by Jackal on Sun Mar 14, 2004 10:29 am
!!
by Andrew on Sun Mar 14, 2004 1:49 pm
by Ruff Ryder on Mon Mar 15, 2004 12:20 am
New School # 23 wrote:RIP
by Boyk on Mon Mar 15, 2004 1:06 am
by carlos on Mon Mar 15, 2004 2:52 am
Laddas_KB8_CA15 wrote:Terrorism is probably the worst though, coz it kills the innocent.
by benji on Wed Mar 17, 2004 7:42 am
by Jackal on Wed Mar 17, 2004 7:49 am
War is the only thing that will destroy terrorism. You cannot run when it strikes. You cannot defend against it. You must destroy it before it destroys you.
by alexboom on Wed Mar 17, 2004 7:18 pm
Psycho Jackal wrote: They are attacking us, before we are attacking them. Doesnt it become a never ending cycle?
by benji on Thu Mar 18, 2004 10:18 am
I feel a little disturbed when I compare the way the media is covering this attack with the way they almost totally ignored the civilians in Iraq who died from bombardments. Everybody in the world should get the same respect in front of this kind of tragedy.
alexboom wrote:indeed, the USA may have started first by blindly bombarding civilians. the 03/11 attack was a kind of "answer" even if there is NOTHING to legitimate this horrible act.
various wrote:a French newspaper has received a threat from an Islamist organization, apparently of Chechen origin, "to plunge France into terror and remorse and spill blood outside its frontiers."
...
"Only a dreamer would believe that Germany will not be attacked," say the editors of Bild, Germany's best-selling tabloid. "Islamic terrorists are waging a war against the West, not just against individual countries."
Sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa says Europeans have been dreaming. Writing in Le Monde (in French), Lamo says Europeans have thought they would be spared because they haven't supported the Bush administration's policies.
"When the Americans declared war on terrorism, many of us thought they exaggerated. Many thought terrorism was not likely to occur on our premises, [inhabited by] peaceful and civilized Europeans who speak no evil of anybody, who dialogue, who are the first [to] send assistance and offer cooperation. We are pacifists, they are warmongers. . . . Don't we defend the Palestinians? Are we not pro-Arab and anti-Israeli?"
"Can we dialogue with those who desire only our death and nothing but our death?" Lamo asks. "Dialogue about what? The manner in which we will be assassinated?"
"The war against terrorism will be long and difficult," he concludes. "It was that cretin, President Bush, who said that."
...
The strategy of the terror war speculates not without good reason on the moral impotence of western Europe. The announcement of designated [Prime Minister] Zapatero that he will pull Spanish troops out of Iraq can be celebrated by the assassins as a (wohlfeilen) victory. Even if one would like to view the pull-out as justified by international law, it amounts to a capitulation in the present context that enjoys wide popularity.
Post-heroic societies have only very little with which they can fight terror. Their governments fear nothing more than the return home of dead soldiers. They are incapable of being offensive. In times of danger, they retreat within themselves. They can bear no losses, have no mission, indeed, not even a consciousness that they have something to defend. So they are easy to blackmail. A well-aimed bombing is enough to get them to retreat. And at some point, a credible threat is enough for them to submit to the will of a determined attacker.
by Stevan on Thu Mar 18, 2004 2:09 pm
It's not a quote from a 500 page textbook but it does the job.
by carlos on Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:36 pm
by Bru on Fri Mar 19, 2004 10:32 pm
Ben wrote: If the United States and the Coalition removing Saddam Hussein from power started it, then what hell was 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole, the "Millennium" Plot, The Embassy Bombings, Khobar Towers, Project Bojinka, Somalia, WTC93, and Aden? That didn't start it? When bin Laden declared war on the United States in December of 1992 that didn't start it? Instead the removal of Saddam Hussein did?
by benji on Sun Mar 21, 2004 2:22 pm
We're in a world war... shit I hadn't noticed. I hope all those people who think war is necessary, have offered their services.
but when Israel is going against UN for the last 40 years
and putting all the ¿Palestinians? in a ghetto rounded by a 7 meter tall wall
Almost all the terrorism in the world starts due to some illegal act against their people.
Fighting them won't end with it because the unfairness would be still there.
Give a decent relation between those attacks and Hussein regim
by Robby on Sun Mar 21, 2004 2:38 pm
Israel is building a wall where? Around itself. How are the Arabs being rounded into a ghetto when they are being walled out of Israel. But they can also come and go as they please through the gates!
Maybe if they weren't murdering people they wouldn't have to be kept out. The ones that don't murder people, but who live normal lives are just fine inside Israel.
