Muslims

[Care4all]

Try again

Traing camps in Iraq, and meetings with Saddams secrect police with AQ

Saddam was a terrorist himself

The training camps were in the nofly zone region of Iraq, Saddam had no control or access to these regions but we did....does that mean that we and the kurds supported these terrorists? NO, of course not!

so, YOU can TRY again!

and good morning rsr.... or are you as mean as others and can't say hello to a fellow american that might differ with you?

Care

 

[red states rule]

The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing, according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.

TOP U.S. OFFICIALS linked Iraq and al Qaeda in newspaper op-eds, on talk shows, and in speeches. But the most detailed of their allegations came in an October 7, 2002, letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham and in Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

The Tenet letter declassified CIA reporting on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Two sentences on WMD garnered most media attention, but the intelligence chief's comments on al Qaeda deserved notice. "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade," Tenet wrote. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [in Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." In sum, the letter said, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with

growing indications of a relationship with al Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military actions."

That this assessment came from the CIA--with its history of institutional skepticism about the links--was significant. CIA analysts had long contended that Saddam Hussein's secular regime would not collaborate with Islamic fundamentalists like bin Laden--even though the Baathists had exploited Islam for years, whenever it suited their purposes. Critics of the administration insist the CIA was "pressured" by an extensive and aggressive intelligence operation set up by the Pentagon to find ties where none existed. But the Pentagon team consisted of two people, at times assisted by two others. Their assignment was not to collect new intelligence but to evaluate existing intelligence gathered by the CIA, with particular attention to any possible Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. A CIA counterterrorism team was given a similar task, and while many agency analysts remained skeptical about links, the counterterrorism experts came away convinced that there had been cooperation.

For one thing, they cross-referenced old intelligence with new information provided by high-level al Qaeda detainees. Reports of collaboration grew in number and specificity. The case grew stronger. Throughout the summer and fall of 2002, al Qaeda operatives held in Guantanamo corroborated previously sketchy reports of a series of meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, home to al Qaeda during the mid-90s. U.S. officials learned more about the activities of Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, an al Qaeda WMD specialist sent by bin Laden to seek WMD training, and possibly weapons, from the Iraqi regime. Intelligence specialists also heard increasingly detailed reports about meetings in Baghdad between al Qaeda leaders and Uday Hussein in April 1998, at a birthday celebration for Saddam.

In December 2002, as the Bush administration prepared its public case for war with Iraq, White House officials sifted through reams of these intelligence reports on ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. Some of the reporting was solid, some circumstantial. The White House identified those elements of the reports it wanted to use publicly and asked the CIA to declassify them. The Agency agreed to declassify some 75 percent of the requested intelligence.

According to administration sources, Colin Powell, in his presentation before the U.N. Security Council, used only 10 or 15 percent of the newly declassified material. He relied heavily on the intelligence in Tenet's letter. Press reports about preparations for the Powell presentation have suggested that Powell refused to use the abundance of CIA documents because he found them thin and unpersuasive. This is only half right. Powell was certainly the most skeptical senior administration official about Iraq-al Qaeda ties. But several administration officials involved in preparing his U.N. presentation say that his reluctance to focus on those links had more to do with the forum for his speech--the Security Council--than with concerns about the reliability of the information.

Powell's presentation sought to do two things: make a compelling case to the world, and to the American public, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; and more immediately, win approval for a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force. The second of these objectives, these officials say, required Powell to focus the presentation on Hussein's repeated violations of Security Council resolutions. (Even in the brief portion of Powell's talk focused on Iraq-al Qaeda links, he internationalized the case, pointing out that the bin Laden network had targeted "France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia.") Others in the administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, favored using more of the declassified information about Hussein's support of international terrorism and al Qaeda.

Powell spent just 10 minutes of a 90-minute presentation on the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network." He mentioned intelligence showing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a known al Qaeda associate injured in Afghanistan, had traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment. Powell linked Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda cell operating in a Kurdish region "outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq." Powell told the Security Council that the United States had approached an unnamed "friendly security service"--Jordan's--"to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi," providing information and details "that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi." Iraq did nothing. Finally, Powell asserted that al Qaeda leaders and senior Iraqi officials had "met at least eight times" since the early 1990s.

These claims, the critics maintain, were "hyped" and "exaggerated."
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/033jgqyi.asp?pg=2


Good morning care - I am not mean at all

 

[Care4all]

Rsr/Alucard

Your weekly Standard article has been PROVEN not to be true!!!!

washingtonpost.com
Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47812-2004Jun16?language=printer

The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq.
Along with the contention that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network; earlier this year, Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming."

But the report of the commission's staff, based on its access to all relevant classified information, said that there had been contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding.

The staff report said that bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" while in Sudan through 1996, but that "Iraq apparently never responded" to a bin Laden request for help in 1994. The commission cited reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after bin Laden went to Afghanistan in 1996, adding, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The finding challenges a belief held by large numbers of Americans about al Qaeda's ties to Hussein. According to a Harris poll in late April, a plurality of Americans, 49 percent to 36 percent, believe "clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found."

