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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (118792)	11/6/2003 6:42:11 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

1) Iraqi intelligence aided in the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center. The chief conspirator fled American justice - straight to Baghdad- This conspirator also lived in Manilla, and was also in Pakistan (and was caught there, I think). The fact that he passed through Baghdad doesn't prove anything- these guys are highly mobile and the fact that he went to Baghdad first, probably means it was his primary destination, since travelling through countries to cover their tracks is de rigeur in Yousef's line of work. 2) Saddam paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998; thus, he had already funded Al Qaida- Zawahiri had interests other than Al Qaeda, and other than America. We know that Saddam had interests in religional terrorism, but evidence of other interests is not very clear. 3) Iraqi intelligence was aiding an funding Ansar al Islam, an al Qaida-affiliated Islamist organization Ansar may have links to Al Qaeda- but they are hardly the same organization. Ansar, after all, has interests on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq- in the Kurdish controlled portion of the country. It would be very odd if Saddam was really very interested in funding them, because they are Wahhabi-like in their religious devotion, and they certainly wouldn't support Saddam as their leader of choice. I'm sure Saddam would have been interested in spying on them, but funding groups it the Kurdish controlled areas, enemical to his won interests? Doesn't sound very likely, unless he was accumulating information on them in order to destroy them. 4) Saddam had a long history of making and using bio and chem weapons, even giving up billions in revenue to hide his programs from the UN in defiance of UN sanctions. He may have done this, but those programs were clearly destroyed. And oddly enough we didn't mind when he used WMD's on the Iranians, and we didn't even do anything when he used them on the Kurds. Oh yes, Saddam had a history all right- a history we are complicit in. Saddam never used WMD's on the west, because he wasn't an idiot- and we knew that. He knew what would have happened to him if he had used them. He obviously thought that if he was too honest about how little he had left, no one would respect him anymore. Silly him, but more fool us. 5) Saddam was actively training Islamist terrorists in Salman Pak He may have been- but we don't know what kind of terrorists he was training. We have known (and approved) of Saddam's anti-Iranian terrorists, and he had other interests in the region- but it is not apparent that he trained any terrorists for Weatern targets. You don't have any real proof of that Nadine. You have conjecture. 6) Saddam was proclaiming himself victor against America, louder and louder, and adopting the Islamist program in public. Saddam bluffed in the Iraq war part one, and he did the same in the part two. No big surprise there. I'm not sure why you even use this one as any kind of "proof". Number 6 is lame. 7) Containment and sanctions were breaking down, aided and abetted by France and Russia. How do you figure? The fact that he had no real threatening weapons makes it look like sanctions were working. His infrastructure was crumbling, and he probably would have been brought down by internal rot- and even if he wasn't, who cares? It's not like we've found any evidence that he was planning anything. Uncontroverted hmmm maybe uncontroverted in the papers you read- I see those things controverted all the time.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (118792)	11/6/2003 8:38:09 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

X went through all of them... I only feel like hitting 3. 5) Saddam was actively training Islamist terrorists in Salman Pak. You should let Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at the U.S. Central Command know. They went through Salman Pak and he couldn't come up with that conclusion. [Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at the U.S. Central Command’s ]Brooks said he did not know whether any of the reported foreign fighters were connected to known terrorist organizations. However, he said information gleaned from foreign fighters before the raid left no doubt that the site was used for training terrorists. "The nature of the work being done by some of those people that we captured, their inferences to the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there was terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," he said. "We did also find some other things there," he continued. "We found some tanks and destroyed them. We found some armored personnel carriers and destroyed them, in small numbers," he said. " We destroyed some buildings that were used for command and control, and some other buildings that were used for morale and welfare. We destroyed the complex. The best he could come up with was an "impression". 6) Saddam was proclaiming himself victor against America, louder and louder,.... whoopee! That's a damned good reason to kill thousands of people. You must be a real joy on the freeway..... ....and adopting the Islamist program in public. The Islamist program???? Is that like the homosexual agenda? Containment and sanctions were breaking down,.... "Containment" has to do with keeping someone from invading another country. Which country was Iraq recently invading? You might make note that Israel asserted just prior to the war that Iraq's military capability was severely degraded over a decade of sanctions. This is also an interesting story.... guardian.co.uk The [Kuwait] government said months ago that it was buying gas masks for most of its 2.4 million people, but it changed course after consulting with its allies and instead distributed a few thousand masks to police, oil and aid workers. 20 Mar 2003 Kuwait was told by an ally they didn't need gas masks to any significant degree. Funny. jttmab