Exactly. Bin Laden is not in "charge" of Al Qaeda like Blowfeld was in charge of SPECTER. He is a figurehead and inspiration for groups that choose to call themselves affiliated with Al Qaeda. KSM was one of the masterminds of 9/11 and one of Bin Laden's chief disciples. Bin Laden did not come up with the idea of 9/11, mastermind it, organize it, or probably even fund it. He did, apparently, approve of it though beforehand and take credit for it elsewhere afterwards.
1) There is no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
That's not what I said, is it?
If there is evidence Saddam knew of the attack, by all means cite a source.
Saddam was the only world leader to praise the attacks on 9/11. Castro, Il, and other enemies of ours all condemned them. When the casualties were estimated in tens, prehaps hundreds, of thousands, Saddam was unflinchingly positive about the attack. Only after heavy international condemnation did he apologize a few days later.
The 9/11 report shows how some Iraqi agents were told in the week or two leading up to the attack to go to the streets and gauge public opinion on an event. They were told they would know it when they saw it.
Iraq supposedly went to its highest threat level that day, though I can no longer find reports of this. This might be apocryphal.
It's not conclusive, though nor is it implausible. Saddam had a vast terrorist network, including known members of Al Qaeda. It seems entirely likely that a message forewarning about a massive attack wound its way through Saddam's spy network.
But please, please cite some evidence showing they were involved, as a nation, in any of those attacks.
Abdul Rahman Yasin admitted to FBI agents that he helped mix the ingredients for the 93 WTC attack. He then flew to Iraq using his Iraqi passport with the help of the Iraqi government. Papers discovered in 2003 in Iraq showed he was on the Iraqi payroll for the previous 10 years.
Hussein al Husseini, the man identified as John Doe #2 in the 95 OKC attack, was a Unit 999 member from Iraq. Unit 999 was a special operations unit with the purpose of conducting attacks overseas in deep cover.
The list goes on and on. Just google Iraq and WTC 93 or Iraq and OKC 95. Mylroie's War Against America and Davis' The Third Terrorist are also excellent starting points.
And by the way - what does 'bomb them for 8 straight years' mean?
Because that's pretty much what we did. The bombing campaigns on Iraq (using dumb bombs, mostly) were so commonplace that they rarely made the news. It was like space shuttle launches. Every few days or weeks, Saddam would ty to shoot down our arcraft and we bomb them for days. We ran several long bombing campaigns. Between the sanctions and the constant dropping of inaccurate (by today's standard) dumb bombs, Clinton killed far more Iraqis than Bush did. There were no cameras on the ground covering it in gruesome detail though.
we broke our own rule; never attack first.
Given Iraq's involvement in terrorist attacks in the US, I don't see it that way.
The upshot is that, yeah, you should be labeled a troll for this.
I am an intelligence analyst working in Iraq. I've tracked terrorism for years. What do you for a living again? And what makes you more of an expert on terrorism than I?
Hey, it was you that used the "violent" card to justify attacking Iraq.
I said they were a violent, despotic regime that invaded their neighbor (and it was you that selectively quoted me). They massacred over 500,000 of their own people, threw them in mass graves all over the country, used VX on their own people, brutally put down several revolts, filled pallaces with unwilling women to act as sex slaves for Saddam's sons, etc etc ad infinitum. If the US has done anything like this, please point it out.
1) For the USA to directly denounce said officials (link please)
I can't find a statement from the Bush administration in any of my google searches. I guess I don't know what to search for. They were not happy, as I recall.
2) For the USA stand in front of the UN, justify itself, and apologize for the UN (as a body) (link please)
I'm not quite sure why we would apologize in front of the UN when it was the UN that was corrupt. I think they should be the ones to apologize to us. I'd be happy if just France apologized for secretly selling them MRBMs, let alone accepting bribes.
What was done goes a little beyond "disagreement", don't you think
Yes, given the treachery and corruption this "friend" has done to us, given how they humiliated us and scolded us before the war and how they pleaded for contracts after the war, given how utterly useless, wasteful, and inefficient they are at the jobs to which they are appointed, I'd say it goes far beyond a disagreement. Fuck the UN.
You can bet a lot of countries consider the USA despotic and violent
To paraphrase your comment farther down, name me one government that is NOT violent. Seriously, I could care less what "a lot" of countries think. Point out the laws we've broken, pass a resolution in the UN, or STFU.
That is exactly what I described earlier, albeit in more blunt terms.
What you said was that I said Bush only went through the UN because it was convenient, which is exactly opposite of what I said. If you can't understand that twice now, there's nothing more I can say.