As recently as Monday, Cheney said in a speech that Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." Bush, asked on Tuesday to verify or qualify that claim, defended it by pointing to Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has taken credit for a wave of attacks in Iraq.

But Cheney CONTINUED to pass along this FALSE information, a form of mind control...to brainwash people in to believing that this connection existed....and still exists after it was PROVEN not to be true.

This is a TACTIC that is utilized quite well, by this administration....to mislead people...imo.... and shows AGAIN the way this administration utilizes propaganda tactics to brainwash our citizens....imho.... As they did with Iraq's imminent threat to us.... watch out for it rsr!

Care

 

[red states rule]

Sorry to bust your bubble, but the WS article has NOT been disproved

 

[Care4all]

Sorry to bust your bubble, but the WS article has NOT been disproved

Your contention that saddam and alqaeda were working TOGETHER is simply false.

The 911 commission dismissed it, so to say.

So, your weekly Standard article is OUTDATED and their speculations of a working relationship between saddam and alqaeda/bin laden has been DISMISSED, NOT FOUND.

Care

 

[red states rule]

Your contention that saddam and alqaeda were working TOGETHER is simply false.

The 911 commission dismissed it, so to say.

So, your weekly Standard article is OUTDATED and their speculations of a working relationship between saddam and alqaeda/bin laden has been DISMISSED, NOT FOUND.

Care

The 9-11 commission found several links to Saddam and AQ

Get your talking points straight Care

 

[Truthmatters]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_...n_and_al-Qaeda

 

[Truthmatters]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_...n_and_al-Qaeda

 

[Truthmatters]

http://tinyurl.com/prfqn

 

[Truthmatters]

Sorry about that .
I kept posting this link and it worked when I checked it from where I copied it from but not after I pasted it.

Oh well now it works

 

[Truthmatters]

The intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc) view, confirmed by the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq, is that there was not a cooperative effort between the two and that Saddam did not support the 9/11 attacks. According to this view, the difference in ideology between Saddam and al-Qaeda made cooperation in any terrorist attacks very unlikely.[5] The Senate Report discussed the possibility of Saddam offering al-Qaeda training and safe-haven, but confirmed the CIA's conclusion that there was no evidence of operational cooperation between the two.


Now this is hows the facts are my fellow Americans.

CIA
NSA
DIA
and others

Have all said there was NO evidence of operational cooperation between AQ and Saddam.

They never told the president there was.

The admin cherry picked the intell to make it look like there was.

Richard Clarke told us that before the Iraq war and as I recall the admins montra for that one was "disgruntled employee".

Please we are all Americans and the truth is not right or left.

The downing street memo which was straight from tonys desk said that they would "Fix the intelligence around the issue".

IT does not serve America to disagree with Facts on the ground.

 

[Superlative]

It's possible for me to be elected President too ...

Not unless you are rich my friend.

 

[Truthmatters]

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0803/080803nj2.htm

 

[Truthmatters]

