Richard Clarke: Bush Admin Negligent in Antiterrorism

[Ramo]

With terrorism, no. With al-Qaeda, yes. The only threads about such a link came from the Nedaverse.

[notyoueither]

Hmmmm, that is not what I recall. I seem to recall articles showing that Saddam allowed AQ safe harbour in Iraq. Also that it was not a constant and steady relationship, but that it was quite rocky. Not the Iraqi spy paid one of the hijackers, but still... Whatever happened to the Iraqi spy-Mohamed Atta (?) links, anyway?

[Ramo]

Which "articles," exactly? Do you want to substantiate that?

What I remember was a lot of propaganda. Like the supposed Atta-Saddam link.

[notyoueither]

Well, I've been digging... This article shocked the hell out of me.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/archive/article/0,,4296646,00.html

'Saddam controlled the camp'
The Iraqi connection

As evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to the 11 September hijackers begins to emerge, David Rose gathers testimony from former Baghdad agents and the CIA to reveal the secrets of Saddam's terror training camp

War on Terrorism: Observer special

David Rose
Observer

Sunday November 11, 2001


His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre.

Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer has learnt that Atta's talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has 'credible information' that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. They are believed to be Atta's closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the 'German cell ' who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s.

In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: 'Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure.

In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers have responded to this prospect with 'horror', arguing that an attack on Saddam Hussein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western anger across Middle East.

Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, heads a clique of determined, powerful hawks, most of them outside the administration - among them James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. The doves argue that an al-Qaeda-Iraq link is improbable, given the sharp ideological differences between Saddam's secular Baathism and Islamic fundamentalism. They also say that claims of Iraqi involvement are being driven by the agenda of the hawks - a group which has for years been seeking to finish the job left undone at the end of the Gulf war in 1991.

Nevertheless, Saddam does not lack a plausible motive: revenge for his expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, and for the continued sanctions and Western bombing of his country ever since. In this febrile atmosphere, hard information about who ordered the 11 September attacks remains astonishingly scarce.

US investigators have traced the movements of the 19 hijackers going back years, and have amassed a detailed picture of who did what inside the conspiracy. Yet what lay beyond the hijackers is an intelligence black hole. If they had a support network in America, none of its members has been traced, and among the hundreds of telephone records and emails the investigators have recovered, nothing gets close to identifying those ultimately responsible.

It still seems almost certain, intelligence sources say, that parts of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network actively backed the conspiracy: about half of the estimated $500,000 the hijackers used reportedly came from al-Qaeda sources, while some of the terrorists are believed to have passed through bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, evidence is emerging of direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers in particular, and with radical Islamic terror groups in general.

In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.'

Last night, Whitehall sources made clear that parts of British intelligence had reached the same conclusion. Uncomfortable as it may be, this reassessment is having a political impact. Last month, when the CIA was still telling him it did not believe Iraq was involved in 11 September, Powell said there were 'no plans' to attack Iraq. Last Thursday, speaking in Kuwait, he abruptly reversed his earlier pronouncements. He promised that after dealing with bin Laden and Afghanistan, 'we will turn our attention to terrorism throughout the world, and nations such as Iraq'.

The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000 of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.

Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details. 'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one source said.

The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations), gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing.

According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses. Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists such as Mohamed Atta.

Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad, expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi, presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan.

Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings] happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.'

Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg, only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely 24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience.

On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two further such meetings in the months before 11 September.

The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers, al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest 'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted to oil exports and busting economic sanctions.

The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years. He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden.

The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle', Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer - codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known - Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad.

However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs.

Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.'

Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.' One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five.

In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims: 'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak".'

Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners' part of the camp. Yesterday their story received important corroboration from Charles Duelfer, former vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team.

Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. 'Of course we automatically took out the word "counter",' he said. 'I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very good at recognising long-term strategic threats.'

At the end of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence Secretary, told reporters there was 'no evidence' that Iraq was involved in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten.

