant: "I could understand people even bothering to call me if we had found weapons of mass destruction. . . . Excuse my language here, but who the f--- was right?" Mr. Ritter would seem somewhat vindicated on the WMD issue, but it remains a mystery how and when he decided that the weapons did not exist. "Iraq today is not disarmed and remains an ugly threat to its neighbors and to world peace," Mr. Ritter told a Senate committee--under oath--in September 1998.

As for the Democratic congressmen, Mr. al-Khafaji was indeed financing elections, as Omar said--at least in the small amounts permitted by campaign finance law. Public records show a contribution of $500 in 1992 and $1,000 in 1999 to Mr. Conyers, an early and vocal proponent of lifting sanctions on Saddam. Mr. Conyers said through a spokeswoman that he has no recollection of ever having met Mr. al-Khafaji.

Mr. al-Khafaji was a much more regular contributor to Mr. Bonior: $1,000 in 1994, $250 in 1996, $500 and $1,000 in 1998, $1,000 in 1999, $1,000 in 2000, and $1,000 each from Mr. al-Khafaji and his wife in 2001. Mr. Bonior called the suggestion he'd received anything other than legal political contributions from Mr. al-Khafaji "absolutely preposterous and false." Mr. Bonior, until 2002 the second-ranking Democrat in the House, was one of the chief congressional critics of U.S. Iraq policy, calling the sanctions "infanticide masquerading as policy." It's worth noting that many "hawks" agreed that sanctions were morally problematic, but favored regime change instead of retreat.

As war loomed in September 2002, Mr. al-Khafaji escorted Mr. Bonior on a high-profile trip to Baghdad, along with Washington Rep. Jim McDermott and California Rep. Mike Thompson. Mr. Bonior, whose office handled the arrangements, told me last month that Mr. al-Khafaji "was part of the trip and he obviously knew people, and he was connected quite well so we could get the meetings that we wanted." Mr. McDermott's spokesman likewise recalls that Mr. al-Khafaji played a central role, adding that a Michigan-based charity called Life for Relief and Development organized and paid everything. Mr. al-Khafaji told me that he'd been a financial supporter of that organization, too, though he said he couldn't remember how much--not even ballpark--he'd given over the years.

The trip proved something of a propaganda coup for Saddam, with Mr. McDermott suggesting in a televised interview from Baghdad that President Bush "would mislead the American people" while saying "I think you have to take the Iraqis at face value." Mr. al-Khafaji seems to have taken a particular shine to Mr. McDermott, resulting in another contribution--$5,000--to a legal defense fund that had been set up for the congressman in an unrelated case. "He's a friend and he gives me money," Mr. McDermott told Roll Call in February 2003.

The al-Khafaji trail stretches as far as South Africa, where his family's Falcon Trading Group is incorporated and sold food and dry goods to the Saddam regime. A South African paper has reported that Falcon traded upward of $50 million worth of commodities with Iraq since 1993. Recent articles in the South African press say Mr. al-Khafaji facilitated the Iraq visits of top government officials, possibly influencing that country's pro-Saddam stance. They also name him as a beneficiary of an Iraqi oil deal through a South African company--Montega Trading--in which he was allegedly a partner. Montega appears on the Iraqi Oil Ministry list, but Mr. al-Khafaji denies that he was ever a partner or "anything else" in Montega.





It should be reiterated that there is no hard evidence of any wrongdoing on Mr. al-Khafaji's part. Federal authorities were aware, to some degree at least, of his Iraq-related activities. It is possible that he trucked extensively with a corrupt regime while keeping his own hands clean. But a few things are clear. First, he was a well-connected fixer when it came to dealings with Saddam's regime, able to arrange meetings with the likes of Tariq Aziz at the drop of a hat. Second, Iraqi intelligence, rightly or wrongly, perceived him as at least a potential asset. Third, he was intimately involved in facilitating the Iraq trips of some of the most prominent American critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
If there's no fire with all this smoke, as everyone involved maintains, then surely they will welcome the scrutiny it deserves. The U.S. Treasury says it is aware of the Iraqi Oil Ministry documents, and is looking into the matter.

Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.”

“Strat, if you have nothing of your own to say, what does that say about you?

Your article is baseless, yet again. It's immediate premis is that there is no evidence linking Ritter to Iraq money, and then tries to draw a conclusion that he WAS.

Answer my question:

Does no doubt mean no doubt?”

“Premise. I'm having a bad typing day.”

“let's look at more of the left's tactics.....


Iraqi spy case shows media at it again

March 14, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Anyone who wants to understand why the media are held in such low regard by the public -- in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles -- should consider the following headline from an Associated Press story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week:

''Accused Spy Is Cousin Of Bush Staffer''

The accused spy is Susan Lindauer, who is accused of working for Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency. She describes herself merely as an "anti-war activist,'' though, as the daily rummage through the Baathists' scrupulous paperwork indicates more clearly every day, being an anti-war activist and on the Saddamite payroll are by no means mutually exclusive.

Before she allegedly became an Iraqi agent, Lindauer spent a decade in Washington working for four members of Congress: Peter DeFazio, Ron Wyden, Carol Moseley Braun and Zoe Lofgren. What do these four legislators have in common?

Answer: They all have a ''D'' after their name.

But to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's headline writer the salient fact about Lindauer is not her 10 years of work for the Democratic Party but the amazing revelation that she is a second cousin of Bush chief of staff Andrew Card.

A second cousin! Hold the front page!

Here's an easy test for the publisher, editor and news staff of the paper:

1. Name all your second cousins.

2. Where do they live?

3. When did you last see them?

It's one thing for the press to be anti-war and feel Saddam should be given another decade or two to come into compliance with Security Council resolutions. It's quite another to be so smitten with the old butcher that your copy editors internally absorb Baath Party tribal politics and assume that mere second cousinship with members of the Bush clan automatically puts you in the inner circle. To be fair to the Associated Press, they sent the story out on the wires with the headline, ''Woman Named In Spy Case Worked As Journalist, Congressional Aide.''