Please name one government that is not corrupt.
So 2 wrongs make a right now? Make a consistent argument for once. Is it OK that the UN is massively and thorougly corrupt because other governments are corrupt? In any case, it was the specific form of corruption that is the problem here. Hundreds of UN officials were making big money from Iraq on the Oil for Food Program. No matter what Bush did, he was not going to get approval to turn off their cash flow and reveal their corruption. Going around them was the only thing to do. I'm sorry you don't these things this way, so let's just agree to disagree.
I'm still waiting for your answer for how can the UN still pretend to support the UN (and host it!) after the past actions
I assume you mean "US still pretend to". Just because we disagreed with the UN on this occassion with this President does not mean we will not work with them in the future, as we have done in the past. Have you never had an argument with a friend? Did it mean you were biter rivals forever afterward?
And who decided which resolutions should be followed and which ones can be broken ?
Let's look at the number and type of resolutions being broken. The UN banned Iraq, a despotic and violent regime that had just invaded its neighbor, from having a WMD program and from having MRBMs. Iraq then violated 19 resolutions over 9 years that required them to turn everything over or account for its destruction. What other country has ever done anything remotely like that?
So what you are saying is that countries (whatever country) should only go through the UN when it is convenient for them ?
That's not even remotely close to what I said. You basically just made up a strawman argument that sort of resembled what you thought I meant. It was not convenient to go through the UN. In fact, it made things more difficult. It pushed planning for the war back. It gave Saddam more time to prepare for attack. How was any of that convenient? Bush went through the UN because he wanted their blessing and the support of Democrats. When it turned out the UN was a waste of time, he pressed on. Afterwards, they turned out to be corrupt. As my sig used to say, "Covenants without swords are but words" -Hobbes.
I AM an intelligence analyst, you insensitive clod! I've been tracking terrorism for several years. My wife is a counter-terrorism analyst, and I've read several of her books as well as bounced what I've read off of her. I am not an amatuer with an agenda. I am an Atheist animal-loving pro-choice environmentalist, hardly a stereotypical Bush-supporter. But when it comes to Iraq's connections to terrorism, I think Bush is if anything underscoring Iraq's complicity.
Davis and Mylroie have done much more research than even the FBI, which several agents admit in their respective books. When I hear people dismiss their works without having read them (not you, but these experts to which you refer), I have to wonder about their agenda. In any case, just google Iraq and OKC or Iraq and WTC 1993. There are plenty of articles written over the years about these topics.
When did the UN pass a resolution for the USA turn over WMDs ? Sorry, I missed that one.
Um, that's kinda my point. Whatever UN resolutions you were implying the US broke hardly compares to the ones Iraq did.
Of course I was.
Well, I think you're in the minority. It hardly made news and most people I know don't even know it happened.
As for the UN, we were pressured to get their blessing. So they passed another resolution for Iraq to turn over their WMDs or at least account for the ones that were destroyed. They handed over thousands of pages of meaningless crap. Democrats wanted to give them one more chance to come clean, and Bush said no more. I think it was the right thing to do in many ways. We were holding them accountable, finally, for the long string of defied resolutions. Going through the UN is the right way to do it, but they were never going to back up their own words.
Two dipshit rednecks dowloaded the instructions for a bomb from the internet in 1995? That's some story. And they don't teach how to build bombs to Bradley gunners in the Army. Also, building a large bomb and succesfully seting it off is MUCH harder than it sounds. They'd probably blow most of the explosive material over the parking garage or themselves in the process without extensive training.
Also, they DID have stooges in the 93 WTC. It's part of Iraq's MO. The pros got out with hardly a trace (Youself was caught by accident a couple years later), but the young Palestinians got caught the next day, one trying to get his money back on the deposit on the Ryder truck he used for the bomb. And I never said Iraq was involved in 9/11. The strongest statement I made was that Saddam might have had foreknowledge. I'm still not sure on that point.
See above about the books linking Iraq to 93 WTC and 95 OKC. Sure some people are unconvinced, but there's plenty of evidence. And McVeigh regretted what he did to Iraqis.
Uh, OK third try posting. Sorry if this is duplicate.
See above about Jayna Davis' book. It's worth the read. And alliances change over time. England was our enemy, now they're not. It's easy for retrospective armchair generals like yourself to question why our leadership couldn't see 20 years into the future, but at the time the enemy of our enemy was a temporary ally. It happens.