Iraq-al Qaeda links weak, say former Bush officialsBy Peter H. Stone National Journal August 8, 2003
As criticism over the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction continues, a new wave of accusations seems ready to break - this time, over complaints that in its efforts to sell the war, the White House also hyped claims about the links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies. The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction as being definitive or rock solid.
"Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated."
Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq was overblown.
"Anyone who followed al Qaeda for a living would not have considered Iraq to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about," said Roger Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top aide to cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke. "I'd argue that Iraq would be in the third tier." By contrast, Cressey said, Iran would rate in "the top tier."
And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the Qaeda connection. "After September 11, there was a concrete effort by policy makers, particularly in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, to come up with links between al Qaeda and Iraq."
Generally, these and other former intelligence officials who talked to National Journal felt that the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein. But the analysts questioned the war's timing and wondered whether the attack should have come before the battle against al Qaeda was sufficiently far along.
In the reviews that the Senate and the House Intelligence panels are conducting into the accuracy of prewar intelligence, the claims on Iraq and al Qaeda are also a topic of inquiry. Republican leaders of those committees have generally defended the administration's prewar assessment of Qaeda-Iraq links. Democrats, however, have been skeptical.
"I have never believed that the prewar links between al Qaeda and Iraq were very strong," declared Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who voted in favor of the war last fall. "The evidence on the al Qaeda links was sketchy."
Her counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also sounded dubious about the administration's effort to link al Qaeda and Iraq. "I think the ties were always tenuous at best," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., who also voted for the war. "The evidence about the ties was not compelling." Rockefeller said that his panel has a staff group focusing on the question and that the panel may hold a hearing just on this issue in the fall.
In two periods during the run-up to the war against Iraq - in late September and early October of 2002, just before the vote in Congress, and then this year in the weeks before the war - administration heavyweights highlighted what they portrayed as significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all weighed in on this point, sometimes in a broad-brush way, sometimes with hints of tantalizing specifics.
Powell, in his major speech to the United Nations on February 5, cited the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who was in Baghdad in May 2002 receiving medical treatment for wounds he received in Afghanistan. Powell referred to al-Zarqawi as "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants."
But several intelligence experts say that Powell overstated these ties. Al-Zarqawi "is at best seen as having linkages to al Qaeda, instead of being a card-carrying member," Cressey said. "There's no question that Zarqawi is a terrorist, but there are real questions about whether he's a member of al Qaeda," said Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA.
In his State of the Union address in January, Bush made the Qaeda-Iraq connection. "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody," the president said, "reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda." Bush darkly added, "Secretly and without fingerprints, [Saddam] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own."
In perhaps the boldest assertion before the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on September 27 stated that the administration had several "bullet-proof" sentences in intelligence reports about ties between Iraq under Saddam and al Qaeda. "We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade," Rumsfeld said.
Bush echoed Rumsfeld's remarks in his major address in Cincinnati on October 7, asserting as well that al Qaeda and Iraq had "high-level contacts that go back a decade." He also stated that "we've learned" that Iraqis trained Qaeda members in "bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." And Bush posited that Iraq "could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."
But even as the president made these comments, the key classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq making the rounds in the Bush administration presented a more nuanced and less alarmist view. For instance, according to a recent Washington Post account, Bush didn't mention a key conclusion of the intelligence report: that although high-level contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, these contacts had not been followed by any significant ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. Similarly, intelligence sources have said that the claim that Bush made about Iraq training Qaeda members in bomb making or poison gas use had not been fully verified.
"There wasn't the kind of link between Iraq and al Qaeda that people wanted," said one Bush administration alum. The CIA, he added, had "some measure of intellectual responsibility and didn't come up with a case."
Moreover, the president failed to mention the report's conclusion that the prevailing view in the intelligence community was much more guarded about the prospect of Saddam's transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. In fact, CIA Director George J. Tenet wrote to Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, that only if a U.S. attack against Iraq seemed imminent or inevitable might Saddam "decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the U.S. would be his last chance to exact vengeance.... "
Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was "extremely unlikely" that Saddam would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there's a "much stronger" argument to be made that "the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue."
Bush particularly irked intelligence analysts when he landed on an aircraft carrier right after Baghdad fell and proclaimed that the U.S. had just "removed an ally of al Qaeda." Thielmann, the former State Department analyst, calls the statement "an outrageous distortion" and a "shameless falsehood."
Bush, when specifically asked at his news conference on July 30 whether the links between Iraq and al Qaeda were exaggerated and whether he now had more definitive evidence pointing to them, gave a long answer justifying the war on other grounds. But on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq, he said only that David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector now in Iraq looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, was also going through piles of documents to look for such links. "It's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered," Bush said.
Some critics argue that by linking al Qaeda and Iraq, the administration has not only misled the public about Iraq but about the real and continuing danger from al Qaeda.
The Bush administration "created a powerful impression for the American public that al Qaeda and Iraq were joined," said Dan Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror." Benjamin added, "People don't understand that al Qaeda is a global insurgency distinct from states, and is eager to topple some states."
Other former intelligence officials are also dismayed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's recent statement that the fight against Iraq is the "central battle" in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. "The idea that the battle in Iraq is the central battle in the war on terrorism flies in the face of reality and all that we know about al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other globally active terrorists," Leverett said.
Looking ahead, some critics worry that the Iraq war could ultimately help al Qaeda more than hurt it. "A lot of people who could have been very helpful working on al Qaeda were working on Iraq," Graham, a presidential candidate, said. "We shifted intelligence assets as well as military and intelligence people to Iraq."
Other Democrats concur. "The war enormously deepened the pool of eager recruits for al Qaeda," Rockefeller said. "I think that al Qaeda was, is, and always will be a greater threat than Iraq."

 

[Truthmatters]

the date on this article is august 03 my friends.

There was indeed a concerted effort to mislead the American people.

This is intelligence people who had to Leave their jobs to be able to tell the American people the truth.

Think for just one momment about the experts in their field with years of experience who we NO longer have on the job because of this.

 

[Truthmatters]

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was "extremely unlikely" that Saddam would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there's a "much stronger" argument to be made that "the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue."
Bush particularly irked intelligence analysts when he landed on an aircraft carrier right after Baghdad fell and proclaimed that the U.S. had just "removed an ally of al Qaeda." Thielmann, the former State Department analyst, calls the statement "an outrageous distortion" and a "shameless falsehood."

 

[Truthmatters]

Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the Qaeda connection. "After September 11, there was a concrete effort by policy makers, particularly in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, to come up with links between al Qaeda and Iraq."

 

[Truthmatters]

"Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated."

 

[Truthmatters]

Bush made the Qaeda-Iraq connection. "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody," the president said, "reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda." Bush darkly added, "Secretly and without fingerprints, [Saddam] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own."

 

[Care4all]

The 9-11 commission found several links to Saddam and AQ

Get your talking points straight Care

There was NO COORDINATION or working agreement between Saddam/Iraq and Alqaeda....

There was no involvement of Saddam with Alqaeda and the attack on us on 911.


Care