What's that? ''Worked As Journalist''? Well, there's an angle the Seattle guys unaccountably missed. Before she went to work for the Democratic Party, Lindauer worked for . . . the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Instead of the cousin thing, the headline writer might more usefully have written:

''Accused Spy Used To Sit At Desk Next To Mine; I Made Clumsy Pass At Her At 1992 Office Party.''

I'd love to see these headline writers working in Hollywood: ''Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me''? ''Well, to be honest we thought it sounded punchier as 'Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Someone Who Used To Go To School With Someone Who Was A Cousin Of Someone Who Was Briefly Married To A Receptionist At Halliburton. When Cheney Worked There!' ''

Look, these are serious times. Week after week, more details emerge of the extraordinary number of influential Westerners, from French government ministers to the head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, who appear to have been in the pay of Saddam. That's, among other things, what Susan Lindauer is accused of.

But we don't have a serious press for these serious times. Boring and self-important is not the same as serious. But one reason why John Kerry calculates he can get away with damning the Bush administration as ''crooks'' and ''liars'' is because he figures he can count on the mainstream media doing what the Post-Intelligencer did -- instinctively framing every issue in anti-Bush terms, no matter how ludicrously. I suppose it's not entirely impossible that one reason the Post-Intelligencer guys went with their spy-Bush linkage is because Lindauer has been accused of betraying her country and Al Gore accused Bush of ''betraying'' the country, too. But that's one more reason why Bush will win in November: The media and the Democrats are sustaining each other in their delusions.

Sen. Kerry thinks the Bush administration are ''crooked'' and ''lying.'' The Bush ''lie'' boils down to this: The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things. And they think Bush is ''lying'' by insisting on playing it as a war.

As it happens, the only big political ''lie'' in recent days came from Kerry, who told a meeting in Florida, ''I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy.' '' The senator has spent most of the last year in Iowa and New Hampshire, which, for all their charms, are not where one goes to rub shoulders with ''foreign leaders.'' Jacques Chirac could have driven over the Granite State border from Quebec's Eastern Townships, where he was vacationing last summer. But he didn't. Kerry does not appear to have ''looked at'' any foreign leaders since he began his campaign.

And, if he had, he'd find them far less well-disposed to him than he imagines. Last Thursday, March 11, 2-1/2 years to the day after Sept. 11, nearly 200 people were murdered by terrorists in Spain. Like Britain, Australia and Poland, Spain is a member of what John Kerry calls Bush's ''fraudulent coalition.''

You can disagree with the administration on this war. I have. A few days after 9/11, I called for resignations from the agencies that failed on that day -- FAA, FBI, CIA, INS. Didn't happen. Still hasn't happened. It should. A couple of weeks after 9/11, I called for a total upheaval of America's relationship with Saudi Arabia. Didn't happen then. There are a few subtle hints that things are changing, but far too slowly. Anyone who took the war seriously can certainly find fault with the administration. But not if you stand there like a 5-year-old boy and never get beyond pointing your fingers and sticking your tongue out: ''Ooh, Bush lied. And Ashcroft's a big bully. And Cheney's stealing it all for his oil buddies. And you shouldn't mention the war in your campaign ads, because it's not fair. Nyaa-nyaa!''

Two hundred people died in Madrid because of a war Democrats refuse to admit exists. But, hey, you never know: Maybe the guy who did it will be a third cousin twice removed of Karl Rove.

Copyright 2004 Associated Press”

“"Can't prove it", sure seems to be a one way affair-----use some disproof not the above. Practice Problem; Dis prove I am an ... hole. No, don't worry,you won't hurt my feelings.”

“So strat, much like his norm, gets bored when he loses a debate and moves on.

Carry on. Bush lied.”

“you are boring saleboard... completely , utterly, hideously boring to the bone.
cheap cutdowns, thoughtless rhetoric, mindless hyperbole....BOOOOORRRRRING!

maybe you'll find the truth more interesting...as i do;


March 10, 2004, 6:19 p.m.
Kojo & Kofi
Unbelievable U.N. stories.

By Claudia Rosett

In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.

That's fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Saddam Hussein's widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam's regime.

Cotecna was hired by the U.N. on December 31, 1998. Shortly afterward, press reports surfaced that Kojo was a partner in a private consulting firm doing work for Cotecna, and that just 13 months previously he had occupied a senior slot on Cotecna's own staff. Asked about this in 1999 by the London Telegraph, a U.N. spokesman, John Mills, replied that the U.N. had not been aware of the connection, and that "The tender by Cotecna was the lowest by a significant margin."

It seems there's a lot the U.N. managed not to be aware of. But the information that Cotecna — while employing Kofi's son in any capacity — put in the lowest bid by far for the job of authenticating Saddam's Oil-for-Food imports, is not necessarily reassuring. Cotecna, which got paid roughly $6 million for its services during that first year (the U.N. will not release figures on Cotecna's fees over the following years) was bidding on work that empowered its staff to inspect tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks as a routine part of business. The issue was never solely whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy.

The whole setup raises disturbing questions. But this is a subject on which neither the U.N. nor Cotecna has been willing to offer illumination. Asked for details, both have stonewalled. The U.N. spokesman Mills, who fielded the question in 1999, is now deceased. A query to the U.N. Oil-for-Food elicits from a spokesman only the information that the five-year-old response by the late Mills "stands, as provided by the U.N." A recent query to Cotecna, asking for at least some detail on ties to Kojo Annan, elicits nothing beyond the reply that: "There is nothing else to add."

It is possible of course, that Kojo Annan had nothing to do with the Iraq program per se, as he told the Telegraph back in 1999: "I would never play any role in anything that involves the United Nations for obvious reasons." Though at the same time, in a comment that suggested at least nodding acquaintance with the Oil-for-Food program, Kojo added: "The decision is made by the contracts committee, not by Kofi Annan."

