Justification for the War in Iraq FACTS *Liberals Read Up*

[The Dude]

US REMOVES TWO TONS OF RADIOLOGICAL MATERIALS

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States removed nearly two tons
of radiological and nuclear materials from Iraq last month, the Energy
Department said. The material could have potentially been used to make a "radiological dispersal device" -- a so-called dirty bomb -- "or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program," the department said Tuesday. Radiological sources for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes were not removed, the department said. Less-sensitive materials were repackaged and remained in Iraq. The departments of Energy and Defense removed "1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly 1,000 highly radioactive sources from the former Iraq nuclear research facility," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Tuesday. "This operation was a major achievement for the Bush administration's goal to keep potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists," Abraham said. "It also puts this material out of reach for countries that may seek to develop their own nuclear weapons." The material was gathered from around Iraq and taken to the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, 11 miles southeast of Baghdad
and the main site for the Iraqi nuclear program before the war. The United States notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of the planned transfer on June 19, but "requested IAEA to keep the information about the intended transfer confidential for ... security reasons," Mohamed ElBaradei said in a letter released Wednesday by the United Nations. It was then was flown to the United States on June 23, where it will be held at secure sites, said Brian Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/07/07/iraq.nuclear/

Saddam supporting terror:

Let’s start with money. At a minimum, we know that Saddam Hussein’s government supported terrorism by paying "bonuses" of up to $25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. How do we know this? Tariq Aziz, Hussein's own deputy prime minister, was stunningly candid about the Baathist government’s underwriting of terrorist killings in Israel.

“President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al-Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000,” Aziz, announced at a Baghdad meeting of Arab politicians and businessmen on March 11, 2002, Reuters reported the next day.

http://www.husseinandterror.com/

How Close Saddam got to a Nuclear weapon
Khidhir Hamza, once Iraq's leading nuclear physicist, defected five years ago and, so far, has lived to tell about it. In his new memoir, he recounts the inside story of how Saddam almost built an atomic weapon

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magaz...ag-saddam.html


The Iraq -- Al Qaeda Connections :

* 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.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html

Picture below is a certificate recognizing a suicide bomber's "martyrdom." Note the attached President Saddam Hussein's Grant" check in the lower right-hand corner.

Need I go on?

[Mathx]

Saddam supporting terror:

Let’s start with money. At a minimum, we know that Saddam Hussein’s government supported terrorism by paying "bonuses" of up to $25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. How do we know this? Tariq Aziz, Hussein's own deputy prime minister, was stunningly candid about the Baathist government’s underwriting of terrorist killings in Israel.

On that note! let's take over Saudia Arabia!...oh wait...they are our allies, oh well, hmmm... the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudia Arabia, but since they say they're cool with us I'm guessing that it's still an A-Okay country!

[xbdestroya]

Jesus Christ, Ansar al-Islam and Saddam were at war for each other for God's sake - it was their holy mission to depose him! Half this evidence is totally bogus, not to mention that I don't consider paying martyrs in Palestine to be traditional terrorism in the least mind you. That was simply PR for him in the Muslim world, truthfully and honestly. There is a large part of this world's population that views the Israelis as the bad guys in that situation, even if their methods are clearly unsavory.

One man's terrorist is another mans freedom fighter - and that's the truth. We should know, because we were calling them 'freedom fighters' when we trained Bin Laden and the gang in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

Saddam and Bin Laden were enemies of each other; perhaps allies of convenience at times, through intermediaries, but there are *many* more complicit nations than Iraq in terms of aiding and abetting bin Laden than Iraq; including terror war 'ally' Pakistan for example.

[Viper]

Originally Posted by Mathx

On that note! let's take over Saudia Arabia!...oh wait...they are our allies, oh well, hmmm... the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudia Arabia, but since they say they're cool with us I'm guessing that it's still an A-Okay country!

The heritage of a few doesn't dictate the ideology of the many.

We have thousands of rapists and murderers in America but does that make us all as such?

[Dralor]

There is a reason wahabism trives in Saudia Arabia. It is not because the royals support them but they signed a pact that you don't mess with our leadership and we will not crackdown on you.

[Blaksmoke]

Bush retracted his Saddam-Osama partnership statement a while back. I guess you guys didn't get the memo. Or something.

[Bryan]

wait wait wait

terrorists are operating out of the country with the most american soldiers in the middle east, and somehow that's an indication of hussein beingconnected to al-qaeda? the more pessimistic of us might say that they stay there because it's convenient.

a muslim leader giving bonuses to suicide bombers families? let's take out the whole region if that's something thats so surprising and outlandish that we cant understand that middle eastern politicians are politicians too. as someone already said, there is a good portion of the world that does not side with israel. granted, not everyone blows up israeli citizens, but i can kind of undestand why palestine would be pissed that half their country was annexed and given to somebody else.

anyway, about the stuff that is based off of what fmr. secretary powell said at the un. he petty muchlost any credibility he had with that testimony.

[The Dude]

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...3/378fmxyz.asp
Saddam 9/11 link
hen there is the interesting case of Ahmad Hikmat Shakir — an Iraqi VIP facilitator who worked at the international airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Citing "a foreign government service," page 340 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-Iraq-War intelligence indicates that, "Shakir claimed he got this job through Ra'ad al-Mudaris, an Iraqi Embassy employee" in Malaysia. On January 5, 2000, Shakir greeted Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi at Kuala Lampur’s airport. He then escorted them to a local hotel where these September 11 hijackers met with 9/11 conspirators Ramzi bin al Shibh and Tawfiz al Atash. Five days later, according to The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Shakir disappeared. Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi subsequently spent the morning of September 11, 2001 flying American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 184 people. Shakir, the Iraqi airport greeter, was arrested in Qatar on September 17, 2001. On his person and in his apartment, authorities discovered documents connecting him to the 1993 WTC bomb plot and “Operation Bojinka,” al-Qaeda’s 1995 plan to blow up 12 jets simultaneously over the Pacific. Interestingly enough, as a May 27, 2004 Wall Street Journal editorial reported, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir's name appears on three different rosters of the late Uday Hussein's prestigious paramilitary group, the Saddam Fedayeen. A government source told the Journal that the papers identify Shakir as a lieutenant colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen. Below is a rare photograph of Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. He was Consul and Second Secretary at Iraq's Czech embassy between March 1999 and April 22, 2001. He long has been suspected ofmeeting with September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, most likely on April 8, 2001. Perhaps at other times, too. While skeptics dismiss this encounter, Czech intelligence found Al-Ani's appointment calendar in Iraq's Prague embassy, presumably after Saddam Hussein's defeat. Al-Ani's diary lists an April 8, 2001, meeting with "Hamburg student." Maybe, in a massive coincidence, Al-Ani dined with a young scholar and chatted about Hegel and Nietzsche.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/11125
BELOW
Mural found in one of Saddam's palaces


Facts are facts people. It's not my problem if you do not accept the truth. As you can see I used several news sources CNN,Weekly Standard, CBS ect. (wow and very little fox news to apease)