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A CS reader recently back from flying missions in Iraq sent us the following article that shows a U.S. federal judge would disagree with John Edwards claim that there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11. "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time." Conventional wisdom has it that no connection existed between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and that our failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes our presence there a mistake. People who say this are wrong on three counts, but for now let's ignore the chemical weapons that have already been found (rocket warheads and artillery shells containing the nerve agent cyclosarin, which could have killed thousands) and concentrate on the Al Qaeda/Hussein connection. Evidence of the connection centers around a park outside of Baghdad known as Salman Pak. Originally a biological warfare research facility under the direction of Dr. Rihab Taha (whom terrorists recently tried to free by beheading two Americans) the 20 square km compound added a terrorist training camp in 1995. This was the same year that Al Qaeda agents in the Philippines devised the plan of hijacking airliners and slamming them into American buildings. On Nov 6, 2001, an Iraqi general told the PBS television show Frontline of his work guarding the facility, where Egyptians, Saudis, and others studied aircraft hijacking. Other Iraqis, instructors at the facility, gave interviews to Frontline in which they complained of their students' fundamentalist approach to Islam; it took longer to teach them because they insisted on stopping so frequently to pray. To what end where these Islamic fundamentalists being trained? One of the instructors admits, "we were training these people to attack installations important to the United States." It's not just the Public Broadcast Service and some Iraqis making the case that terrorists received training in Iraq. Former Clinton administration CIA director James Woolsey is on record as saying the facility and the Boeing 707 located there were used for training terrorists to hijack aircraft using small knives, silverware, and other unconventional weapons - just as they did on September 11. Laurie Mylroie, a Pentagon terrorism consultant, Iraq Policy advisor to the Clinton '92 campaign, and author of The War Against America agrees. She says "It took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive, and deadly as what happened on Sept 11." This is given credence by the fact that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers traveled using stolen Kuwaiti identities. The stolen identities were part of a cache of documents taken from the Kuwaiti national archives by the Iraqi Army during the first Gulf War. Even Bin Laden and the 9/11 Commission Report have acknowledged links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In documents and recorded messages, Bin Laden encouraged followers to work with Saddam's Baath party on matters where the two groups held common interests. And despite what is commonly reported, the much-discussed but seldom-read 9/11 report recognized links between the two. Is this enough evidence to build a compelling case? According to a U.S. court, it is. Even before the findings of the 9/11 Report were released, these facts and others given in sworn testimony were enough to convince U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baer that Saddam's regime played a material role in the Sept. 11 attacks. For his May 2003 ruling, the Judge Baer heard testimony from not only Woolsey and Mylroie, but also three of the instructors from Salman Pak. Iraq built and staffed a facility solely for the purpose of training Islamic terrorists to hijack airliners and use them as weapons against American targets. The war on terror, which rightly began in Afghanistan, progressed to its next logical step when it broadened its focus to include Saddam Hussein. The campaign in Iraq is the right war, the right place, and at the right time. |
Al
Qaeda is Everywhere but Iraq? |
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