Jayna Davis did a great job researching this in her book The Third Terrorist. And actually, there are more connections than she uncovers. One thing, though, is that John Doe #2 is actually a Unit 999 Iraqi Agent named Hussein al Husseini, sent to the US to conduct terrorist attacks. But just use some common sense. Two "lily whites", as the terrorists called them, with no training successfully build and detonate a large complex bomb and get caught immediately? The bomb used in the 93 WTC attack was similarly large and complex and had a whole team of people to coordinate the attack (reconnaissance, drivers, mixers, testers, etc). And BTW Iraq and at least 2 agents involved with that one as well, as described in Laurie Mylroie's book The War Against America. How was it 2 rednecks did what professional terrorists did in 93 all on their own?
So, how many UN resolutions have the USA violated ?
Uh, 19 consecutive resolutions to turn over prohibited WMDs and prohibited MRBMs? Uh, I'd have to say we never did that.
Or doesn't invading Iraq without UN sanction counts ?
Does bombing it without one count, like when Clinton did it? Tell me you were as upset with him as you are with Bush. The UN was on the take with the corrupt Oil for Food program and France was selling the aformentioned phohibited MRBMs. Any surprise they weren't going to approve of offensive action?
Yeah, he only violated 19 consecutive UN resolutions over 9 years with the only repurcussion therof getting another resolution against him. Maybe we should have given him one more chance. I'm sure that's all he needed. Is 20 your magic number before you do something? 30? 40? When would you do something about instead of just using empty words, which is what the UN decided to do?
Well, we only gave Saddam about 9 months warning that were going to invade. I'm sure it's quite impossible he could have moved them in that time, especially not in the large convoys we saw driving into Iran and Syria leading up to the war. C'mon, George, FIND em already!
And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
I'd hate for something measly like facts to get in your way, but there is the small problem that McCain is leading in the Gallup polls today 49% - 44%. Yup, no challenge at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fricken spy. Geez.
As an intelligence analyst, what is your take on the possibility of Osama still being an American Operative?
BAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Whoooo. Good one. Do you still beat your wife?
Seconded. I think perhaps the title could have been better worded. Like, "Brain Scan Used in Murder Conviction of Indian Woman".
Exactly. Bin Laden is not in "charge" of Al Qaeda like Blowfeld was in charge of SPECTER. He is a figurehead and inspiration for groups that choose to call themselves affiliated with Al Qaeda. KSM was one of the masterminds of 9/11 and one of Bin Laden's chief disciples. Bin Laden did not come up with the idea of 9/11, mastermind it, organize it, or probably even fund it. He did, apparently, approve of it though beforehand and take credit for it elsewhere afterwards.
Disclaimer: IAAIA (I am an Intelligence Analyst)
1) There is no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
That's not what I said, is it?
If there is evidence Saddam knew of the attack, by all means cite a source.
Saddam was the only world leader to praise the attacks on 9/11. Castro, Il, and other enemies of ours all condemned them. When the casualties were estimated in tens, prehaps hundreds, of thousands, Saddam was unflinchingly positive about the attack. Only after heavy international condemnation did he apologize a few days later.
The 9/11 report shows how some Iraqi agents were told in the week or two leading up to the attack to go to the streets and gauge public opinion on an event. They were told they would know it when they saw it.
Iraq supposedly went to its highest threat level that day, though I can no longer find reports of this. This might be apocryphal.
It's not conclusive, though nor is it implausible. Saddam had a vast terrorist network, including known members of Al Qaeda. It seems entirely likely that a message forewarning about a massive attack wound its way through Saddam's spy network.
But please, please cite some evidence showing they were involved, as a nation, in any of those attacks.
Abdul Rahman Yasin admitted to FBI agents that he helped mix the ingredients for the 93 WTC attack. He then flew to Iraq using his Iraqi passport with the help of the Iraqi government. Papers discovered in 2003 in Iraq showed he was on the Iraqi payroll for the previous 10 years.
Hussein al Husseini, the man identified as John Doe #2 in the 95 OKC attack, was a Unit 999 member from Iraq. Unit 999 was a special operations unit with the purpose of conducting attacks overseas in deep cover.
The list goes on and on. Just google Iraq and WTC 93 or Iraq and OKC 95. Mylroie's War Against America and Davis' The Third Terrorist are also excellent starting points.
And by the way - what does 'bomb them for 8 straight years' mean?
Because that's pretty much what we did. The bombing campaigns on Iraq (using dumb bombs, mostly) were so commonplace that they rarely made the news. It was like space shuttle launches. Every few days or weeks, Saddam would ty to shoot down our arcraft and we bomb them for days. We ran several long bombing campaigns. Between the sanctions and the constant dropping of inaccurate (by today's standard) dumb bombs, Clinton killed far more Iraqis than Bush did. There were no cameras on the ground covering it in gruesome detail though.
we broke our own rule; never attack first.