Many still suspect the anthrax which has so far killed four people in America has an ultimate Iraqi origin: in contrast to recent denials made by senior FBI officials, CIA sources say there simply is not enough material to be sure. However, it does not look likely that the latest anthrax sample, sent to a newspaper in Karachi, can have come from the source recently posited by the FBI - a right-wing US militant. 'The sophistication of the stuff that has been found represents a level of technique and knowledge that in the past has been associated only with governments,' Duelfer said. 'If it's not Iraq, there aren't many alternatives.'

If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a State Department spokesman after Powell's briefing by the Czech leader on Friday: 'If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Centre attacks to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.'

At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush's closest advisers - his father, Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, to name but three - made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war without toppling Saddam.

The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two months would seem like a trivial prelude.

Additional reporting by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Kate Connolly in Berlin.

What changed? The article mentions interviews with people who were there. It mentions definite links with AQ. It mentions 2 visits by Atta to the Iraqi spy. Where has all this gone, and why have the mainstream dropped it? It's not like any leftist is going to question the source, are they?

[notyoueither]

I can find, let's call them slightly more right wing sources, but I'm looking for stuff that isn't going to cause people to dismiss by knee jerk reaction.

[Ramo]

Have you been hibernating for the past two and a half years? November of 2001? This article is completely bogus. We now know that the basis for the Prague meeting is entirely on one ME informant with questionable reliability, and has been since dismissed by just about every intel organization, domestic and foreign (including the FBI, CIA, and Mossad).

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by uh Clem
DinoDoc, you're a bright guy, but you really need to stop lying.

Lying about not recalling something like that? How was I doing that?

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Ramo
Have you been hibernating for the past two and a half years? November of 2001? This article is completely bogus. We now know that the basis for the Prague meeting is entirely on one ME informant with questionable reliability, and has been since dismissed by just about every intel organization, domestic and foreign (including the FBI, CIA, and Mossad).

Oh, you mean the WSJ has been hibernating too?

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004046

Iraq and al Qaeda
There's more evidence of a link than the critics admit.

Monday, September 22, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The Bush Administration was cautious, arguably too cautious, when making its case for the liberation of Iraq. Exhibit A is what it said about the links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Investigators, interrogators and even journalists are turning up evidence of a stronger relationship than the limited ties originally sketched by President Bush and Colin Powell.

That wasn't the big story last week of course. The big news was that Mr. Bush said he has "no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved" in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Predictably, this is being spun as a concession from the Administration, which has been accused of exaggerating the al Qaeda link.

In truth, Mr. Bush has never gone further than what he reiterated last week: "There's no question Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." U.S. intelligence officials, meanwhile, have confirmed that fact once again. Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being harbored in Iraq; documents recently found in Tikrit indicate that Saddam provided Yasin with monthly payments and a home. According to federal authorities, the Ramzi Yousef-led terror cell that carried out the 1993 bombing received funding from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 2001 attack.

Far from exaggeration, what struck us about the case the President and Colin Powell took to the U.N. last fall and winter was its restraint. It focused mainly on a then-obscure terrorist named Abu Mussab al Zarqawi with no alleged 9/11 link, and a small affiliated terror group called Ansar al Islam operating in the Kurdish area of Northern Iraq. Left out entirely by Mr. Bush were the following stories:

• About a month after September 11, reports surfaced that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi embassy official and intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. Al-Ani was a later expelled from the Czech Republic, in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Iraq. Despite repeated attempts to discredit the report of a meeting between the two, Czech officials at the cabinet level have stuck by the story. Al-Ani has been captured in Iraq, and the public deserves to know what he's telling U.S. officials about that meeting.

• Also in October 2001, two defectors alleged that a 707 fuselage at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was being used to train terrorists in the art of hijacking with simple weapons such as knives. Though no link to al Qaeda was alleged, some of the trainees were said to be non-Iraqi Arabs. The fuselage was clearly visible in satellite photos, and has since been found.

• Press reports, which had begun in 1998, resurfaced that former Iraqi intelligence chief and then-ambassador to Turkey Faruk Hijazi had met with bin Laden and associates on multiple occasions. Hijazi is in U.S. custody too, and has reportedly confirmed some of the alleged contacts.

