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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: H-Man who wrote (405590)	5/13/2003 9:37:54 AM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 769667

good post

To: H-Man who wrote (405590)	5/13/2003 9:42:16 AM
From: CYBERKEN	Respond to of 769667

Powell suggested that the Saudi bombings show that Al Quaeda has been pushed back to their "home base" (his actual words), though not destroyed. The Iraq liberation is what did it-and THAT'S indisputable...

To: H-Man who wrote (405590)	5/13/2003 11:16:22 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

H-Man, Your list is impressive, in a way. It seems that it could use a bit of additional "context" however. Re: • We know of a meeting between Ayman Al Zawahiri and Saddam Hussein in 1993. To which we should add: • We know of meetings between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in 1983 and 1988. *********** Hussein seemed indiscriminate as to which terrorists he was willing to consort with.

To: H-Man who wrote (405590)	5/21/2003 1:04:56 AM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 769667

Just to pick one of your "we know" items: • We know* that Al Qaeda members used the Salman Pak terrorist training camp.* In reality, we don't know this. Moreover, we can be fairly certain this is FALSE. <<< Almost immediately after September 11th, the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks. In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and “Frontline,” the public-television program, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,” and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison,” the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.” Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war. >>> newyorker.com