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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (105261)	7/14/2003 8:49:35 AM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Well it just keeps getting more and more contradictory. Look at this…don't you think that "surprising sources" are getting a little tiresome at this point. On the one hand we have the Weekly Standard quoting Jessica Stern writing in Foreign Affairs, citing bin Laden's "official biographer" and an analyst for al Jazeera, who has "personal knowledge" and on the other we have the Kansascity.com bulletin wherein unnamed ex US Intelligence officials are cited by Matt Kelly in an AP report. fwiw, I saw this AP report on Yahoo news too. Compare Jessica Stern, a Harvard professor and Clinton administration national security official, discusses the links in a fascinating and sober analysis of the Al Qaeda threat in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Under the subheading, "Friends of Convenience," she writes: Meanwhile, the Bush administration's claims that al Qaeda was cooperating with the "infidel" (read: secular) Saddam Hussein while he was still in office are now also gaining support, and from a surprising source. Hamid Mir, bin Laden's "official biographer" and an analyst for al Jazeera, spent two weeks filming in Iraq during the war. Unlike most reporters, Mir wandered the country freely and was not embedded with U.S. troops. He reports that he has "personal knowledge" that one of Saddam's intelligence operatives, Farooq Hijazi, tried to contact bin Laden in Afghanistan as early as 1998. At that time, bin Laden was publicly still quite critical of the Iraqi leader, but he had become far more circumspect by November 2001, when Mir interviewed him for the third time. Hijazi has acknowledged meeting with al Qaeda representatives, perhaps with bin Laden himself, even before the outreach in 1998. According to news reports and interviews with intelligence officials, Hijazi met with al Qaeda leaders in Sudan in 1994. Message 19107393 and contrast. Farouk Hijazi, a former Iraqi intelligence operative who U.S. officials allege met with al-Qaida operatives and perhaps bin Laden himself in the 1990s, also has denied any Iraq-al-Qaida ties, officials say. kansascity.com you guys figure this out, I gotta go.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (105261)	7/14/2003 4:39:04 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

Again, most interesting Charleymane...Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the congressional commission investigating the September 11 attacks, added to the intrigue this week when he flatly declared, "there is evidence" of Iraq-al Qaeda links. Lehman has access to classified intelligence as a member of the commission, intelligence that has convinced him the links may have been even greater than the public pronouncements of the Bush administration might suggest. "There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons." Hopfully, folks will go back to your link to find the original link for this article... i>