Then why the reluctance from the U.N., or Cotecna, for that matter, to provide any further details whatsoever? Beyond that, it is disingenuous to suggest Annan had no responsibility for the contracts. Oil-for-Food was run out of the U.N. Secretariat, reporting directly to Annan, who regularly signed off on the six-month phases of the program. Without his approval, the contracts would not have gone forward.

Even if we assume that everyone on the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food staff, as well as Kofi Annan himself, was indeed ignorant of Kojo Annan's involvement with Cotecna, it is hard to buy the argument that Kofi, while signing off regularly on the program's workings, was simply oblivious to the details. Not only was Kofi Annan the boss, but he was directly involved from the beginning. Kofi Annan's official U.N. biography notes that shortly before his promotion to Secretary-General "he led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid."

It was Annan, who in October 1997 brought in as Oil-for-Food's executive director Benon Sevan, reporting directly to the Secretary-General, to consolidate Oil-for-Food's operations into the Office of Iraq Program. And it was shortly after Sevan took charge that Oil-for-Food, set up by Kofi Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with at least some transparency on individual deals, began treating as confidential such vital information as the names of specific contractors, quantities of goods, and prices paid.

U.N. staff, such as Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor in a letter last month to the Wall Street Journal, have argued that the U.N. was not responsible for Saddam's misdeeds, and that U.N. staff were not concerned with such kickback-relevant matters as business terms of Saddam's contracts. The disturbing implication is that the U.N. — while collecting a commission of more than $1 billion on Saddam's oil sales to cover its own overhead in administering Oil-for-Food — was indifferent to Saddam's short-changing the Iraqi people, whose relief was supposed to be the entire point of the program.

Beyond that, the U.N., during the final months of Oil-for-Food, gave every indication of knowing just where the problems lay. Last May, shortly after the fall of Saddam's regime, the U.N. Security Council voted to end the Oil-for-Food program and gave the U.N. Secretariat six months to tie-up loose ends before handing over any outstanding import contracts to the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority. With Saddam's regime gone as a contracting party, the U.N. began a frenzied process of "renegotiating" billions in contracts, basically winnowing out the graft component that Oil-for-Food had previously approved.

By the end of this sudden housecleaning, the U.N. had scrapped more than 25 percent of the contracts for which, under Saddam, it had already agreed to release funding from the U.N.-controlled Oil-for-Food bank accounts. Uncharacteristically, the U.N. on its website has posted explanatory notes next to some of the dropped contracts. These do not suggest a U.N. that was living in ignorance of Saddam's 10-percent-overpricing-and-kickback scheme.

For instance, in the U.N.'s own footnotes, there is reference to the welding-machine contractor from Lebanon, "unwilling to accept the 10% deduction"; likewise the Belgian and Jordanian suppliers of medicine, both refusing a "10% reduction." In other cases there is a vaguer note, such as the Russian backhoe supplier, who "refused to accept extra fee deduction." Or the supplier of "fork lift and spares" from Belarus who "stated that the supply of remaining parts cannot be cost effective under the current circumstances." Asked to further explain these notations, an Oil-for-Food spokesman offers no comment except that all available information is already posted on the U.N. website.

Altogether, according to U.N. records, 728 previously approved and funded deals were "removed from the list of amendable contracts," a few because the supplies had already been delivered, but many because the contractors appear to have run for the hills. For instance, there's the Jordanian supplier of school furniture, whose contract was dropped during the U.N.'s post-Saddam frenzy of "prioritization" because the "Company does not exist and the person in charge moved to Egypt." Or the Russian supplier of "vehicle spare parts," who "could not be contacted despite all efforts." Or the Algerian seller of "adult milk" who "has no interest in renegotiation"; the Egyptian seller of "generator" for educational purposes, who "is not enthusiastic about proceeding with the amendment"; the Syrian seller of "laboratory equipment" who is "not possible to contact."

Another 762 contracts set aside indefinitely by the U.N., post-Saddam because of their "questionable utility" were deals for goods that sound handy and humanitarian enough on the generic U.N. face of it. These include medicine from China; sugar and ambulances from Egypt; laboratory materials and medical equipment from France; educational materials from Pakistan; wheat, medical equipment, and ambulances from Russia; and yet more wheat, from Saudi Arabia. One has to wonder if the revised assessment of utility lay in the nature of the goods described, or in the actual terms of the contracts previously blessed by the U.N.

It's commendable that the U.N., facing imminent handover of the program, tried to clean up the remaining contracts. It is plausible, perhaps, that no one at the U.N. knew of the links between Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, and the firm monitoring Iraq's U.N.-approved imports, Cotecna, and that these ties had no bearing on a massively corrupt program. It is possible that only after Saddam fell did anyone among the 1,000 or so U.N. international staff administering Oil-for-Food, or Sevan, or Kofi Annan, notice that they'd been approving Saddam's deals with suppliers that were, in various combinations, paying kickbacks, hard to contact, or even, as in the case of the Jordanian school-furniture contractor, nonexistent.

But what has to be clear by now is that the U.N. itself was either corrupt, or so stunningly incompetent as to require total overhaul. There are by now enough questions, there has been enough secrecy, stonewalling, and rising evidence of graft all around the U.N. program in Iraq, so that it is surely worth an independent investigation into the U.N. itself — and Annan's role in supervising this program. If Kofi Annan will not exercise his authority to set a truly independent inquiry in motion, it is way past time for the U.S., whose taxpayers supply about a quarter of the U.N. budget, to call the U.N. itself to account for Oil-for-Food — in dollar terms the biggest relief operation it has ever run, and by many signs, one of the dirtiest”

“"you are boring saleboard... completely , utterly, hideously boring to the bone.
cheap cutdowns, thoughtless rhetoric, mindless hyperbole....BOOOOORRRRRING!........."



MUTT!?!?! is THAT you !?!?!

LMFAO!”

“The greatest friend the Democrats have in this election is our hideously pathetic system of government education. Come on, let's face it. These schools are doing a hideous job. You could spend three weeks making a list of things that our young people should know but don't know by the time they get out of high school.