I do not "think" war is necessary, I know it is necessary. Perhaps such a "wise" person like yourself could tell us all just how we will defeat the terrorists without fighting back in this war.
Should we allow them to murder us until we are either dead or living in the Seventh Century?
by Stevan on Mon Mar 22, 2004 12:30 am
I do not "think" war is necessary, I know it is necessary. Perhaps such a "wise" person like yourself could tell us all just how we will defeat the terrorists without fighting back in this war.
by Bru on Mon Mar 22, 2004 1:21 am
Ben wrote:So you would rather Saddam Hussein stay in power to murder hundreds of thousands more, support terrorism, potentially acquire weapons of mass murder, get rich off illegal deals and theft, imprison more people, have his sons rape more young girls, have more torture chambers and did I mention the murdering of hundreds of thousands?
by carlos on Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:58 am
Ben wrote:Fighting them won't end with it because the unfairness would be still there.
So what SHOULD we do? Surrender? Go back to the Seventh Century? All be ruled by the Caliphate?
Should we allow them to murder us until we are either dead or living in the Seventh Century?
by benji on Wed Mar 24, 2004 9:42 am
No, I think ending with unfairnesses like the Palestina ocuppation will improve the relationships between the arabic world and Europe and USA.
It's not the same topic but, ¿did you know that in 1948 there was an arabic group of people living in those territories but the UN decided to create a Israel country there? Many people had to leave their homes to make room to the Israel people who had been brutally killed. Israel wanted more land and built out of their borders invading the land of the arabic people who lived there before.
Also, Iraq and Kuwait where a whole country. United Kingdom colonized both but they weren't free at the same time so they became two separate countries when, years before, they had been only one.
Richard Miniter on September 25, 2003 wrote:Every day it seems another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts. Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours. What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.
That is why is important to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight. Indeed, many of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record -- from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers -- attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam going back to 1994.
Those who try to whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just ignore it. So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public record for months or years:
* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.
* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.
* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.
* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.
(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")
* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.
* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"
* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.
* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.
* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.
* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.
* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.
*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.
* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."
* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.
* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."
* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.
Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.
In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.
The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.
Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.
So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."
The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.
Richard Miniter on September 24, 2001 wrote:In President Bush's soaring, Reaganesque speech Thursday night, two words were missing: Saddam Hussein.
Is America's Gulf War foe behind the attacks? Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials say there is "no evidence" of that. Yet veteran State Department watchers say that "evidence" is a kind of Foggy Bottom shorthand for absolute proof--the kind that lawyers would need to convict the Iraqi dictator in court.
Still, there is a strong circumstantial case that Iraq has backed Osama bin Laden and has been waging a terrorist war of assassination plots and bombings that had already killed hundreds of Americans before Sept. 11--from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole last year.
Israeli intelligence services reportedly met with CIA and FBI officials in August and warned of an imminent large-scale attack on the U.S. There "were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," a senior Israeli official later told London's Daily Telegraph.
Bin Laden's Al Qaeda reportedly had representatives based in Baghdad. In 1997 he also set up training camps in Iraq, according to Canada's National Post. Iraq has also reportedly delivered small arms and money to bin Laden's organization over the past few years. Iraqi intelligence agents have met repeatedly with bin Laden or his operatives in Sudan, Turkey, Afghanistan and an undisclosed site in Europe (evidently Prague). Iraqi opposition leaders have also said that there is a long history of contact between Iraq and the archterrorist.
Bin Laden is believed to have met repeatedly with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay. Bin Laden also seems to have ties to Iraq's Mukhabarat, another one of its intelligence services.
Perhaps the most dramatic meeting occurred in December 1998, when Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in the Mukhabarat who later became ambassador to Turkey, journeyed deep into the icy Hindu Kush mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," according to a 1999 report in the Guardian, a British newspaper.
That same year, an Arab intelligence officer, who knows Saddam personally, predicted in Newsweek: "Very soon you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis." The Arab official said these terror operations would be run under "false flags"--spook-speak for front groups--including bin Laden's organization. And Iraqi intelligence agents were in contact with bin Laden in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence sources told the Washington Times' Bill Gertz.
A Saddam-bin Laden partnership would offer both sides advantages. The Iraqi dictator would gain an energized terrorist network, whose actions he could plausibly deny. Bin Laden would gain expertise and the world-wide logistical support that only a client state can offer. Certainly, bin Laden has need of Saddam's skills--developed with the aid of the Soviets and East Germans--for planning covert operations, forging false documents and coordinating large campaigns over vast areas. Given their personal history, several of the hijackers needed false papers and concealment skills to enter and remain in the U.S. The FBI has acknowledged that it was searching unsuccessfully for two of the hijackers two weeks before the attacks.
