Saddam ordered training of sept 11th hijackers

[bfp]

Saddam Hussein ordered the training of al-Qaida members two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to an independent Iraqi weekly.

The Fedayeen, under the command of Saddam's late son Uday, directly supervised 100 al-Qaida fighters who were split into two groups, reported Al-Yawm Al-Aakher, citing an Iraqi officer identified by the initial L.

One group went to Al-Nahrawan and the second to Salman Pak, near Baghdad, where they were trained to hijack airplanes, the officer said in an article translated by the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute.

According to the testimony of Iraqi military defector Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, Iraqi intelligence had a Boeing 707 fuselage at Salman Pak used to train groups how to hijack planes without weapons. His claims were consistent with commercial satellite photos showing the fuselage. Saddam's regime insisted to U.N. inspectors Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.

The Iraqi weekly, quoting the anonymous officer, said senior Fedayeen officers visited the al-Qaida fighters almost daily, "especially during the final days when they transferred them, late at night in two red trucks that belonged to the Ministry of Transportation, to an undisclosed destination."

"I witnessed that with my own eyes because on that day I was the duty officer," he said.

The officer recalled one day a Land Cruiser belonging to Saddam's personal security force, Al-Amn Al-Khass, arrived, and a senior officer, one of Saddam's personal bodyguards, stepped out.

After a two-hour meeting with a select group of officers at the Special Forces school, the officer said "we were informed that we would have dear guests, and that we should train them very well in a high level of secrecy – not to allow anyone to approach them or to talk to them in any way, shape or form."
About 100 trainees arrived a few days later, he said, a mixture of Arabs, Arabs from the Saudi peninsula, Muslim Afghans and other Muslims from various parts of the world.

The training, he said, was under direct supervision of a major general he identified only by his initials, M. DH. L, who he said now serves as a police commander in one of the provinces.
Most left Iraq after completion of their training, but others stayed through the last battle in Baghdad against coalition forces earlier this year.

The officer said he remembers the leader of the group was a Saudi cleric named Muhammad "who was a fervent and audacious individual and did not require much training."

"He was highly skilled, and could fire accurately at a target while riding a motorcycle," the Iraqi officer said. "Additionally, he used to deliver fiery sermons calling for jihad and for fighting the Americans anywhere in the world."

Surprisingly, he continued, "this man's picture, alongside the commander of the Special Forces school, was televised several times before the beginning of the war and the fall of the former regime."

At the beginning of the Iraq war this year, the officer said, "we were surprised to see the same people whom we had trained return to the Special Forces school and with them 100 additional individuals. The high command asked us to retrain them and to divide them into several groups to be deployed in various areas in Iraq."

"Truth be told," he said, "most of these individuals competed to go to war and to the front lines. Therefore, under pressure they participated immediately in extremely fierce battles that astonished the Iraqis and the Americans."
On April 5, about 100 of the foreign trainees were sent to the 11th company division on the front lines in Nasiriya.

"And for the sake of history," he said, "I will say that this division's endurance was due to some formidable fighters, the commanding officer and members of al-Qaida who fought with intensity and brutality that are seldom matched, while they were praising Allah: Allahu Akbar [Allah is great] … Allahu Akbar. …"
These battled, which took place for 17 days, forced coalition troops to withdraw and re-enter from the industrial areas of Nasiriya, he noted.

Others went to al-Kifl, he said, and participated in "extremely brutal battles."

"Not many of them retreated and they sacrificed their lives to Apache [helicopter] fire, amid the admiration of the Iraqis and the Americans themselves," he said. "The proof is that some of them blew themselves up in the midst of American forces."

acording to our own president they had nothing to do with it.

how quickly we get confused around here

[bfp]

acording to our own president they had nothing to do with it.

how quickly we get confused around here

or how quickly YOU get confused anyway.. let me explain a little clearer so you can comprehend...

weeks ago, bush was referring to the iraqi intel official meeting with atta in prague. prague officials still say the evidence is solid. bush still downplays the evidence.

this is new information coming from another iraqi official.

[Dionysos]

Source?

Originally posted by bfp
or how quickly YOU get confused anyway.. let me explain a little clearer so you can comprehend...

weeks ago, bush was referring to the iraqi intel official meeting with atta in prague. prague officials still say the evidence is solid. bush still downplays the evidence.

this is new information coming from another iraqi official.

no...i seem to remember the actual statement was that there was no proof iraq had any involvement in 9/11.

and please dude......dont talk down to me.....