Particularly galling is the ignorance Americans show over matters economic. This is fantastic news for Democrats who continuously misrepresent the state of our economy ... and get away with it. The economy is booming, unemployment is low and things are looking great ... but you'll never hear it from a Democrat. They can lie and get away with it because stupid Americans just don't know any better.

Let's take this asinine nonsense over jobs "outsourcing." To listen to Democrats and those who vote for them you would think that India has stolen about two out of every three jobs in the United States. It's not true. None other than Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich had his say on this subject. Reich said: "The number of [information technology] jobs sent abroad still accounts for a tiny proportion of America's 10-million-strong IT workforce. When the U.S. economy bounces back from recession -- as it surely will within the next 18 months -- we can expect many IT jobs to return."

Is there really a jobs problem in the United States? Try this factoid on for size. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that with all of the baby boomers retiring, by 2005 there will only be one worker in the U.S. ready to join the workforce for every two boomers that leaves. This means that by 2008, the time of the next presidential election, there will be 10 million more jobs than there are people in this country available to fill them.

This information is dangerous to Democrats ... so is education. No wonder they oppose any meaningful reform in how our children learn.”

“OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."

The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front. Numerous sources have confirmed this. One defector reported that "al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-al Qaeda relationship. The defector said Iraq sought al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided al Qaeda with training and instructors."

One such confirmation came in a postwar interview with one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. As the memo details:


4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.
A decisive moment in the budding relationship came in 1993, when bin Laden faced internal resistance to his cooperation with Saddam.


5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.
Another facilitator of the relationship during the mid-1990s was Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. Abu Hajer al-Iraqi). Abu Hajer, now in a New York prison, was described in court proceedings related to the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as bin Laden's "best friend." According to CIA reporting dating back to the Clinton administration, bin Laden trusted him to serve as a liaison with Saddam's regime and tasked him with procurement of weapons of mass destruction for al Qaeda. FBI reporting in the memo reveals that Abu Hajer "visited Iraq in early 1995" and "had a good relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Sometime before mid-1995 he went on an al Qaeda mission to discuss unspecified cooperation with the Iraqi government."

Some of the reporting about the relationship throughout the mid-1990s comes from a source who had intimate knowledge of bin Laden and his dealings. This source, according to CIA analysis, offered "the most credible information" on cooperation between bin Laden and Iraq.


This source's reports read almost like a diary. Specific dates of when bin Laden flew to various cities are included, as well as names of individuals he met. The source did not offer information on the substantive talks during the meetings. . . . There are not a great many reports in general on the relationship between bin Laden and Iraq because of the secrecy surrounding it. But when this source with close access provided a "window" into bin Laden's activities, bin Laden is seen as heavily involved with Iraq (and Iran).
Reporting from the early 1990s remains somewhat sketchy, though multiple sources place Hassan al-Turabi and Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's current No. 2, at the center of the relationship. The reporting gets much more specific in the mid-1990s:


8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.
9 . . . Bin Laden visited Doha, Qatar (17-19 Jan. 1996), staying at the residence of a member of the Qatari ruling family. He discussed the successful movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia, and operations targeted against U.S. and U.K. interests in Dammam, Dharan, and Khobar, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, bin Laden met with Hijazi and Turabi, among others.

And later more reporting, from the same "well placed" source:


10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required.
The analysis of those events follows:


The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation.

IN ADDITION TO THE CONTACTS CLUSTERED in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad's point of contact with al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz."


11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan in 1999. . . .
14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.

That visit came as the Iraqis intensified their defiance of the U.N. inspection regime, known as UNSCOM, created by the cease-fire agreement following the Gulf War. UNSCOM demanded access to Saddam's presidential palaces that he refused to provide. As the tensions mounted, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon on February 18, 1998, and prepared the nation for war. He warned of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals" and said "there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The day after this speech, according to documents unearthed in April 2003 in the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing coming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered by liquid paper that, when revealed, exposed a plan to increase cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to that memo, the IIS agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might provide "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

Four days later, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden issued his now-famous fatwa on the plight of Iraq, published in the Arabic-language daily, al Quds al-Arabi: "For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples." Bin Laden urged his followers to act: "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

Although war was temporarily averted by a last-minute deal brokered by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, tensions soon rose again. The standoff with Iraq came to a head in December 1998, when President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a 70-hour bombing campaign that began on December 16 and ended three days later, on December 19, 1998.

According to press reports at the time, Faruq Hijazi, deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met with bin Laden in Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer bin Laden safe haven in Iraq. CIA reporting in the memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee seems to confirm this meeting and relates two others.


15. A foreign government service reported that an Iraqi delegation, including at least two Iraqi intelligence officers formerly assigned to the Iraqi Embassy in Pakistan, met in late 1998 with bin Laden in Afghanistan.
16. According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998.

17. . . . Iraq sent an intelligence officer to Afghanistan to seek closer ties to bin Laden and the Taliban in late 1998. The source reported that the Iraqi regime was trying to broaden its cooperation with al Qaeda. Iraq was looking to recruit Muslim "elements" to sabotage U.S. and U.K. interests. After a senior Iraqi intelligence officer met with Taliban leader [Mullah] Omar, arrangements were made for a series of meetings between the Iraqi intelligence officer and bin Laden in Pakistan. The source noted Faruq Hijazi was in Afghanistan in late 1998.

18. . . . Faruq Hijazi went to Afghanistan in 1999 along with several other Iraqi officials to meet with bin Laden. The source claimed that Hijazi would have met bin Laden only at Saddam's explicit direction.

An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports:


Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.
Information about connections between al Qaeda and Iraq was so widespread by early 1999 that it made its way into the mainstream press. A January 11, 1999, Newsweek story ran under this headline: "Saddam + Bin Laden?" The story cited an "Arab intelligence source" with knowledge of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. "According to this source, Saddam expected last month's American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam's long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift if formally."


