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Subject: Follow the Money
swhitebull    4/14/2007 6:31:41 PM
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swhitebull       4/14/2007 6:32:16 PM

From captainsquartersblog.com:

 

What Happened To 'Follow The Money'?

It gets disheartening defending the obvious pre-9/11 connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when the White House seems unmotivated to do so, but Thomas Jocelyn and Andy McCarthy haven't been chased off the story by Senator Carl Levin and the Washington Post. When both asserted that no one had found connections between Saddam and AQ, they both reminded readers to follow the money:

But Levin's story, which was simply repeated without any real investigation by the Post or even the inspector general's office, relies on a false dichotomy. The senator now pretends that the CIA and other intelligence outfits had reached a rock-solid conclusion that there was no noteworthy relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in 2002, but Feith's shop improperly pressed on. The Post summarized the inspector general's report as saying: " the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups."

This is simply revisionist history at its worst.

Although there were certainly disagreements between the CIA and Feith's shop, both argued in 2002 that there was a relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, stated the CIA's position quite clearly in an October 7, 2002 letter to then head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Bob Graham (D-FL). Tenet explained, "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Iraq and al Qaeda "have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression." Tenet warned, "We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." And, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al-Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action."

 

Andy picks up on one very important connection between Iraq and AQ -- money:

Forgetting all of these circumstances, among others, Tom also recalls, as Steve Hayes, myself, and others have for some time, that in 1998, "Ayman al-Zawahiri was in Baghdad ... and collected a check for $300,000 from the Iraqi regime." I would add, for context, that this was in the same time frame as bin Laden and Zawahiri's infamous fatwa calling for the murder of Americans — which, if you read it, argues that American actions against Iraq are a big part of the justification. It also came just a few months before al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in east Africa, the Clinton administration bombed a Sudanese phramaceutical factory because intel indicated it was a joint Iraqi/Qaeda chemical weapons venture, and Clinton counter-terror honcho Richard Clarke fretted that "wily old Osama would boogie to Baghdad" — of all places — if the U.S. made things too hot for Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Sure, maybe all this is just a big coincidence. But, given that al Qaeda is a 24/7 terror operation whose main target is the U.S., I've always wondered for what earthly purpose Senator Levin and other connection naysayers figure Saddam Hussein gave Ayman Zawahiri 300K?

 

The money came to Zawahiri right before the attacks on two American embassies. Sure sounds like Saddam funded, at least indirectly, attacks on American assets that resulted in the death of Americans. Does Carl Levin think that doesn't represent a connection?
 
 
swhitebull
 
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swhitebull       4/14/2007 6:46:40 PM
Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the WTC 1 Blind Sheikh:
 
 

More Connection -- the 1998 Fatwa   [Andy McCarthy]

Can't help but belabor this point.  Over the years, the media, the Intelligence Community, the Justice Department, the Congress and various investigative bodies like the 9/11 Commission have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden & Co.'s infamous 1998 fatwa, the summons to "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," calling for the murder of all Americans, whether civilian or military, anywhere on earth where they are found.  That, of course, is the command — the direction about what is to be done.  But very little has been said publicly about bin Laden's stated rationale for this command.

Below is al Qaeda's justification for the command to kill all Americans.  As you read this — recalling the meetings and exchanges of funds between Iraq and al Qaeda in 1998, the Clinton administration's retaliation against the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (believed to be a joint Iraq/Qaeda weapons operation) that followed the embassy attacks, the Clinton administration's fear that bin Laden would move his operation to Baghdad — note how focused bin Laden was on Iraq in the months before bombing our embassies.  Note also his allusions to the "rulers" of countries in the Arabian Peninsula, including Iraq — there is no trace of the hostility that the Intelligence Community often maintains was a constant between jihadist bin Laden and secular Saddam.  All italics are mine:

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries....  On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."

So said Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and their Sunni jihadist confederates, who, according to today's congressional lead

 
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Bob       4/14/2007 7:21:11 PM
"yeah, but nothing ever came from it."

that's the sentence that magically wills away and negates a decade plus of intelligence that counters the bogus idea that saddam wasn't working with al qaeda.