[bfp]

no...i seem to remember the actual statement was that there was no proof iraq had any involvement in 9/11.

and please dude......dont talk down to me.....

there WAS no proof that iraq had any involvment in 9/11, at that time.


and mark, is it? keep talking shit, im still waiting for a visit.

are you talking about the Prauge link? well the Czech's are saying there was no link, so go fish again.

im shure those iraqi ties to al-quida will show up the same time elvis, 2-pac, hoffa, and those WMD's will.

[bfp]

There still isn't.

of course there is. you just can't accept it. it does'nt matter if 10-15 iraqi general's come out and admit to the training, you already have your mind made up. try engaging your brain every once in a while, if you can. try looking at the other side of the story. instead of wasting your time reading conspiracy theories and investigating the "evil" republican party, why don't you study the intolerance of the enemy. you seem to have the same ideal's.

moron.

[bfp]

are you talking about the Prauge link? well the Czech's are saying there was no link, so go fish again.

listen again. the prague link has been labeled by prague officials to be solid evidence, bush downplayed the evidence. i will show you proof below, from the weekly standard.



* No fewer than five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that Mohammed Atta, the lead September 11 hijacker, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer working at the Iraqi embassy, in Prague five months before the hijacking. Media leaks here and in the Czech Republic have called into question whether Atta was in Prague on the key dates--between April 4 and April 11, 2001. And several high-ranking administration officials are "agnostic" as to whether the meeting took place. Still, the public position of the Czech government to this day is that it did.

That assertion should be seen in the context of Atta's curious stop-off in Prague the previous spring, as he traveled to the United States. Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but did not have a valid visa and was denied entry. He returned to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and took a bus back to Prague. One day later, he left for the United States.
Despite the Czech government's confirmation of the Atta-al Ani meeting, the Bush administration dropped it as evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection in September 2002. Far from hyping this episode, administration officials refrained from citing it as the debate over the Iraq war heated up in Congress, in the country, and at the U.N.


WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS LEARNED SINCE THE WAR

THE ADMINISTRATION'S CRITICS, including several of the Democratic presidential candidates, have alluded to new "evidence" they say confirms Iraq and al Qaeda had no relationship before the war. They have not shared that evidence.
Even as the critics withhold the basis for their allegations, evidence on the other side is piling up. Ansar al-Islam--the al Qaeda cell formed in June 2001 that operated out of northern Iraq before the war, notably attacking Kurdish enemies of Saddam--has stepped up its activities elsewhere in the country. In some cases, say national security officials, Ansar is joining with remnants of Saddam's regime to attack Americans and nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq. There is some reporting, unconfirmed at this point, that the recent bombing of the U.N. headquarters was the result of a joint operation between Baathists and Ansar al-Islam.

And there are reports of more direct links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden. Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.

For one thing, the meeting was reported in the press at the time. It also fits a pattern of contacts surrounding Operation Desert Fox, the series of missile strikes the Clinton administration launched at Iraq beginning December 16, 1998. The bombing ended 70 hours later, on December 19, 1998. Administration officials now believe Hijazi left for Afghanistan as the bombing ended and met with bin Laden two days later.

Earlier that year, at another point of increased tension between the United States and Iraq, Hussein sought to step up contacts with al Qaeda. On February 18, 1998, after the Iraqis repeatedly refused to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into sensitive sites, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a hawkish speech about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Said Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The following day, February 19, 1998, according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's security forces, 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 be "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

I emailed Potter, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for the Toronto Star, about his findings last month. He was circumspect about the meaning of the document. "So did we find the tip of the iceberg, or the whole iceberg? Did bin Laden and Saddam agree to disagree and that was the end of it? I still don't know." Still, he wrote, "I have no doubt that what we found is the real thing. We plucked it out of a building that had been J-DAMed and was three-quarters gone. Beyond the pale to think that the CIA or someone else planted false evidence in such a dangerous location, where only lunatics would bother to tread. And then to cover over the incriminating name Osama bin Laden with Liquid Paper, so that only the most stubborn and dogged of translators would fluke into spotting it?"

Four days after that memo was written, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a famous fatwa about the plight of Iraq. Published that day in al Quds al-Arabi, it reads in part:

First, 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. . . . The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million . . . despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
The Americans, bin Laden says, are working on behalf of Israel.
The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Bin Laden urges 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." It was around this time, U.S. officials say, that Hussein paid the $300,000 to bin Laden's deputy, Zawahiri.
ACCORDING TO U.S. officials, soldiers in Iraq have discovered additional documentary evidence like the memo Potter found. This despite the fact that there is no team on the ground assigned to track down these contacts--no equivalent to the Iraq Survey Group looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Interviews with detained senior Iraqi intelligence officials are rounding out the picture.