INTELLIGENCE REPORTS about the nature of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda from mid-1999 through 2003 are conflicting. One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, "said that the last contact between the IIS and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam's office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda."

The bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that "in late 1999" al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that "was operational as of 1999." Other reports suggest that the Iraqi regime contemplated several offers of safe haven to bin Laden throughout 1999.


23. . . . Iraqi officials were carefully considering offering safe haven to bin Laden and his closest collaborators in Nov. 1999. The source indicated the idea was put forward by the presumed head of Iraqi intelligence in Islamabad (Khalid Janaby) who in turn was in frequent contact and had good relations with bin Laden.
Some of the most intriguing intelligence concerns an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir:


24. According to sensitive reporting, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national (Shakir) facilitated the arrival of one of the Sept 11 hijackers for an operational meeting in Kuala Lumpur (Jan 2000). Sensitive reporting indicates Shakir's travel and contacts link him to a worldwide network of terrorists, including al Qaeda. Shakir worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport--a job he claimed to have obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee.
One of the men at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole.


25. Investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 by al Qaeda revealed no specific Iraqi connections but according to the CIA, "fragmentary evidence points to possible Iraqi involvement."
26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.

The analysis of this report follows.


CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh's timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons."
Additional reporting also calls into question the claim that relations between Iraq and al Qaeda cooled after mid-1999:

27. According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia.

And then there is the alleged contact between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The reporting on those links suggests not one meeting, but as many as four. What's more, the memo reveals potential financing of Atta's activities by Iraqi intelligence.





The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, [Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir] al Ani, on several occasions. During one of these meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office.
And the commentary:


CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague--in Dec. 1994 and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information.
It's not just Gross who stands by the information. Five high-ranking members of the Czech government have publicly confirmed meetings between Atta and al Ani. The meeting that has gotten the most press attention--April 9, 2001--is also the most widely disputed. Even some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met al Ani on that occasion. They believe that reports of the alleged meeting, said to have taken place in public, outside the headquarters of the U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, suggest a level of sloppiness that doesn't fit the pattern of previous high-level Iraq-al Qaeda contacts.

Whether or not that specific meeting occurred, the report by Czech counterintelligence that al Ani ordered the Iraqi Intelligence Service officer to provide IIS funds to Atta might help explain the lead hijacker's determination to reach Prague, despite significant obstacles, in the spring of 2000. (Note that the report stops short of confirming that the funds were transferred. It claims only that the IIS officer requested the transfer.) Recall that Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but was denied entry because he did not have a valid visa. Rather than simply return to Germany and fly directly to the United States, his ultimate destination, Atta took pains to get to Prague. After he was refused entry the first time, he traveled back to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and caught a bus back to Prague. He left for the United States the day after arriving in Prague for the second time.

Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:


31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel.
The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration:


References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11.
Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell's case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.


37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi's procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.
38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.

The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."


CRITICS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION have complained that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror; that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely "exaggerated" for political purposes; that hawks "cherry-picked" bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public.

Carl Levin, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made those points as recently as November 9, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." Republicans on the committee, he complained, refuse to look at the administration's "exaggeration of intelligence."

Said Levin: "The question is whether or not they exaggerated intelligence in order to carry out their purpose, which was to make the case for going to war. Did we know, for instance, with certainty that there was any relationship between the Iraqis and the terrorists that were in Afghanistan, bin Laden? The administration said that there's a connection between those terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was there a basis for that?"

There was, as shown in the memo to the committee on which Levin serves. And much of the reporting comes from Clinton-era intelligence. Not that you would know this from Al Gore's recent public statements. Indeed, the former vice president claims to be privy to new "evidence" that the administration lied. In an August speech at New York University, Gore claimed: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Really?

One of the most interesting things to note about the 16-page memo is that it covers only a fraction of the evidence that will eventually be available to document the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. For one thing, both Saddam and bin Laden were desperate to keep their cooperation secret. (Remember, Iraqi intelligence used liquid paper on an internal intelligence document to conceal bin Laden's name.) For another, few people in the U.S. government are expressly looking for such links. There is no Iraq-al Qaeda equivalent of the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group currently searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, CIA and FBI officials are methodically reviewing Iraqi intelligence files that survived the three-week war last spring. These documents would cover several miles if laid end-to-end. And they are in Arabic. They include not only connections between bin Laden and Saddam, but also revolting details of the regime's long history of brutality. It will be a slow process.

So Feith's memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee is best viewed as sort of a "Cliff's Notes" version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive.

One example. The memo contains only one paragraph on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi facilitator who escorted two September 11 hijackers through customs in Kuala Lumpur. U.S. intelligence agencies have extensive reporting on his activities before and after the September 11 hijacking. That they would include only this brief overview suggests the 16-page memo, extensive as it is, just skims the surface of the reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda connections.

Other intelligence reports indicate that Shakir whisked not one but two September 11 hijackers--Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi--through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they met with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the masterminds of the September 11 plot. The meeting lasted three days. Shakir returned to work on January 9 and January 10, and never again.

Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for its intelligence operations; in some cases, more than half of the alleged "diplomats" were intelligence operatives.) The Iraqi embassy, not his employer, controlled Shakir's schedule. He was detained in Qatar on September 17, 2001. Authorities found in his possession contact information for terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and the September 11 hijackings. The CIA had previous reporting that Shakir had received a phone call from the safe house where the 1993 World Trade Center attacks had been plotted.

The Qataris released Shakir shortly after his arrest. On October 21, 2001, he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was to change planes to a flight to Baghdad. He didn't make that flight. Shakir was detained in Jordan for three months, where the CIA interrogated him. His interrogators concluded that Shakir had received extensive training in counter-interrogation techniques. Not long after he was detained, according to an official familiar with the intelligence, the Iraqi regime began to "pressure" Jordanian intelligence to release him. At the same time, Amnesty International complained that Shakir was being held without charge. The Jordanians released him on January 28, 2002, at which point he is believed to have fled back to Iraq.