That these stories never figured in the case for war was partly a function of caution on the part of the Administration. It was also partly a result of skepticism from the CIA, which had wrongly judged Saddam and Osama incapable of cooperation on the grounds that the former was secular, the latter fundamentalist.

Some CIA officials are still flogging this theory through leaks to the media. A June 9 article by James Risen in the New York Times claimed captured al Qaeda planner Abu Zubaydah had told CIA interrogators that al Qaeda had not "worked jointly" with Saddam. But what Mr. Risen's source, according to our own, neglected to mention was that the very next sentence of the Zubaydah debrief describes bin Laden's attitude toward Saddam as considering the enemy of his enemy to be his friend.

According to Insight magazine, the CIA's Paul Pillar, National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, used a lecture at Johns Hopkins University earlier this year to criticize the President's war on terror. He said that there was no evidence of Iraqi terror sponsorship since 1993, and no evidence of its involvement in the World Trade Center bombing that year. Curiously, we hear the agency has so far declined to share the file found in Iraq on Yasin (the 1993 New York bombing suspect) with other branches of the government.

One of the more interesting pieces of postwar evidence was uncovered in Baghdad by reporters for the Toronto Star and London's Sunday Telegraph. The February 19, 1998, memo from Iraqi intelligence, in which bin Laden's name was covered over with Liquid Paper, reported planned meetings with an al Qaeda representative visiting Baghdad. Days later al Qaeda issued a fatwa alleging U.S. crimes against Iraq. At about the same time, a U.S. government source tells Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, Iraq paid bin Laden deputy Ayman Zawahiri $300,000.

As Saddam's very public financial support for Palestinian suicide bombing would suggest, the dictator had no problem working with other fundamentalist groups based on nothing more than their mutual hatred for the United States. Sources tell us the CIA has found 1993 memos from Saddam's government directing Iraqi intelligence to assist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and to assist Afghan-based holy warriors against the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Somalia. These facts deserve more public disclosure.





Of course, none of this "proves" any Saddam-9/11 link, as Mr. Bush acknowledges. But neither can we be sure there wasn't one. Our point is that U.S. government and intelligence officials ought to be open to the evidence of any links between state sponsors and terrorists. But for many Administration critics, it seems, nothing less than smoking-gun proof that 9/11 was an Iraqi-al Qaeda joint operation will do.
This standard ignores the multiple ways in which states can aid and abet terror--harboring, training, funding, providing false travel documents. What the President's critics seem to want, instead, is to de-link Iraq from the war on terror, and to return to the pre-9/11 practice of targeting terror groups without going after their state sponsors. We think this is short-sighted and dangerous, and that Mr. Bush should begin to call them on it.

I have to say, I am scratching my head for similar reasons. They go into Iraq based on assumptions of WMD (which were widely shared) when they could have gone into Iraq simply on the basis of support for terrorism.

Tell me that Saddam on tape cheering homicide bombers and writing them cheques, and links between Iraq and previous attacks on the US could not have justified it?

The only thing I can assume is that since the game is still on, real intelligence cannot be revealed to any but the most trusted. Since it cannot be revealed, it cannot be used as the justification. Catch 22.

[Urban Ranger]

If there's something to that link, don't you think the Bush Admin would have latched on it already?

[notyoueither]

Linked to by the pillar of Republican thought, PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/etc/links.html

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/iraq/956-tni.htm

An article about the first WTC bombing.

In September 1995, the State Department forwarded to Congress the report of an independent panel, established to examine whether mistakes in security training had contributed to the March 8 assassination of two U.S. consular officials in Karachi--apparent retaliation for Ramzi Yousef's extradition. The report expressed concern about the FBI's lack of cooperation with the national security agencies. Clearly, discontent with the FBI is growing among those agencies as issues such as international crime--and with them the Bureau's international role--assume a mare prominent role in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, one State Department official described the FBI'S unwillingness to share information as "the train wreck coming"--meaning that given the FBI's lack of expertise in international politics, there may well come a time when the Bureau will be sitting on information that, in the hands of others, could have been used to avert a disaster.

