Muslims

[Truthmatters]

But Gunny I produced quotes where Cheney and Busyh said that Saddam was tied to AQ.

This is a connection to 911

 

[Gunny]

Do you believe that Bush's ratings in current polls are 30%?

Are americans THAT smart?

I think that an intelligent human being does not need to resort to opinion polls to back up an argument. If nothing else, it is relying on one, questionable source that is subject to the manner in which the questions are asked, and who they are asked of, and what the agenda is of those doing the asking.

To steal the liberal argument in this thread .... I think Bush's popularity is a DIRECT result of people being constantly fed "Bush lied" and taht everything he does is for some evil and/or nefarious self-serving reason over and over again for 6 years.

 

[red states rule]

But Gunny I produced quotes where Cheney and Busyh said that Saddam was tied to AQ.

This is a connection to 911

There were ties between Saddam and AQ

 

[Gunny]

But Gunny I produced quotes where Cheney and Busyh said that Saddam was tied to AQ.

This is a connection to 911

Wrong. What you're basically saying is that if I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, I'm tied to the Kennedy Assasination.

It's illogical. Period.

 

[Annie]

Wrong. What you're basically saying is that if I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, I'm tied to the Kennedy Assasination.

It's illogical. Period.

Right. ? I got your back? Is that the right terminology?

 

[Truthmatters]

AQ is not just one person its a terror group and one that is recognised to have perpitrated 911.

Now why did we attack the country of afganistan?

Because they were tied to AQ and allowing them safe haven.
There was poll after poll at the time that showed vast amounts of Americans believed Saddam had something to do with 911.

That is fact.

"[Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi] went to Baghdad, he took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene," Cheney told Limbaugh. "This is Al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."



Cheney, responding to moderator Gwen Ifill’s first question, said that “concern” about Iraq before the war had “specifically focused” on the fact that Saddam’s regime had been listed for years by the U.S. government as a “state sponsor of terror,” that Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal operated out of Baghdad, that Saddam paid $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and that he had an “established relationship” with Al Qaeda.


The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.


One of the greatest dangers we face is that weapons of mass destruction might be passed to terrorists who would not hesitate to use those weapons. Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. And an al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases.

 

[Superlative]

To steal the liberal argument in this thread .... I think Bush's popularity is a DIRECT result of people being constantly fed "Bush lied" and taht everything he does is for some evil and/or nefarious self-serving reason over and over again for 6 years.

Well, dont you just prove the propaganda point right there?

You dont believe it works the other way around?

I know youre saying Propaganda is a Liberal conspiracy, I get that.

Read my post 360, pg 24,

You honestly dont believe that if those words are repeated often enough, TOGETHER, that this can and will sway public opinion?

That the people dont actually have to do anything, or think for themselves is the point, Every channel was repeating what the White House said.

and you believe that the guys in charge didnt know any better? they dont know how propaganda works?

You arent giving these men enough credit when it is surely due.

I realize you are smart, and you do research, and you do think for yourself, but what about the other 70% of the populous? you think they have the time and the effort to weed out the noise?

No way.

Thats why it was so easy to flip the polls, the people got enough time to absorb the issues, and more facts have come to light, they changed their minds.

 

[red states rule]

What did Pres Bush lie about?

WMD's?

If Bush lied about WMD's so did most Dems

 

[Annie]

The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

Got a link?

 

[Truthmatters]

Got a link?

I gave links to all of these quotes go back to page 5 of this thread

 

[Truthmatters]

The "Postwar Findings" report had the following conclusions about Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaeda:

Conclusion 1: The CIA's assessment that Iraq and al-Qaeda were "two independent actors trying to exploit each other" was accurate only about al-Qaeda. "Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa'ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qa'ida to provide material or operational support."

Conclusion 2: Postwar findings have indicated that there was only one meeting between representatives of Saddam Hussein and representatives of al-Qaeda. These findings also identified two occasions "not reported prior to the war, in which Saddam Hussein rebuffed meeting requests from an al-Qa'ida operative. The Intelligence Community has not found any other evidence of meetings between al-Qa'ida and Iraq."

Conclusion 3: "Prewar Intelligence Community assessments were inconsistent regarding the likelihood that Saddam Hussein provided chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training to al-Qa'ida. Postwar findings support the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000.... No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war."

Conclusion 4: "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qa'ida operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations."

Conclusion 5: Postwar findings support the assessment that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and associates were present in Baghdad from May-November 2002. "Prewar assessments expressed uncertainty about Iraq's complicity in their presence, but overestimated the Iraqi regime's capabilities to locate them. Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

Conclusion 6: Prewar interactions between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda affiliate group Ansar al-Islam were attempts by Saddam to spy on the group rather than to support or work with them. "Postwar information reveals that Baghdad viewed Ansar al-Islam as a threat to the regime and that the IIS attempted to collect intelligence on the group."

Conclusion 7: "Postwar information supports prewar Intelligence Community assessments that there was no credible information that Iraq was complicit in or had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks or any other al-Qa'ida strike..... Postwar findings support CIA's January 2003 assessment, which judged that 'the most reliable reporting casts doubt' on one of the leads, an alleged meeting between Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, and confirm that no such meeting occurred. Prewar intelligence reporting cast doubt on the other lead as well."

Conclusion 8: "No postwar information indicates that Iraq intended to use al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist group to strike the United States homeland before or during Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Conclusion 9: "additional reviews of documents recovered in Iraq are unlikely to provide information that would contradict the Committee's findings or conclusions. The Committee believes that the results of detainee debriefs largely comport with documentary evidence, but the Committee cannot definitively judge the accuracy of statements made by individuals in custody and cannot, in every case, confirm that the detainee statements are truthful and accurate."