Was Shakir an Iraqi agent? Does he provide a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11? We don't know. We may someday find out.

But there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.


Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.”

“I have never read a website that smacked of conspricy theorists in my life. No wonder you are so paranoid.

What's next, a link the the "Weekly World News"?”

“The Bush administration also stated that Iraq's threat to the US was "imminent". (As in "they could attack us at any moment.) This was also a misrepresentation, as Iraq posed no imminent threat to the US. However, the Saudis, DID pose an imminent threat to the US and we did nothing about that.
The Bush administration was warned about Osama Bin Laden by the outgoing Clinton administration and chose to do nothing about it. They let the ball drop in apprehending terrorists. Then they played a little misdirection game in order to invade Iraq, which is what GW wanted to do all along.”

“The Bush administration was warned about Osama Bin Laden by the outgoing Clinton administration and chose to do nothing about it. They let the ball drop in apprehending terrorists. Then they played a little misdirection game in order to invade Iraq, which is what GW wanted to do all along."
Dunadan


ok, so clinton warned bush but bush is bad cuz he didn't do anything.....but what did clinton do? he has to know if he warned bush?”

“The Pacepa Accusation
Jay Bryant
August 23, 2003
Washington Times

Pacepa charges that General Yevgeny Primakov, a former Prime Minister of Russia and onetime head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, ran Saddam Hussein's weapons program and personally oversaw the liquidation of the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Pacepa doesn't quite say it directly, but his article implies that Russian President Vladimir Putin was aware of and approved Primakov's role in the WMD disappearance program.

If all this is true, it is the most important news about Iraq since the fall of Saddam's government, for two reasons: first, it indicts the anti-American axis of old Europe in complicity not just to prevent us from getting too big for our britches, but in a willingness to prop up the most dreadful dictator since Stalin in the process.

Second, it provides the real answer to the embarrassing question: why haven't you found any WMD's?

Who is this Ion Pacepa, and why should we believe him? Once deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence, he defected to the U.S. in 1978. He remains the highest- ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet Bloc.

To me, that pedigree means two things: he knows a lot about intelligence, and he knows how to lie.

Is he lying about Primakov? Or perhaps he's not exactly lying; but perhaps his theory is simply wrong.

Here is Pacepa's case. The Soviets and their allies always had a "standard operating procedure" for getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. Pacepa himself implemented the S.O.P. in Libya.

Saddam had such a procedure in place; Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu "told me so," Pacepa says, and so did Primakov, who "in the late 1970's…ran Saddam's weapons programs." There is a problem with this assertion, because Saddam did not officially come to power until July of 1979, and Ceausescu certainly was not chatting up Pacepa after the latter's 1978 defection. However, Saddam was the power behind the throne of his cousin General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who assumed control of Iraq in a 1968 coup d'etat, so it all may be true at least de facto, if not de jure. But Pacepa needs to explain just how this part of the story works to have real credibility.

Primakov, according to Pacepa, worked with Saddam throughout the latter's reign, and it is true that he was closely involved with the Iraqi leader in 1991, earning the enmity of the administration of Bush the Elder.

Primakov's closeness to Saddam is attested by other sources as well. In 1999, when the general was Russian Prime Minister, journalist Seymour Hirsch published an article in the New Yorker alleging that Primakov had received an $800,000 Iraqi bribe hand-delivered by Tariq Aziz.

But the truly important piece of information in Pacepa's story is this: that Primakov was in Baghdad with two other former Soviet generals, Vladislav Achalov and Igor Maltsev, "from December [2002] until a couple of days before the war."

I have confirmed that he was there at least part of that time. On February 24, 2003, Condoleezza Rice was asked by a reporter what she thought Primakov was doing in Baghdad.

She didn't know, but she knew he was there, and referenced his parallel 1991 visit in her answer.

If Primakov spent anything like the three months before the Iraqi War in Baghdad, it is patently obvious that he was up to no good, and logical, given his expertise, to believe his mission may well have been orchestrating the deep-sixing of Saddam's WMD stockpile.

The worldwide press should pick up this story, investigate it thoroughly, and if it vets out make it front page news for a long time. They should smoke out Primakov – and his two cronies, too, perhaps even more so – and ask them to explain what they was doing on the banks of the Tigris in the winter of '03. Whatever lie they tell in answering, reporters should follow up on, disprove and write another week's worth of stories.

Putin, too should be made to feel the heat of this investigation. Primakov, Achalov and Matlsev may have been there on their own, without Putin's imprimatur, but I doubt it, and anyway, Putin should be put on the record with that claim, if he chooses to make it.

The world (not to mention the Democrats) is beating the Bush Administration about the head and shoulders with the accusation that there are no WMD's in Iraq. If the reason is because General Primakov implemented an old Soviet plan and liquidated the whole stockpile, then the world needs to know it”

“North Korea has delivered 400 ballistic missile to Mideast



SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, October 27, 2003
North Korea has delivered 400 ballistic missiles to clients in the Middle East and sharply increased sales over the last year.

The South Korean Defense Ministry told parliament in a report that Pyongyang delivered 400 Scud-class missiles to a range of Middle East countries since 1985. The report said the missile export constituted the largest source of hard currency for the Stalinist regime.

The report said the best clients of North Korea were Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The report did not say how much Pyongyang earned from the exports. But the Yonhap News Agency said the figure was $110 million.

In 2002, North Korea sold $60 million worth of Scud missiles and missile parts to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen, Middle East Newsline reported. The report said Pyongyang also sold Pakistan, Syria and Yemen $30 million worth of missile technology in 1999. The combined figure for 2001 was $20 million in 2001.
"Since the middle of the 1980s, North Korea has exported 400-odd Scud missiles along with missile-related parts to the Middle East region," Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Ki-Beom, quoting the report, said.

Analysts said the North Korean delivery of 15 Scud B and Scud C missile systems in December 2002 was a major reason for the sharp increase in revenues for Pyongyang. The missile shipment was seized by a Spanish war vessel and after Yemeni threats was ordered released by the United States.

