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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (169646)	6/12/2006 10:34:41 PM
From: Rollcast...	Respond to of 793912

Then again, if one wanted to argue that al-Qaida would not be in Iraq if we were not, one had to confront the fact that Zarqawi was actually there first. And that while he was there, he could in theory have had a chat with Abdul Rahman Yasin, the man who mixed the chemicals for the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and then (released by the FBI) went straight to Baghdad. Or perhaps kicked back with Abu Abbas, organizer of the ocean liner hijacking that resulted in the murder of American Jew Leon Klinghoffer, who when arrested by the Italians had to be released because when on hijack duty he carried an Iraqi diplomatic passport. Failing that, what about chewing the fat with Abu Nidal, assassin of several PLO diplomats and mastermind of the mass slaughter at the Rome and Vienna airports? Yes, it's true that there are more foreign gangsters in Iraq today, but they are no longer living in government hospitality homes, and they are being killed at the rate of dozens every week. And, yes, it hasn't yet been shown that any of them—except of course Zarqawi and his friends—were ideologically linked to the events of Sept. 11. But the intervention in Afghanistan was to make up for that atrocity. The intervention in Iraq was partly designed to forestall the next attack. Now I'm told that it has only made the jihadists more angry. Should I try to think of a policy that would have made them less so? Hitchens truly nails it on occasion.

To: LindyBill who wrote (169646)	6/13/2006 1:18:40 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793912

Shhhhhh, Christopher Hitchens....The Dems don't want to hear what you are saying!!! None of them want to even think that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq BEFORE mid-2002!!!!! Heck, they don't even want to admit that A-Q was EVER in Iraq..... "They be wrong, but that's not anything new." The Jordanian authorities thus had excellent reasons of their own to follow Zarqawi, and the kingdom's Mukhabarat—or General Intelligence Department, which generally earns high marks for efficiency—had been trailing him ever since he left Jordanian soil for Afghanistan, and then Afghan soil for Iraq. It is from this source that we know that Zarqawi was in Baghdad at least as early as June 2002, almost a year before the invasion. Indeed, as the Senate intelligence committee report has confirmed, it was in that month that the G.I.D. contacted the Saddam Hussein regime to "inform" the Iraqis that this very dangerous fellow was on their territory. Given the absolute police-state condition of Iraq at that time, it is in any case impossible to believe that such a person was in town, so to speak, incognito. And remember that in 2002, even states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were at least ostensibly expelling known al-Qaida members from their turf or else arresting them. Only Saddam's Iraq—which did not reply to the Jordanian messages—was tolerating and encouraging the presence of men who were on the run from Afghanistan