"It's clear that the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq," Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterintelligence efforts, told Knight Ridder in 1999. He added that "the Iraqis have all the technological elements, the tradecraft that bin Laden lacks, and they have Abu Nidal," the notorious Palestinian bomb expert.
Most of all, bin Laden needs money. His Al Qaeda organization operates in some 50 countries. Informed estimates put bin Laden's personal wealth at perhaps $30 million--not the $300 million usually cited in the press--and this probably is not enough to sustain a global terror network over many years. Bin Laden told an Arab reporter that he lost $150 million in Sudanese investments. What's left of his fortune is tied up in real estate in Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere or has been frozen by various governments in the past few years. Sanctions notwithstanding, Saddam is far more liquid. Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $7 billion.
Iraq doesn't shrink from financing terrorism. Baghdad has two intelligence services that have funded and planned terrorist campaigns carried out by independent organizations, starting in 1969 in eastern Iran.
Saddam and bin Laden share a powerful hate for America, and both cite the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat and subsequent sanctions crippled the Iraqi economy and stymied its buildup of nuclear and biological weapons. Upon learning of the first President Bush's 1992 election defeat, Saddam joyously fired his pistol into the sky and declared on Iraqi radio: "The mother of all battles continues and will continue."
Bin Laden called Saudi Arabia's alliance with the U.S. during the Gulf War "treason." He regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on holy sands of Arabia.
Bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998, call for jihad lists three grievances: that U.S. warplanes use bases in Saudi Arabia to patrol the skies of Iraq, that United Nations sanctions have caused grievous suffering in Iraq, and that America's Iraq policy is designed to divert attention from Israel's treatment of Muslims. In short, bin Laden's call to arms reads as if it was issued from Baghdad.
Aside from Saddam's links to bin Laden and his known hostility to America, there is a wealth of intriguing connections between Iraq and this past week's attacks. Mohamed Atta, believed to be the commander of the hijacking crew that smashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Center, reportedly met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe a few months ago. U.S. intelligence reports from Southeast Asia suggest that Iraq played a role in training the hijackers who attacked America, according to Time magazine. An Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities last October.
Certainly, Iraq seems to be acting strangely. Hours after the attacks, Iraqi soldiers moved away from likely military targets, notes Neil Partrick, a London-based analyst.
And Iraq, alone among the 22 members of the Arab League, failed to condemn the atrocities of Sept. 11. Indeed, Baghdad celebrated them. Saddam's government issued a statement, quoted widely in Al-Iraq and other state-run papers, that said America deserved the attacks.
Perhaps Iraq's official response indicates nothing more than a continuing hatred of America, but Mideast leaders who are no friends of the U.S. acted differently. Iran sent its condolences. Yasser Arafat expressed sorrow and gave blood. Even Libya's Moammar Gadhafi called for Muslim aid groups to help Americans, adding that the U.S. had the "right to take revenge."
For almost a decade, Saddam has waged a secret terror campaign against Americans, according to terrorism experts, former government officials, U.S. government reports and newspaper accounts from around the world. That Iraqi-inspired terror campaign--working through Osama bin Laden and others--is believed to include foiled assassination attempts against President Bush père in Kuwait in April 1993 and against President Clinton in the Philippines in November 1994. The terror campaign seems to include the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five American soldiers; a massive 1995 bombing of U.S. troop barracks at Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans soldiers; the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224; and last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 39.
Knowledgeable observers point to wide-ranging Iraqi terrorist activity. James Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence during the Clinton administration, has repeatedly raised the issue of Iraqi involvement in last week's attacks and past terrorist assaults. Laurie Mylroie, author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" and a Clinton Iraq adviser, presents a compelling case that Iraqi agents were behind a string of bombings.
Iraq's secret war against America probably began with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Iraq became involved, Ms. Mylorie believes, after learning of the bomb plot from a terrorist holed up in Iraq who was an uncle of one of the ringleaders. One of the perpetrators placed 46 calls--some more than an hour long--to that uncle in a single month before the bombing, according to phone records collected by the FBI.
The two ringleaders both had connections to Iraq. The mastermind, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was known to his associates as "Rashid the Iraqi." It was he who persuaded the bombers to make their target the World Trade Center. The other man, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad, where, ABC News reported in 1994, he had been put on the government payroll. He is believed to be still at large in Iraq. "The majority of senior law-enforcement officers in New York believe that Iraq was involved," Jim Fox, who ran the FBI's investigation of the World Trade Center bombing, told Ms. Mylorie. Egyptian and Saudi intelligence sources also told U.S. officials that Iraq organized the bombing.