Echoes of FBI field agents and discraded reports, anyone? But wait, it gets better...

One may indeed ask whether the World Trade Center bombing itself is not a harbinger of the train wreck coming. For if Saddam Hussein was behind it, then the Justice Department, in effect, has blinded the national security bureaucracies to a serious danger, namely the possibility that in the extreme Iraq might use biological agents, whether for terrorism in America or in the context of military' action in the region, possibly involving U.S. troops.

Of course, that is an important "if." It is to that issue we now turn.


Dramatis Personae
Ramzi Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim -the key man; likely Iraqi agent.

El Sayid Nosair--murderer of Rabbi Meir Kahane, bomb plot initiator.

Emad Salem--FBI informant with ties to Egyptian intelligence.

Mohammed Salameh--Palestinian fundamentalist, Nosair accomplice and early plotter; left a trail of phone calls to Iraq.

Musab Yasin--Iraqi with New Jersey apartment where Yousef first went.

Abdul Rahman Yasin--Musab's brother, led FBI to apartment where bomb was made; employee of Iraqi government; indicted fugitive, presently in Baghdad.

Nidal Ayyad--Palestinian fundamentalist convicted in the World Trade Center bombing.

Mahmud Abu Halima--Egyptian fundamentalist cab driver convicted in the World Trade Center bombing

Eyyad Ismail--Palestinian from Jordan charged with having driven the van.

Why was the guy highlighted in bold hiding in Iraq as of when this was written?

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
If there's something to that link, don't you think the Bush Admin would have latched on it already?

Very good question, considering we have Saddam on tape sponsoring homicide bombings. Doesn't seem to me like a hard case to make if tolerance for state sponsored terror is now zero.

Why do you suppose that the US and UK would go to war and not expose their real reasons for doing so, if those real reasons were intelligence based and the game is still on?

I'm just asking. I'm not certain, but I can't believe the Brits were brought on side for no good reason at all. I can buy one administration going hay-wire, but two is getting to be a stretch, especially given what is being reported but not picked up due to lack of official confirmation.

I can say that the reading for the next twenty years on the topic will be fascinating, assuming we are done with it, and the truth can be told.

[Kuciwalker]

There's a simple explanation: it'll look better closer to November.

[Ramo]

Oh, you mean the WSJ has been hibernating too?

Apparantly this writer has.

About a month after September 11, reports surfaced that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi embassy official and intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. Al-Ani was a later expelled from the Czech Republic, in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Iraq. Despite repeated attempts to discredit the report of a meeting between the two, Czech officials at the cabinet level have stuck by the story. Al-Ani has been captured in Iraq, and the public deserves to know what he's telling U.S. officials about that meeting.

Bull****, as explained earlier.

Also in October 2001, two defectors alleged that a 707 fuselage at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was being used to train terrorists in the art of hijacking with simple weapons such as knives. Though no link to al Qaeda was alleged, some of the trainees were said to be non-Iraqi Arabs. The fuselage was clearly visible in satellite photos, and has since been found.

The two defectors are members of the INC. INC propaganda is bad:

http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/special_packages/iraq/8194211.htm

Thank you, come again.

Press reports, which had begun in 1998, resurfaced that former Iraqi intelligence chief and then-ambassador to Turkey Faruk Hijazi had met with bin Laden and associates on multiple occasions. Hijazi is in U.S. custody too, and has reportedly confirmed some of the alleged contacts.

Never heard of this, but I'm sure that it's also bogus.

[Ramo]

Why was the guy highlighted in bold hiding in Iraq as of when this was written?

Maybe because he's an Iraqi (the article says that his brother's Iraqi) and so his roots are over there.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Ramo
Never heard of this, but I'm sure that it's also bogus.

And there you have it. Due to preconceptions some assume yes, and others assume no.

My point is that I doubt any of the posters on this board are anywhere near knowing the full story, and will not be anywhere near knowing it for a good long time to come.