 
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swhitebull       4/15/2007 7:26:05 PM
Some more from National Review's former DA Andrew McCarthy and former White House National security advisor Michael Ledeen:

al qaeda and iraq, al qaeda and iran
   [Michael Ledeen]

Andy McCarthy and others have constantly pointed out the mountains of evidence showing al Qaeda's long-standing and extensive working relations with Saddam's Iraq.  Tom Joscelyn has recently written a marvelous essay doing the same on the relations between al Qaeda and Iran.  I borrow extensively from that material—which should be published shortly by Claremont—in a book on Iran I have just finished and submitted to the green eye shade crowd at St Martins Press, but suffice to say that it's very compelling.

I remain convinced that when all is said and done and we finally unravel all the threads in the vast winged conspiracy that constitutes the terror network, we will find most everyone involved.  I mean, just for starters, ask yourself what Ramzi Bin al-Shib, the logistics officer for the 9/11 attacks, was doing in Iran in February, 2001 (after meeting with Atta elsewhere), and why said Ramzi headed for Iran again, just six days before 9/11.  That information was provided to the 9/11 Commission just 24 hours before the report went to press...good old CIA just happened to stumble on it, hoHO. 
 
 

Saddam & 9/11   [Andy McCarthy]

For the record, I continue not to understand why people are so quick to absolve Saddam of any involvement in 9/11. 

To be clear, I don't understand Jonah to be saying anything other than that no connection has been proved, and assuming that's what he's saying, I agree. But there is a big difference between saying no connection has been proved and saying no connection is likely, or at least conceivable.  The debate on this has become so perverted by those hell-bent on discrediting the American invasion of Iraq (aided and abetted by the administration's infuriating failure to defend itself), that it seems people feel compelled to make an opening concession that there is no connection between Iraq and 9/11 in order to be taken seriously in arguing that there is a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.  But it would be more accurate to say that the evidence of connection between Iraq and al Qaeda is extensive, and there is enough troubling circumstantial evidence of Iraqi ties to central 9/11 players that Iraq's participation in 9/11 cannot be discounted.

First, contrary to the myth tirelessly repeated by the "no connection" crowd, it has never been established that Mohamed Atta did not meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001.  Czech intelligence has not recanted its spotter's the identification of Atta, and, mightily as it tried to help the CIA naysayers, the 9/11 Commission could not establish Atta's whereabouts between April 4 and April 11, 2001 — the week in which the meeting was said to take place.

Second, no one has ever explained Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi intelligence operative who escorted 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Midhar through through the Malaysia airport and then attended, with al-Midhar and 9/11 hijacker Nawaf al-Hamzi, among other Qaeda figures, the Kuala Lampur meeting in January 2000 that is generally thought to be one of the initial meetings about the 9/11 operation (as well, more than likely, as covering the plot that ultimately led to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole).  About two years ago, I posted this on the Corner, regarding the 9/11 Commission's laughable straw-man attempt to dismiss Shakir in a footnote to its final report, and I've also discussed the intriguing Shakir facts here and here, for example.

It's perfectly fine to say that no Iraqi role in 9/11 has been demonstrated.  But until Prague and Shakir are convincingly discounted — and they may never be — it's simply wrong to exonerate Saddam from knowing participation of some kind in 9/11.  This is not law enforcement, it's national security — we don't require proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we identify threats.  Moreover, it's absurd to let the Intelligence Community use its ineffectiveness as an offensive weapon — i.e., our intelligence about Iraq and al Qaeda pre-9/11 was so sparse that we can't explain what the ties meant, so therefore you all should conclude that they meant nothing.
 

Al Qaeda & Saddam   [ Quote    Reply


Bob       4/15/2007 8:58:28 PM
Nobody ever brings up the issue of anthrax when talking about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda or 9/11.