Given Iraq's involvement in terrorist attacks in the US, I don't see it that way.
The upshot is that, yeah, you should be labeled a troll for this.
I am an intelligence analyst working in Iraq. I've tracked terrorism for years. What do you for a living again? And what makes you more of an expert on terrorism than I?
slapdash kludge
That would be a great name for a rock band.
Hey, it was you that used the "violent" card to justify attacking Iraq.
I said they were a violent, despotic regime that invaded their neighbor (and it was you that selectively quoted me). They massacred over 500,000 of their own people, threw them in mass graves all over the country, used VX on their own people, brutally put down several revolts, filled pallaces with unwilling women to act as sex slaves for Saddam's sons, etc etc ad infinitum. If the US has done anything like this, please point it out.
1) For the USA to directly denounce said officials (link please)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/07/iraq.ewenmacaskill
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-09-06-oil-for-food_x.htm
I can't find a statement from the Bush administration in any of my google searches. I guess I don't know what to search for. They were not happy, as I recall.
2) For the USA stand in front of the UN, justify itself, and apologize for the UN (as a body) (link please)
I'm not quite sure why we would apologize in front of the UN when it was the UN that was corrupt. I think they should be the ones to apologize to us. I'd be happy if just France apologized for secretly selling them MRBMs, let alone accepting bribes.
What was done goes a little beyond "disagreement", don't you think
Yes, given the treachery and corruption this "friend" has done to us, given how they humiliated us and scolded us before the war and how they pleaded for contracts after the war, given how utterly useless, wasteful, and inefficient they are at the jobs to which they are appointed, I'd say it goes far beyond a disagreement. Fuck the UN.
I'd mod you up, but you have to say 'swordfish' first.
Holy rusted metal, Batman!
You know, that layer on Iron Man that makes him invulnerable to everything. That should do the trick.
You can bet a lot of countries consider the USA despotic and violent
To paraphrase your comment farther down, name me one government that is NOT violent. Seriously, I could care less what "a lot" of countries think. Point out the laws we've broken, pass a resolution in the UN, or STFU.
That is exactly what I described earlier, albeit in more blunt terms.
What you said was that I said Bush only went through the UN because it was convenient, which is exactly opposite of what I said. If you can't understand that twice now, there's nothing more I can say.
Please name one government that is not corrupt.
So 2 wrongs make a right now? Make a consistent argument for once. Is it OK that the UN is massively and thorougly corrupt because other governments are corrupt? In any case, it was the specific form of corruption that is the problem here. Hundreds of UN officials were making big money from Iraq on the Oil for Food Program. No matter what Bush did, he was not going to get approval to turn off their cash flow and reveal their corruption. Going around them was the only thing to do. I'm sorry you don't these things this way, so let's just agree to disagree.
I'm still waiting for your answer for how can the UN still pretend to support the UN (and host it!) after the past actions
I assume you mean "US still pretend to". Just because we disagreed with the UN on this occassion with this President does not mean we will not work with them in the future, as we have done in the past. Have you never had an argument with a friend? Did it mean you were biter rivals forever afterward?
And who decided which resolutions should be followed and which ones can be broken ?
Let's look at the number and type of resolutions being broken. The UN banned Iraq, a despotic and violent regime that had just invaded its neighbor, from having a WMD program and from having MRBMs. Iraq then violated 19 resolutions over 9 years that required them to turn everything over or account for its destruction. What other country has ever done anything remotely like that?
So what you are saying is that countries (whatever country) should only go through the UN when it is convenient for them ?
That's not even remotely close to what I said. You basically just made up a strawman argument that sort of resembled what you thought I meant. It was not convenient to go through the UN. In fact, it made things more difficult. It pushed planning for the war back. It gave Saddam more time to prepare for attack. How was any of that convenient? Bush went through the UN because he wanted their blessing and the support of Democrats. When it turned out the UN was a waste of time, he pressed on. Afterwards, they turned out to be corrupt. As my sig used to say, "Covenants without swords are but words" -Hobbes.
I guess the mods didn't grok the joke. Or this one, in all liklihood.
I AM an intelligence analyst, you insensitive clod! I've been tracking terrorism for several years. My wife is a counter-terrorism analyst, and I've read several of her books as well as bounced what I've read off of her. I am not an amatuer with an agenda. I am an Atheist animal-loving pro-choice environmentalist, hardly a stereotypical Bush-supporter. But when it comes to Iraq's connections to terrorism, I think Bush is if anything underscoring Iraq's complicity.