Iraqi agents, Ms. Mylroie persuasively argues, also supplied false passports and escape routes. They may have also provided bomb-making expertise and money. The hydrogen-cyanide gas that was supposed to be spread by the explosion--luckily it was burned up instead--probably has origins in Iraq's chemical-weapons program, Ms. Mylroie concludes. The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B.
The Iraqi terror campaign intensified in the mid-1990s, after bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence became better acquainted, most likely in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. In that dusty city, Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub until the late 1990s, when Sudanese officials allegedly told them to leave. Bin Laden was based in Khartoum until 1996, when Sudan kicked him out at the request of the U.S. government, a representative of the Sudanese government told me. There are documented meetings that occurred between bin Laden and Iraqi agents at the time.
After a June 1996 Arab League summit--the first since the Gulf War--issued a communiqué in favor of maintaining sanctions against Iraq, Iraq's government-controlled press seethed with anger. "Before it is too late, the Arabs should rectify the sin they committed against Iraq," one state-run paper warned. Saudi Arabia was the prime mover behind the Arab League's bold statement. Two days after the meeting ended, a truck bomb exploded outside the Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia. The U.S government never publicly charged Iraq, but Gen. Wafiq Samarai, an Iraqi defector, did. He said Saddam had asked him to join a secret committee to commit terrorist acts against U.S. forces during the Gulf War. The Al Khobar bombing was strikingly similar to the plans of that committee, Mr. Samarai said.
Next, Iraq seems to have played a role in bin Laden's plot to bomb two U.S embassies in East Africa. Beginning on May 1, 1998, Iraq warned of "dire consequences" if the U.N. sanctions were not lifted and the weapons-inspection teams removed. Eight days later, bin Laden released another statement calling for jihad against America. Throughout the summer, Iraq's and bin Laden's threatening statements moved in lockstep. Then Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors on Aug. 5. Two days later, the bombs went off in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Dire consequences, indeed.
Why didn't the Clinton administration follow up on the Iraqi connection? Part of the answer is bureaucratic bungling. The New Jersey FBI office released a suspect who was sought by the New York office in connection with the 1993 twin towers bomb plot. There was little communication or trust between the FBI and the National Security Agency. And the FBI turned much of its evidence in the 1993 bombings to the defendants long before America's national-security specialists saw it. During the Clinton years, America's antiterrorist units suffered from the lowest ebb of morale since the 1970s, according to a recent National Commission on Terrorism report.
Another possibility is that administration officials didn't want to see it, that they saw their job as containing Saddam, not confronting him. Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Adviser, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996 that dealing with Saddam was "little bit like a Whack-a-Mole game at the circus: They bop up and you whack them down, and if they bop up again, you bop them back down again."
To avoid targeting Iraq, Clinton administration officials blamed the governments of Sudan and Afghanistan or a loose network of Islamic extremists. Both explanations seem incomplete. Sudan and Afghanistan are among the world's poorest nations; their governments cannot control sizeable sections of their own territories. While both governments are run by Islamic extremists and have long been havens for terrorists, they lack the ability to act alone. Iraq has strong ties to both of these nations.
The idea that loose networks of Islamic hardliners randomly come together to plot attacks is also hard to credit. It takes organization, money, patience and precision to carry out these attacks--qualities not usually present in volatile, itinerant extremists. Clinton officials should have noticed that the 1998 U.S. embassy bombs detonated within nine minutes of each other and the perpetrators had false papers and plane tickets for Pakistan.
They also should have grasped that the terrorists are political extremists--not Islamic zealots. This is also true of the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta slugged down vodka like a sailor, notes Time magazine. The night before the attacks, several men with knowledge of the impending attacks are reported to have had a drunken party at a Florida strip club--two major violations of Islamic law. Many of the perpetrators lacked beards, which fundamentalists believe the Koran instructs cannot be shaved. One disco-loving hijacker has been traced to another Al Qaeda terrorist plot in the Philippines, where a fellow terrorist lived with a non-Muslim girlfriend. A third terrorist boasted of his sexual conquests, on a phone tapped by the Philippine police. Audio files on the computer used by the 1993 World trade Center bombers contain numerous obscenities. And so on.
Even overlooking the Koran's injunctions against murder and killing of women in war, the lifestyles of the Al Qaeda terrorists don't reflect orthodox Islam. But the Clinton administration kept talking about a shadowy network of Islamic extremists--not a campaign of terror by a vengeful Saddam Hussein.
The scale of last week's devastation requires a sober look at America's enemies, starting with Iraq. If Iraq is behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the terrorist assaults of the past decade, then Americans will know that they were not the victims of senseless hate, but malevolent calculation. And President Bush will know that winning the war against terrorism will require him to win the war his father began.
by Matthew on Wed Mar 24, 2004 11:39 am
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