Iraq War – WMD – and Connections With Al-Qaeda (9/11)

Iraq War – WMD – and Connections With Al-Qaeda (9/11)

No Terrorists or Weapons of Mass Destruction Were Hiding In Iraq = Liberal Lie #11.

It’s common knowledge by now that the Democrat’s used the growing anti-war sentiment in the war with Iraq in 2004-2006 to ride back into power in both of the 2006 and 2008 elections. By early 2007 the Democrats had control of both Congress and the Senate, and in 2008 they had control of the Presidency as well. When the war with Iraq started in 2003 most Democrats supported the war because like President Bush and many Republicans, they believed Iraq had connections to terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda (who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks) and also that Iraq possessed WMD’s, or Weapons of Mass Destruction. It wasn’t long after we were well into the war that the Democrats changed their minds and withdrew their support because they no longer believed Iraq supported Al Qaeda, or possessed WMD’s. They were following their liberal supporters in undermining our war effort in any way they could and they were successful at regaining power – despite such treasonous behavior. The following is a true story about how wrong they are.

Around 2002, Iraq began transferring its permanent WMD sites underground and into mobile units. Dissidents reported that year and after the invasion that weapons were also being moved to mosques, since Coalition forces refrained from searching mosques. A full listing of all the reputed sites given by sources who collaborated with the Coalition lists more than a dozen locations. More than 100 cases of “mysterious” illnesses reported by soldiers during clean-up activities suggests that these were examples of missed WMD traces. British troops in Basra reported being fired at with 82mm mortar rounds containing chemical weapons. In 2003, a UN weapons inspector confidently stated that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear program, and that he knew personally of uranium reprocessing at a facility six miles from Tarmiya. A twenty-gallon barrel found in Northern Iraq tested positive for sarin, and another tested positive for mustard gas.

The infamous “looting” appears to have been orchestrated to remove evidence of WMD’s, as confirmed by the Kay interim report. David Kay told a House committee on October 2, 2003, that “significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) activities of Saddam’s regime.” Perhaps the most credible evidence comes from ex-Iraqi general Georges Sada, who published his evidence in Saddam’s Secrets (2006), providing firsthand observation of these programs. Sada, an air vice marshal in the Iraqi Air Force, had ordered a sarin gas attack on Israel in 1990 that was called off because it would have required Iraqi jets to fly over Syria and Jordanian airspace. In 2006, Sada revealed that he knew those “who were involved in smuggling the WMD’s out of Iraq in 2002 and 2003…. I know how and when they were transported and shipped out of Iraq (including) how many aircraft were actually used and what types of planes they were.”

Then there were the tapes and documents that came out of postinvasion Iraq: more than three thousand hours of Saddam meeting with his war cabinet and millions of pages relating to Saddam’s WMD’s. These documents included orders to transport the WMDs out of the country in the event of a pending invasion or UN weapons inspection. In these tapes, Saddam can be heard discussing Iraq’s WMD and nuclear programs and how he fooled the weapons inspectors. In September 2002, Jon Wolfstahl, an analyst then with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – hardly a right-wing think tank – stated flatly, “Iraq continues to possess several tons of chemical weapons agents, enough to kill thousands and thousands of civilians or soldiers.” Further, Sada noted that the term “special weapons” which always denoted WMDs, was used by Saddam on numerous occasions. Eventually, realizing he was about to be invaded, Saddam “called a meeting of all the top scientists, researchers, and technicians involved in developing weapons systems, and told them to memorize their plans,” then ordered all schematics, plans, and data related to WMDs destroyed. When a Syrian dam broke in 2002, and Syrian president Basher al-Assad asked Saddam for help, interspersed in the “relief” effort were the main elements of the WMD program. Some fifty-six sorties of commercial jetliners, with their seats and other equipment removed to make room for the WMDs, took the weapons to Syria. Demetrius Perricos, president of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), confirmed in June 2004 that Saddam had indeed smuggled the WMDs out of Iraq before the war. Clearly Syria was implicated (other sources also suggest the Russians supplied trucks to assist this move), and no one in the UN or in the U.S. government wanted to “go there.” So the WMD issue was dropped. The Jordanians, however, knew the real story, and broke up a plot by Abu Masab al-Zarqawi to explode “a large chemical weapon in the center of Amman, Jordan.” If the weapons inspectors and Iraq Study Group had looked half as hard for the WMDs as Nixon’s tormentors looked for evidence of his involvement in Watergate, they’d be awash in chemical and biological weapons by now.

It is also a sleight of hand to claim that President Bush made Saddam’s possession of WMDs the only issue that triggered Operation Iraqi Freedom. While he primarily focused on WMDs in the famous 2002 State of the Union “Axis of Evil” speech, in his Cincinnati address leading up to the war nine months later, he listed three main casis belli, namely WMDs, the presence of terrorists (including, but not limited to, al_Qaeda) in Iraq, and the prospect that a free and democratic Iraq would further reduce the conditions that supported and nourished terrorism.