Davis and Mylroie have done much more research than even the FBI, which several agents admit in their respective books. When I hear people dismiss their works without having read them (not you, but these experts to which you refer), I have to wonder about their agenda. In any case, just google Iraq and OKC or Iraq and WTC 1993. There are plenty of articles written over the years about these topics.
When did the UN pass a resolution for the USA turn over WMDs ? Sorry, I missed that one.
Um, that's kinda my point. Whatever UN resolutions you were implying the US broke hardly compares to the ones Iraq did.
Of course I was.
Well, I think you're in the minority. It hardly made news and most people I know don't even know it happened.
As for the UN, we were pressured to get their blessing. So they passed another resolution for Iraq to turn over their WMDs or at least account for the ones that were destroyed. They handed over thousands of pages of meaningless crap. Democrats wanted to give them one more chance to come clean, and Bush said no more. I think it was the right thing to do in many ways. We were holding them accountable, finally, for the long string of defied resolutions. Going through the UN is the right way to do it, but they were never going to back up their own words.
Two dipshit rednecks dowloaded the instructions for a bomb from the internet in 1995? That's some story. And they don't teach how to build bombs to Bradley gunners in the Army. Also, building a large bomb and succesfully seting it off is MUCH harder than it sounds. They'd probably blow most of the explosive material over the parking garage or themselves in the process without extensive training.
Also, they DID have stooges in the 93 WTC. It's part of Iraq's MO. The pros got out with hardly a trace (Youself was caught by accident a couple years later), but the young Palestinians got caught the next day, one trying to get his money back on the deposit on the Ryder truck he used for the bomb. And I never said Iraq was involved in 9/11. The strongest statement I made was that Saddam might have had foreknowledge. I'm still not sure on that point.
See above about the books linking Iraq to 93 WTC and 95 OKC. Sure some people are unconvinced, but there's plenty of evidence. And McVeigh regretted what he did to Iraqis.
Uh, OK third try posting. Sorry if this is duplicate.
See above about Jayna Davis' book. It's worth the read. And alliances change over time. England was our enemy, now they're not. It's easy for retrospective armchair generals like yourself to question why our leadership couldn't see 20 years into the future, but at the time the enemy of our enemy was a temporary ally. It happens.
Jayna Davis did a great job researching this in her book The Third Terrorist. And actually, there are more connections than she uncovers. One thing, though, is that John Doe #2 is actually a Unit 999 Iraqi Agent named Hussein al Husseini, sent to the US to conduct terrorist attacks. But just use some common sense. Two "lily whites", as the terrorists called them, with no training successfully build and detonate a large complex bomb and get caught immediately? The bomb used in the 93 WTC attack was similarly large and complex and had a whole team of people to coordinate the attack (reconnaissance, drivers, mixers, testers, etc). And BTW Iraq and at least 2 agents involved with that one as well, as described in Laurie Mylroie's book The War Against America. How was it 2 rednecks did what professional terrorists did in 93 all on their own?
So, how many UN resolutions have the USA violated ?
Uh, 19 consecutive resolutions to turn over prohibited WMDs and prohibited MRBMs? Uh, I'd have to say we never did that.
Or doesn't invading Iraq without UN sanction counts ?
Does bombing it without one count, like when Clinton did it? Tell me you were as upset with him as you are with Bush. The UN was on the take with the corrupt Oil for Food program and France was selling the aformentioned phohibited MRBMs. Any surprise they weren't going to approve of offensive action?
Yeah, he only violated 19 consecutive UN resolutions over 9 years with the only repurcussion therof getting another resolution against him. Maybe we should have given him one more chance. I'm sure that's all he needed. Is 20 your magic number before you do something? 30? 40? When would you do something about instead of just using empty words, which is what the UN decided to do?
Well, we only gave Saddam about 9 months warning that were going to invade. I'm sure it's quite impossible he could have moved them in that time, especially not in the large convoys we saw driving into Iran and Syria leading up to the war. C'mon, George, FIND em already!
At least I've heard of a Jackalope. WTF is an Eft? Anyone?
I have the feeling one day we will discover that Timothy is not a name, but an acronym for Thousands of Imbecilic Monkeys On Typewriters Hell Yeah!
And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
I'd hate for something measly like facts to get in your way, but there is the small problem that McCain is leading in the Gallup polls today 49% - 44%. Yup, no challenge at all.