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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (90891)	12/9/2004 12:07:25 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Well, I assume the quote was accurate, but there's something deeply ironic about citing events around the Sudan raid, which was almost universally derided by the right at the time. I don't recall W bringing up that particular alleged connection in the long stream of pre-war propaganda, but I might have missed that too.

To: epicure who wrote (90891)	12/9/2004 8:57:38 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

That's funny - you are assuming the Washington Post didn't report Clarke's on-the-record statements accurately. Boy, that is a reach, I think. BTW, here is the article: The Washington Post January 23, 1999; Page A02 Embassy Attacks Thwarted, U.S. Says; Official Cites Gains Against Bin Laden; Clinton Seeks $10 Billion to Fight Terrorism By Vernon Loeb U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have prevented Osama bin Laden's extremist network from carrying out truck-bomb attacks against at least two American embassies since the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania more than five months ago, the Clinton administration's senior counterterrorism official said yesterday. Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings. While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas. Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan. Given the evidence presented to the White House before the airstrike, Clarke said, the president "would have been derelict in his duties if he didn't blow up the facility." pqasb.pqarchiver.com Now could Clarke have been lying in 1999 or simply mistaken? Sure. Clarke's statement and the other things I've mentioned (the harboring of AR Yasin, the timing of AQ attacks to coincide with anniversaries significant to Saddam, the bin Ladin indictment citing cooperation with Iraqi intel, etc.) do NOT constitute proof of collaboration between Saddam and AQ. But they do demonstrate that the idea that the two may have cooperated is not farfetched. Indeed the idea has a "commensense logic" to it as noted by the article you posted the other day: The polls, in fact, may reflect a kind of commonsense logic: Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida share a pathological hatred of the United States, so it’s entirely possible that they collaborated, even if we don’t know how. msnbc.msn.com And it certainly is not the case that we know they did not collaborate. No matter how much some folks would like to stretch things that far.