Subsequently, most commentators focused solely on the comments about WMDs. The misdirection was also present, but not as pronounced, in the press coverage of the “Axis of Evil” speech itself, whereby the media glossed over the president’s statement that North Korea, Iraq, and Iran were merely examples. By zeroing in on the three, the media left “them in possession of the field of evil.” As media historian Jim Kuypers showed, virtually none of the media picked up on the larger concept relayed by Bush, even as they recoiled against the term “evil.” Even then, however, the CBS Morning News noted that “the CIA believes (Iraq has) been trying to develop nuclear weapons and already have chemical and probably biological weapons.” As Kuypers concludes about the press coverage that followed, “In a definitive shift from the previous chapters, opinion essays and editorials (following the State of the Union) took a decidedly negative shape.

Then there were the “deniers,” people such as Richard Clarke, former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism official, who made the ridiculous claim, “There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever. As Stephen Hayes, who studied the al-Qaeda/Iraq links, noted, there were “literally hundreds of intelligence reports detailing links between Iraq and al-Qaeda’s worldwide operations.” The web site “Regime of Terror” lists dozens of specific terrorists in Iraq prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. President Bush went out of his way to state that there was not any evidence ruling out any Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but no one has ruled it out, and some “circumstantial and speculative” evidence suggests such a connection may exist. Even more obvious was the fact that there were terrorists in Iraq prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2007, former CIA director George Tenet published his book At the Center of the Storm, in which he claimed the al-Qaeda/Iraq links were minimal. Almost immediately, however, one of his own analysts, Christina Shelton, completely disavowed Tenet’s claim that there was “no further analysis required” of the relationship. Shelton told the director that the accumulated sources “reflected a pattern of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda, including high-level contacts between Iraqi senior officials and al-Qaeda, training in bomb making, Iraqi offers of safe haven, and a nonaggression agreement to cooperate on unspecified areas. Earlier, she noted, Tenet told U.S. Senate, “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade. The famous “Feith memo,” presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee in October 2003, concluded that “the substantial body of intelligence reporting – for over a decade – from a variety of sources – reflects a pattern of support for al-Qaeda’s activities.

Although a Pentagon report released in March 2008 found no “operational links” with al-Qaeda, operational links are different from aid, assistance, and support. Operational links imply direct contact in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks. But the list of Saddam/al-Qaeda connections is overwhelming, and it goes back to the 1990’s:

• October 1998 (as reported in the January 10, 1999, edition of Al-Majallah), an Iraqi intelligence official met with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “Osama bin Laden, and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Egypt’s Jihad movement” (and bin Laden’s number two officer). “On December 21, a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat visited Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s residence then he met with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri…. (He) affirmed to his Afghan and Arab audience Iraq’s willingness to provide financial, logistics, political and informational support for the Taliban and the Afghan Arabs.
• November 4, 1998, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White indicted Osama bin Laden and several others in the African embassy bombings. That indictment contained this stunning phrase: “On particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”
• 1998, the CIA reported from a “regular and reliable source” about meetings between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.
• January 15, 1999, Cynthia McFadden of ABC News reported that bin-Laden was “in secret meetings with Saddam Hussein’s top men.”
• February 6, 1999, the Guardian reported, “The Western Nightmare: Saddam and bin-Laden versus the World.”
• December 2000, two al-Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for training in chemical and biological weapons.
• The highly regarded Jane’s reported in September 2001, just a week after the World Trade Center attacks, that “for the past two years Iraqi intelligence officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with Ayman Al Zarahiri.”
• November 11, 2001, the London Observer reported an active camp called Salman Pak where students practiced hijacking techniques on a Boeing 707. What is notable about this is that it was in what is called the “foreigners’ camp.” A defector told the FBI and CIA that the “foreigners” (i.e. what the Iraqis called al-Qaeda and other Arabs) were trained “to use small knifes” to take over airplanes. The defector stated flatly that Saddam controlled the camps.
• November 2001, Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi was captured by Pakistanis. A member of bin-Laden’s inner circle, he “spoke openly” about the collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq on WMDs.
• 2002, Qassem Hussein Muhammed, interviewed by a New Yorker reporter, said he was one of seventeen Iraqi bodyguards who escorted al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zarahiri, during a 1992 trip, and Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi confirmed a second trip to Iraq in 1999, and was aware that the “Iraqi secret service had documents detailing the (Saddam/al-Qaeda) relationship.”
• May 31st, 2002, CBS reported that Abdul Rahman Yasin, a participant in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, escaped and fled to… Iraq.
• July 14, 2002, a former colonel in Saddam’s Fedayeen claimed that he trained with al-Qaeda terrorists in camps near Baghdad. (A man known as “The Ghost” trained terrorists at Salman Pak and other locations and told interrogators that there were “foreigners” at those camps and that they were trained separately from Iraqis.)
• September 5, 2002, CBS News reported that more than a thousand victims of 9/11 attacks sued Iraq for its involvement in the conspiracy with Osama bin Laden to attack the United States. The suit claimed that Iraqi officials were aware of the plan before 9/11, and one of the lawyers bringing the suit said, “We have evidence Iraq knew and approved of the Sept. 11 attacks.”
• October 2002, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) said on ABC’s This Week that he had seen “lots of intelligence” that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda.
• February 7, 2003, The Independent in Britain identified Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the “head of an Iraqi-based al-Qaeda cell. Note that this was more than a month before the U.S. invasion!
• March 16, 2003, Spain indicted Yusaf Galan, who was photographed at an al-Qaeda camp, for being “directly involved with the preparation and carrying out of the attacks…by the suicide pilots on 11 September.
• In 2007, questions still remain as to Saddam’s connections to the first World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Note that none of this evidence gets to some of the most damning material, produced by the Czech Republic, which alleges that the foreign minister of Iraq met with Mohammed Atta in Prague just months before the 9/11 attacks. Czech intelligence to this day stands by that claim, and a security camera clearly shows Ahmed Samir al-Ani casing a U.S. government building in Prague with a man who looked remarkably like Atta. George Tenet, former CIA director, said that while he did not have clear evidence, he thought the meeting took place.