North Korean missile revenues for 2003, the analysts said, were expected to match or exceed those reported for last year. The analysts cited increased North Korean missile cooperation with Iran.

The report did not seem to reveal significant additional information already found in previous South Korean studies on the North's missile exports. In 2002, a South Korean report asserted that Pyongyang sold $500 million worth of missiles to Middle East clients since the mid-1980s.

North Korea has exported such missiles as the Scud B and C to Syria and Yemen as well as the No-Dong medium-range missile to Iran. Pyongyang was also said by South Korea to have transferred missile technology to Egypt and Libya.”

“Clinton tried to bomb his training ground after they bombed our embassys in Africa. All yuou Repubs then screamed and cried "Wag the Dog" !

Jeepers!”

“you no longer have a free ride....game over

those interested in truth will see you for what you are. insignificant....”

“Why did Bush lie about the existance of WMD?

Did he think we'd forget to ask?”

“O'Reilly admits WMD mistake

Yeah, this was months ago... ice-cold news... but notice how even as he apoligized, he STILL attempted to blame it on the intelligence community.... the same people who told Bush to tone it down time and again.

I guess that's the type of 'defiant attitude' that caused Bush to invade Iraq, eh? LMAO!

This defiance will not be tolerated --- we must invade O'Reilly's TV studio immediately!”

“"you no longer have a free ride....game over

those interested in truth will see you for what you are. insignificant...."


Oh...OK big guy. You go on ahead and post yer copy and pastes from numb skull sources.

Thanks for giving me the "heads up" on the "No free passes". I was getting sick of you givig me too many Mulligans.






This outta be good :O)”

“'NO' on '4MO'.”

“Days before the fighting began, Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in with an opposing view.

"We believe [Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong," Cheney said. "And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency in this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what Saddam Hussein was doing."”

“Blix specifically faulted Powell, who told the U.N. Security Council about what he said was a site that held chemical weapons and decontamination trucks.

"Our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any chemicals or biological things," Blix said. "And the trucks that we had seen were water trucks."

The most spectacular intelligence failure concerned a report by ElBaradei, who revealed that an alleged contract by Iraq with Niger to import uranium oxide was a forgery, Blix said.

"The document had been sitting with the CIA and their U.K. counterparts for a long while, and they had not discovered it," Blix said. "And I think it took the IAEA a day to discover that it was a forgery."

Blix said that during a meeting before the war with the U.S. president, Bush told him that "the U.S. genuinely wanted peace," and that "he was no wild, gung-ho Texan, bent on dragging the U.S. into war."

Blix said Bush gave the inspectors support and information at first, but he said the help didn't last long enough.

"I think they lost their patience much too early," Blix said.

"I can see that they wanted to have a picture that was either black or white, and we presented a picture that had, you know, gray in it, as well," he said.

Iraq had been shown to have biological and chemical weapons before, "and there was no record of either destruction or production; there was this nagging question: Do they still have them?" ElBaradei said.

Blix said he had not been able to say definitively that Iraq had no such weapons, but added that he felt history has shown he was not wrong.

"At least we didn't fall into the trap that the U.S. and the U.K. did in asserting that they existed," he said.”

“Blix said he had not been able to say definitively that Iraq had no such weapons”

“
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Macbeth
Act II Sc. i
”

“Thought I'd toss this into the fight... :o) From Associate Press

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Osama bin Laden's terror network claims to have bought ready-made nuclear weapons on the black market in central Asia, the biographer of al-Qaida's No. 2 leader was quoted as telling an Australian television station.

In an interview scheduled to be televised on Monday, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir said Ayman al-Zawahri claimed that "smart briefcase bombs" were available on the black market. It was not clear when the interview between Mir and al-Zawahri took place.”

“Gee, that makes it sound like we probably should have been pursuing Al Qaida instead of invading Iraq...”

“We were "multi-tasking".”

“Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight, LOL”

“We've been looking for WMD's in Iraq less time than it took Hillary
Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm records on a table in the White
House book room.”

“Official: U.S. ends search for WMD in Iraq

Wednesday, January 12, 2005 Posted: 12:47 PM EST (1747 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN.

The search ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and may have hidden weapons stockpiles.

Members of the Iraq Survey Group were continuing to examine hundreds of documents and would investigate any new leads, the official said.

Charles A. Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group's search for WMD in Iraq, has returned to Iraq and is working on his final report, the official said.

A spokesman for the British Foreign Office said that although the physical search is over, some work continues.

"The hunt for WMD will continue under whatever authority is in charge, right now the Iraqi interim government," he said.

In October, Duelfer released a preliminary report finding that in March 2003 -- the United States invaded Iraq on March 19 of that year -- Saddam did not have any WMD stockpiles and had not started any program to produce them.

The Iraq Survey Group report said that Iraq's WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended the country's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.

The report found that Iraq worked hard to cheat on United Nations-imposed sanctions and retain the capability to resume production of weapons of mass destruction at some time in the future. (Full story)

"[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," a summary of the report said.

Many of the military and intelligence personnel, who had been assigned to the weapons search, are now working on counterinsurgency matters, the official said.

In October after Duelfer delivered his Iraq Survey Group's report to the Senate, Bush acknowledged that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction at the time he ordered the invasion but said Saddam was "systematically gaming the system" and the world is safer because he is no longer in power.

"He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away," Bush said. "Based on all the information we have to date, I believe we were right to take action."

The preliminary report indicated that Saddam was trying to have the sanctions lifted and that he hoped then to restart his weapons programs -- primarily for defense against Iran.

At the same time, the report said that "the former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after the sanctions."

As for nuclear weapons, the report found that Iraq's "ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed" after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991 -- and a nuclear weapon would have been years away.

Bush reiterated in October his position that Saddam had to go.

"He was a threat we had to confront, and America and the world are safer for our actions," he said. Democrats, however, didn't buy the president's position.

