On 5/21/2013 1:22 AM, Siri Cruise wrote:
> In article <
MPG.2c04b014b...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> AlleyCat <
al...@aohell.com> wrote:
>
>> How about you nerds just try once to not forget about 9/11 and the
>> nearly 3000 Americans that died on that ONE day.
>
> Which had zero to do with Iraq.
Try again:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/033jgqyi.asp
The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it
finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met
with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing,
according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA
has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the
Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic
Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other
administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the
intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources
spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.
>> If Bush is relaying info from several credible sources, well, it's just
>> not a lie, now is it?
>
> He wasn't.
>
Others were:
* On February 13, 2003, the government of the Philippines asked Hisham
al Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, to
leave the country. According to telephone records obtained by Philippine
intelligence, Hussein had been in frequent contact with two leaders of
Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, immediately before and
immediately after they detonated a bomb in Zamboanga City. That attack
killed two Filipinos and an American Special Forces soldier and injured
several others. Hussein left the Philippines for Iraq after he was
"PNG'd"--declared persona non grata--by the Philippine government and
has not been heard from since.
According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, an Abu Sayyaf
leader who planned the attack bragged on television a month after the
bombing that Iraq had contacted him about conducting joint operations.
Philippine intelligence officials were initially skeptical of his
boasting, but after finding the telephone records they believed him.
* No fewer than five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly
confirmed that Mohammed Atta, the lead September 11 hijacker, met with
Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer working at
the Iraqi embassy, in Prague five months before the hijacking. Media
leaks here and in the Czech Republic have called into question whether
Atta was in Prague on the key dates--between April 4 and April 11, 2001.
And several high-ranking administration officials are "agnostic" as to
whether the meeting took place. Still, the public position of the Czech
government to this day is that it did.
That assertion should be seen in the context of Atta's curious stop-off
in Prague the previous spring, as he traveled to the United States. Atta
flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but did not have a valid
visa and was denied entry. He returned to Germany, obtained the proper
paperwork, and took a bus back to Prague. One day later, he left for the
United States.
Despite the Czech government's confirmation of the Atta-al Ani meeting,
the Bush administration dropped it as evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq
connection in September 2002. Far from hyping this episode,
administration officials refrained from citing it as the debate over the
Iraq war heated up in Congress, in the country, and at the U.N.