We won’t even bother with the non al-Qaeda terrorists, such as the late Abu Nidal, or Abd-al-Rahman Isa, his second in command, who were harbored by Saddam for years, or the uncomfortable evidence raised by Laurie Mylroie – a Clinton advisor on Iraq – that the main perpetrator of the 1993 WTC bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was known as “Rashid the Iraqi,” and that one of his conspirators, Mohammed Salameh, made forty-six phone calls to Iraq prior to the bombing! Yet another of the 1993 bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin, traveled to the United States from Baghdad and then escaped after the bombing to Baghdad, where his presence was well known to Iraqi secret police. Even a Newsweek reporter found him in Baghdad – but, of course, there were no terrorists in Iraq!

Instead its better to let Ayman al-Zawahiri state the case himself as in July 2007 when he said Iraq was the centerpiece of al-Qaeda’s terror efforts and urged Muslims to “rush to the field of Jihad” in Iraq. According to USA Today, Rita Katz, director of the now-defunct SITE Institute, which monitored terrorist-related activity around the world, “said she didn’t have ‘any doubt’ that al-Qaeda in Iraq is linked to bin-Laden’s network. The best news contained in the July 2007 video is that Zawahiri displayed concern that al-Qaeda was losing in Iraq. George Bush’s original claims of both WMDs and terrorists in Iraq were not only valid, they were overwhelming.

500 Metric TONS of Uranium “Yellowcake” Found in Iraq.

On July7, 2008, CNN reported that the U.S. had transported 500 metric tons of “yellowcake” uranium from Iraq to Canada – precisely the same “yellowcake” that Joe Wilson claimed the Iraqis were not trying to acquire from Niger. The original claim by President Bush – that Iraq was seeking to acquire such yellowcake – had in turn lead to a massive investigation about the leak of the supposed covert status of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, and then to a witch-hunt by the left to implicate Karl Rove for leaking her identity. The sordid affair ended when the prosecutor refused to name the real leaker, State Department official Richard Armitage, and instead indicted Rove aide Scooter Libby for perjury in what is called a “process crime” – the same sort of crime Clinton committed but the left excused.

Known as “Operation McCall,” the transfer of 500 tons of uranium from a nation that had no operating nuclear plants should have raised eyebrows among even the staunchest “no-weapons-in-Iraq” Bush haters, As the American Thinker correctly stated, no one ever asked what 500 tons of yellowcake uranium were still doing at the nuclear research center of Al-Tuwaitha in Iraq when American tanks rolled into Baghdad? This buildup occurred under the very noses of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – the United Nations bureaucrats in charge of making sure Saddam didn’t have WMDs! Both the Butler review in England and a Senate Select Committee stated without equivocation that Saddam had attempted to purchase yellowcake. Whether this was in addition to the massive stockpile he already had – and I repeat a second time, for a nation with no nuclear plants – is not clear.

What is abundantly clear is that the “No WMDs” crowd was horribly wrong, but that Bush was still badly hurt by the secrecy surrounding the mission to clear the uranium – and almost certainly other deadly toxins and materials – out of the country safely.

This is just one of the “48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned In School)”, a book by Larry Schweikart.