Iraq And Terror

I'm sure Russ Fiengold has an "enlightened" reply to this.

From IBD:

Posted 3/22/2006
Origins Of War: When former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says Iraq has fallen into civil war, it garners headlines worldwide. But another claim he has made, strangely enough, gets nary a nod.

Chalk it up as another lesson in media bias. Allawi claims Iraq is gripped by civil war, and mainstream outlets give him respectful coverage as an insider who would know. But two years ago, when he insisted there was solid evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida and 9-11, the media said little — apart from engaging in character smears.

That's funny, because there's far more evidence for his claim of links between Saddam, al-Qaida and 9-11 than for the notion that Iraq has lapsed into civil war. Indeed, the evidence is so plentiful it could easily fill a book or two. Yet it's something the media routinely pooh-pooh as one of the "myths" about Iraq.

It all begins with one big fact: Saddam harbored known terrorists, including al-Qaida members, in Iraq during the 1990s and early 2000s. This is beyond dispute.

Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Iraq in 1999. So did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was in the country "to form a terrorist cell," according to Allawi.

Saddam also provided a home for arch-Palestinian terrorists Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas.

According to Iraqi intelligence documents unearthed by The Weekly Standard, Osama bin Laden met in February 1995 with Iraqi officials, with the approval of Saddam, to discuss "joint operations" with the Baghdad strongman. The documents show that the Mukhabarat nurtured its ties to Osama at least through 1997.

Why would Iraq do this? Saddam had it out for the U.S. after he and his vaunted army were humiliated in the Gulf War. For example, he made a well-documented attempt to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush during a trip to the Mideast.

Even before that, Saddam provided political sanctuary to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the New Jersey-based sheik who was behind the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

In January 2001, when al-Qaida members got together for a summit in Malaysia to plan the 9-11 attack, one of the key participants was a man named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. And who was Shakir? A lieutenant colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen elite military force, under the command of Uday Hussein.

Those who believe in Saddam's innocence also have trouble explaining why one of the 9-11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, Czech Republic, just months before the massacre. The Butcher of Baghdad's financial ties to Al Sayyaf, a Philippine-based offshoot of al-Qaida founded by Osama's brother-in-law, are also well documented.

We could cite dozens of other terrorist ties — like Saddam's terrorist training center at Salman Pak, which suspiciously included a jetliner. The fact is, the evidence is overwhelming — though there's no simple smoking gun in which Saddam says, "I did it."

In the murky world of intelligence, there seldom is. Suffice to say, even discounting the much-derided notion that Saddam had WMD, there was still plenty of reason for taking him out.

Saddam was a linchpin in radical Islam's global war on the West. He was a terrorist danger to the U.S. — and to the world.