In Woodward's book Bush at War there's a passage where Tenet tells Libby & Cheney that CIA believed the Daschle anthrax came from Al Qaeda, and that there was probably a state behind it - Russia or Iraq. Cheney told everybody not to talk about it.

I'm pretty sure Spertzel argued that the anthrax trail led back to Iraq, as well.

But hey, who're these people - the CIA director, vice president, biology expert for UNSCOM - and why do you need their opinion when you have Judith Yaphe, Richard Clarke and Scott Ritter?

 
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Plutarch       4/15/2007 10:37:11 PM

Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the WTC 1 Blind Sheikh:

 

 



More Connection -- the 1998 Fatwa   [Andy McCarthy]


Can't help but belabor this point.  Over the years, the media, the Intelligence Community, the Justice Department, the Congress and various investigative bodies like the 9/11 Commission have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden & Co.'s infamous 1998 fatwa, the summons to "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," calling for the murder of all Americans, whether civilian or military, anywhere on earth where they are found.  That, of course, is the command — the direction about what is to be done.  But very little has been said publicly about bin Laden's stated rationale for this command.


Below is al Qaeda's justification for the command to kill all Americans.  As you read this — recalling the meetings and exchanges of funds between Iraq and al Qaeda in 1998, the Clinton administration's retaliation against the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (believed to be a joint Iraq/Qaeda weapons operation) that followed the embassy attacks, the Clinton administration's fear that bin Laden would move his operation to Baghdad — note how focused bin Laden was on Iraq in the months before bombing our embassies.  Note also his allusions to the "rulers" of countries in the Arabian Peninsula, including Iraq — there is no trace of the hostility that the Intelligence Community often maintains was a constant between jihadist bin Laden and secular Saddam.  All italics are mine:



No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:


First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries....  On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:


The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fig

 
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Plutarch    Answers   4/16/2007 2:37:18 PM
Who originated the story that Zawahiri received 300K from Iraq? How do they know, what bank account information are they privy to, what IIS agents talked, what AQ agents talked?  What is the source of this allegation?  What does 300,000 dollars buy al Qaeda?  If Al Qaeda received 300,000 dollars from Iraq how much more money did the organization receive from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?  Why don't Swhitebull and Bob ask these kinds of questions?
 
Answers to these questions are still pending, and maybe should be resolved before we all jump to conclusions about "links" between Saddam and al Qaeda, and intent on the part of Saddam Hussein.
 
As for the mystery of anthrax, and its dubious links to Iraq, one still has to get around the fact that the letters were sent a week after all the 9/11 hijackers were dead.  When the Iraq archives were opened up we found some interesting things like a Congressional aide that was also a spy for Saddam.  But there was never any mention of a sleeper cell of IIS agents or assets in the US that could have launched the anthrax attack.  So how exactly could Iraqi-linked anthrax be mailed from within the US with no 9/11 hijackers and no sleeper cell of Iraqi agents?  Pure speculation at best.
 
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Mike From Brielle    Plutarch   4/27/2007 2:19:27 PM
 
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Plutarch       4/27/2007 3:09:22 PM
Perhaps he is, though beyond his Iraqi citizenship nothing links him to the Iraqi regime.  Saddam was not omnipotent and did not control the movements and actions of every single one of his citizens. 
 
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Mike From Brielle    Plutarch   4/27/2007 3:29:35 PM
Yes maybe but:
 
"He was formerly a major in the Iraqi army in the 1980s.

The US said he was in Afghanistan for 15 years, but that he had been a member of al-Qaeda "since the late 1990s""
 
 
2007 - 15 = 1992
 
So he became a member of Al Qaeda not to long after Desert Storm and when I believe Zawahiri first started to completly merge his Egyptian Islamic Jihad (rumored to have strong connections to Iraqi Intel) with Al Qaeda and when Al Qaeda first started attacking US interests in the region.
 
Somewhat before the first World Trade Center attack.
 
Notice how Hillary was log rolling her position on if any country was supporting terrorists she would attack them also, why would she do that?
 
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