Bush's opponent in the presidential race, Sen. John Kerry, said the same day: "Mr. President, the American people deserve more than spin about this war.

"They deserve facts that represent reality, not carefully polished arguments and points that are simply calculated to align with a preconceived conception."

In Britain Prime Minister Tony Blair faced similar criticism.

He told his Labour Party's annual conference last September that the "evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong.

"I acknowledge that and accept it," he said. "I simply point out, such evidence was agreed by the whole international community, not least because Saddam had used such weapons against his own people and neighboring countries.

"And the problem is I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam.

"The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power."


Sorry, I should have checked to see what the thread was labeled before posting. My appoligies
last edited: 1/12/05 1:50:45 PM”

“That's OK. Ya got scooped by Buddha Bear on the In Memorium thread anyhow. :P”

“I did? I will have to check that out.”

“OK, sorry, I am stupid.”

“Haha! Stupid, no. Besides, as long as we have Mapes and lizs around we're all safe. They are the queens of getting scooped.”

“March 13th, the NY Times ran some interesting articles on Saddam's WMD program that they previously said did not exist.

hmmm....”

“Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says
By JAMES GLANZ and WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: March 13, 2005


AGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.

Advertisement


The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.

Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.

"They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting."

The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the chaotic months after the invasion.

Dr. Araji's statements came just a week after a United Nations agency disclosed that approximately 90 important sites in Iraq had been looted or razed in that period.

Satellite imagery analyzed by two United Nations groups - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic - confirms that some of the sites identified by Dr. Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, senior officials at those agencies said. Those officials said they could not comment on all of Dr. Araji's assertions, because the groups had been barred from Iraq since the invasion.

For nearly a year, the two agencies have sent regular reports to the United Nations Security Council detailing evidence of the dismantlement of Iraqi military installations and, in a few cases, the movement of Iraqi gear to other countries. In addition, a report issued last October by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, told of evidence of looting at crucial sites.

The disclosures by the Iraqi ministry, however, added new information about the thefts, detailing the timing, the material taken and the apparent skill shown by the thieves.

Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.

"Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private nonprofit organization in Washington that tracks the spread of unconventional weapons.

Dr. Araji said he believed that the looters themselves were more interested in making money than making weapons.

The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case, investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. The vessels could be used for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical weapons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/international/middleeast/13loot.html”

“WASHINGTON — Prewar claims by the United States that Iraq was producing biological weapons were based almost entirely on accounts from a defector who was described as "crazy" by his intelligence handlers and a "congenital liar" by his friends.

The defector, code-named "Curveball," spoke with alarming specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and fleet of mobile labs. But postwar investigations showed that he wasn't even in the country at times when he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work.

Despite persistent doubts about his credibility, Curveball's claims were included in the Bush administration's case for war without so much as a caveat. And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs.

The disclosures about Curveball and the extensive role he played in corrupting U.S. intelligence estimates on Iraq were included in a devastating report released Thursday by a commission established by President Bush to evaluate U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

The 601-page document is a sweeping assessment of U.S. intelligence failures that identifies breakdowns in dozens of cases involving multiple countries and terrorist organizations.
[...]
U.S. intelligence agencies' reliance on Curveball and their failure to scrutinize his claims are described in the report as the "primary reason" that the CIA and other spy agencies "fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's [biological weapons] programs." No other episode is explored in as much detail, or recounted with as much evident dismay.

"Worse than having no human sources," the commission said, "is being seduced by a human source who is telling lies."
[...]
The commission's report describes Curveball as an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected at a time when U.S. and other spy agencies were desperate for new sources on Iraq's weapons programs, after U.N. inspectors had left the country in 1998. The CIA never had access to Curveball. Instead, he was controlled by Germany's intelligence service, which passed along the information it collected to the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon spy agency that handled information from Iraqi defectors.

Between January 2000 and September 2001, the report said, the DIA disseminated "almost 100 reports" from Curveball, who was seen as a valuable new source. Among his most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile labs to manufacture biological weapons and evade detection.

The reports triggered a flurry of escalating U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq, even though the DIA "did not even attempt to determine Curveball's veracity," according to the report. Curveball's claims gained new currency after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Bush administration adopted a policy of preempting international threats and turned its focus to Iraq.

Curveball's claims were crucial to the case for war. An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq "has" biological weapons was "based almost exclusively on information obtained" from Curveball, according to the report.
[...]

Full Story”

“Las Vegas...RICIN....

LAS VEGAS — Detectives may be looking at the discovery of a poison-infested vial at a Las Vegas motel as a murder plot that has left one man gravely ill, FOX News has learned.

The toxin known as ricin turned up at the Extended Stay America Motel, leaving one person in critical condition and in the hospital, with some reports suggesting that he may be in a coma. No one else has exhibited signs of ricin poisoning to date, police said Friday.

Local coverage and video from FOX 5 Las Vegas

Law enforcement officials told FOX that the Las Vegas Police Department is leading the probe and the investigation appears to be focusing on a possible murder plot of some kind. Las Vegas authorities wouldn't confirm that during a Friday afternoon news conference.

"We don't have a lot of specific information," said Kathy Suey, deputy chief of the Las Vegas police Homeland Security division.

One of those exposed to the ricin is in critical condition and might be comatose, according to some accounts, after the vial of ricin was found in his room.


WOW

oh

Ricin is made from the waste left over from processing castor beans and can be extremely lethal. As little as 500 micrograms, or about the size of the head of a pin, can kill a human, according to the CDC.

So if a drop the size of a head of a pin can kill one human...how many drops can you carry in say a container in a briefcase? Or a Nalgene bottle?”

“Why, thinking of taking out your trailer park?”

“I used to be in a band called Ricin”

“WK...LOL....My sister got bit by a moose.....”

“I once saw a moose take a giant pee”

“They never caught the rightwing psycho who mailed weaponised Anthrax spores to Democratic congressmen, did they.”

“How many roaches can dance on the head of a ricin pin?”