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.
This impulse is understandable. It is also dangerous. Some administration officials argue privately that the case for linkage is so devastating that when they eventually unveil it, the critics will be embarrassed and their arguments will collapse. But to rely on this assumption is to run a terrible risk. Already, the absence of linkage is the conventional wisdom in many quarters.

Originally posted by bfp
of course there is. you just can't accept it. it does'nt matter if 10-15 iraqi general's come out and admit to the training, you already have your mind made up. try engaging your brain every once in a while, if you can. try looking at the other side of the story. instead of wasting your time reading conspiracy theories and investigating the "evil" republican party, why don't you study the intolerance of the enemy. you seem to have the same ideal's.

moron.

i can say i have weapons of mass destruction all i want, especially under interogation.....let me tell ya, those guys arent being asked nicely.

and for that intolerance stuff......kettle or pot, which one are you.

and these arent conspiracy theories. we supposedly had HARD evidence that the weapons existed....well where are they? you cant just up and hide entire stockpiles like that. and dont tell me they hid them before the war, because if we knew where they were, then we had constant surveillance on them 24/7. I can tell you for a fact they had predator drones going 24/7 out there before the war. you cant just up and move an entire arsenal like that without the CIA/NSA/DIA moving. if we knew where they were we would have had SF teams watching those camps so they could be tracked, we would have internall intelligence.
WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THIS INTELLIGENCE????
WHERE IS THE PROOF?

Originally posted by bfp

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.
This impulse is understandable. It is also dangerous. Some administration officials argue privately that the case for linkage is so devastating that when they eventually unveil it, the critics will be embarrassed and their arguments will collapse. But to rely on this assumption is to run a terrible risk. Already, the absence of linkage is the conventional wisdom in many quarters.

Oh, so hes gonna wait untill the election gets hot and heavy, huh?
playing politics with national security, very admirable.
I would think that if the proof was there he would be waving it over his head screaming "I TOLD YOU SO I TOLD YOU SO!!!"
But no, our noble christian leader acording to this soles source is going to wait untill the election nears (a year from now....hmmm, maybe when things look really rough for him....) to unveil it. playing dirty politics with national security, especially when france and germany have alluded that if the proof was there they would help us out in Iraq, and therefore aleviate the stress on the US military, is a low and dispicable thing. i think that if this story is true, then its even shittier for him to do than lie.....use the war to his own advantage politically. as a soldier i would have to say that is increadibly shitty....RELEASE THE EVIDENCE IF YOU HAVE IT. If you have it..........

[bfp]

Oh, so hes gonna wait untill the election gets hot and heavy, huh?
playing politics with national security, very admirable.
I would think that if the proof was there he would be waving it over his head screaming "I TOLD YOU SO I TOLD YOU SO!!!"
But no, our noble christian leader acording to this soles source is going to wait untill the election nears (a year from now....hmmm, maybe when things look really rough for him....) to unveil it. playing dirty politics with national security, especially when france and germany have alluded that if the proof was there they would help us out in Iraq, and therefore aleviate the stress on the US military, is a low and dispicable thing. i think that if this story is true, then its even shittier for him to do than lie.....use the war to his own advantage politically. as a soldier i would have to say that is increadibly shitty....RELEASE THE EVIDENCE IF YOU HAVE IT. If you have it..........

baseless accusations if you ask me. bush bash.. bush bash.. do you know his exact intentions btw? or are you jumping to conclusions?

baseless. well BASED upon the evidence in the article, he has the info. why would he want to suppress it? when hes being murdered in the press and being made to look like a warmonger around the world. The US is loosing international prestige faster than the catholic church here and he apparently to your source wants to keep the information supressed.
WHY ELSE WOULD HE WANT TO SUPPRESS IT? there is no other reason.
if this is all public info, then why is it not being put out in the international press than some random magazine or newpaper where it would get buried?
dont tell me its because of the "liberal bias" of the media (which even pat buchanan himself has said is merely a conservative in-joke). there is no proof!
THERE IS NO PROOF. if the prauge story were true, it would be all over the global media, which would get to us as well. but there is not a hard story here. its all hearsay.
WHY WOULD THE PRESIDENT PLAY IT DOWN? solely for his own polictical gain if it were true. there is no other reason!

[Adam D]

If all of this was found only after the war, then it proves that the administration had no concrete proof before the war for their own reasons for going to war.

The ends don't justify the means, but if you prefer to use that sort of Nazi logic, go right ahead.

[Dionysos]

Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.