[edit] CIA conclusions
According to the SSCI report:

The CIA has not published a "fully researched, coordinated and approved position" on the postwar reporting on the former regime's links to al-Qa'ida, but has published such a paper on the postwar reporting of Abu Mus'ad al-Zarqawi and the former regime (see above). The CIA told the Committee that regarding Iraq's links to terrorism, "the research the Counterterrorist Center has done on this issue has called into question some of the reports of contacts and training...revealed other contacts of which we were unaware, and shed new light on some contacts that appeared in prewar reporting. On balance, this research suggests that the prewar judgment remains valid."[101]

[edit] DIA conclusions
According to the SSCI report:

The initial DocEx review focused on searching for WMD related documents, but the DIA also examined the documents for material related to Iraq's link to terrorism. DIA officials explicitly stated that they did not believe that the initial review process missed any documents of major significance regarding Iraq's links to terrorism. During an interview with Committee staff, the lead DIA analyst who follows the issue of possible connections between the Iraqi government and al-Qa'ida noted that the DIA "continues to maintain that there was no partnership between the two organizations." (Page 63)

[edit] FBI
According to the report:

The FBI does not have formal efforts underway to review the prewar relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al-Qa'ida. The FBI continues to analyze information and intelligence on Iraq, particularly in its conduct of interviews of high value targets and participation in document exploitation. The FBI provided the Committee with particularly useful information from the debrief of Saddam Hussein and several high ranking Iraqi intelligence officers. (page 134)

[edit] Administration response
After the release of the report, Condoleezza Rice told Fox News Sunday that she did not remember seeing that particular report and asserted that "there were ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda."[102] In an interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, Vice President Cheney stated, "We've never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11." However, Cheney asserted that there was nevertheless a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, citing Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad and DCI George Tenet's claim of "a relationship that went back at least a decade." When pressed about the Senate Report, Cheney acknowledged, "I haven't seen the report. I haven't had a chance to read it yet."[103]


[edit] 2007 Pentagon Inspector General Report
In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report that concluded that Feith's Office of Special Plans, an office in the Pentagon run by Douglas Feith that was the source of most of the misleading intelligence on al-Qaeda and Iraq, had "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The report found that these actions were "inappropriate" though not "illegal." Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that "The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."[2]

Nevertheless, Feith stated that he "felt vindicated" by the report's conclusion that what he did was not "unlawful."[3] He told the Washington Post that his office produced "a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community," and he acknowledged that he "was not endorsing its substance."[4]

 

[Superlative]

What did Pres Bush lie about?

WMD's?

If Bush lied about WMD's so did most Dems

Be quite.

The Dems gave their opinions that Saddam Would and Could have WMD's in the FUTURE maybe 2 of them said he for sure did. and one of them was Kerry, he doesnt count, cause he probably picked up the cue cards of a conservative.

Truthmatters-

Start BOLDING the parts you want people to read. its easier for everyone. and it makes your point, well, BOLDER.

 

[Shattered]

I gave links to all of these quotes go back to page 5 of this thread

Go back to page 5? In a 28 page thread? Rather than sending her on a wild goose chase, since you know exactly where they're located, wouldn't it have been better for you to just retrieve the link, and post it?

 

[Truthmatters]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda

 

[red states rule]

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. Once "everybody knows" that Saddam and bin Laden had nothing to do with each other, it becomes extremely difficult for any release of information by the U.S. government to change people's minds.


Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/033jgqyi.asp?pg=2

 

[Truthmatters]

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0409c.asp

 

[Truthmatters]

Subscribe to Freedom Daily

Saddam as the Twentieth Hijacker
by James Bovard, October 1, 2004




The 9/11 commission reported in June that there was no “collaborative relationship” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and thus that Bush’s Enemy No. 1 had no role in the 9/11 attacks. Far from finding any partnership between the two, the report noted that bin Laden “at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan.” This report effectively nuked a key justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

President Bush responded to the revelation by asserting, “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” But the evidence showed that though al-Qaeda had repeatedly approached Saddam’s regime about working together, the Iraqi government had effectively rebuffed their proposals.

The Bush administration cannot brush aside the 9/11 commission’s report. A commission whose chairman was appointed by Bush and whose ground rules were dictated in large part by the White House has found that the Bush administration’s claim regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was baseless. And after more than 900 American soldiers have died in Iraq, this cannot qualify as a harmless error.

It is vital to recognize how persistently and intently Bush exploited Americans’ fears on the Saddam–al-Qaeda link to justify his preemptive assault against Iraq.

In a memo President Bush sent on March 18, 2003, notifying Congress that he was launching the war against Iraq, he declared that he was acting

to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

 

[Superlative]

Go back to page 5? In a 28 page thread? Rather than sending her on a wild goose chase, since you know exactly where they're located, wouldn't it have been better for you to just retrieve the link, and post it?

Telling her the exact page is hardly "Wild Goose" and Ive gotten in trouble for not "reading up" on a thread before posting.

Maybe if the thread wasnt full of 15 pages of you neg repping people no one would have to go on a "Wild Goose Chase"


please dont neg rep me

 

[Annie]

Go back to page 5? In a 28 page thread? Rather than sending her on a wild goose chase, since you know exactly where they're located, wouldn't it have been better for you to just retrieve the link, and post it?

Thanks, I wasn't about to chase the loser post.

 

[Annie]

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0409c.asp

right, like anyone will check this out? Hello? What planet are you on?