Text 1443, 137 rader
Skriven 2004-10-31 20:43:53 av Roy Witt (1:10/22)
   Kommentar till text 1428 av MIKE ROSS (2:203/614.61)
Ärende: WMDs and Terrorism
==========================
31 Oct 04 18:52, Björn Forsström wrote to MIKE ROSS:


 MR>> The weapons of mass destruction excuse for attacking Iraq were
 MR>> proven by a US bipartite government report not to exist.

If you'll recall, the Bush administration's twin pillars for going to war
in Iraq were WMDs AND terrorism. Critics like you, most Z2 sysops and
America's political liberal left, seized upon the lack of WMD stockpiles
as a means to de-legitimize the war. Yet, in your/their zealousness to
discredit the entire Bush effort, they've also claimed that Iraq didn't
sponsor terrorism. Apparently those aren't the facts.


Speaking on the subject that there was no support of terrorists in
Iraq; by Dr. Paul Kengor*

Of course, that is a wild assertion; the reality is that there's no
question whatsoever that terrorists were harbored in Iraq and operated
there openly, usually with support from Saddam's regime, and did so prior
to the coalition invasion in 2003, prior to September 11, 2001 and
througout the 1990s.

An extraordinary catalogue of evidence - one that liberals especially
ought to view as 'authoritative and trustworty - has been ignored by all
sides, including both Democrats and Republicans: I'm speaking of the
final report on terrorism issued by the Clinton administration.  For some
strange reason, amid all the heated debate, this official statement has
gone completely ignored.

In 2000, President Clinton's State Department, headed by Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, listed Iraq among the two leading sponsors of
terrorism, as it had regularly in it's 'Patterns of Global Terrorism'
report.

What was the report?

The US Congress was so worried about terrorism that in 1979 it passed the
'Export Adminstration Act', which required that the State Department
submit "detailed assessments of foreign countries where significant
terrorist acts occurred" and a list of countries "that have repeatedly
provided state support for international terrorism." This annual
assessment lists the top terrorist-sponsoring states. To quote the 2000
report: "Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan continue
to be the seven governments that the US Secretary of State (Albright) has
designated as state sponsors of international terrorism.

www.state.gov/s/et/rls/pgtrpt/2000/2441.htm

These were the same seven nations identified in 1999 and in previous
years; among them Iraq and Iran were singled out as the worst offenders.

The 2000 report didn't rank the seven. Nonetheless, some terrorist nations
received considerably more attention than others. The report devoted 78
words to Cuba, 112 to North Korea, 187 to Sudan, 199 to Syria, 390 to
Iran, 537 to Libya, and 638 to Iraq. Yes, the winner was Iraq, which
received literally more attention than any other country in the final
terrorism report issued by the Clinton State Department.

The Iraq section of the report began categorically: "Iraq planned and
sponsored international terrorism in 2000." It then listed where and how
"the regime continued to support various terrorist groups." These included
activities in London, Prague, Berlin and other Western cities, as well as
various activities in northern Iraq and even in neighboring Iran. The mode
of attack ranged from shootings to car bombs.

The report detailed Iraqi attacks on U.N. workers - i.e., assaults not
unique to today's post-war Iraq: "Baghdad continued to denounce and
de-legitimze UN demining teams, in the wake of the killing in 1999 of an
expatriate UN de-mining worker in northern Iraq under circumstances
suggesting regime involvement. An Iraqi who opened fire at the UN Food and
Agriculture Organsization (FAO) office in Baghdad, killing two persons
and wounding six, was permitted to hold a heavily publicized press
conference at which he contended that his action had beeen motivatied by
the harshness of UN sanctions, which the regime regularly excoriates."

Most remarkable, the Clinton State Department reported: "The Iraqi regime
rebuffed a request from Riyadh for the extradition of two Saudis who had
hijacked a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Baghdad... Disregarding its
obligations under international law, the regime granted political asylum
to the hijackers and gave them ample opportunity to ventilate in the
Iraqi Government-controlled and international media their criticisms of
alleged abuses by the Saudi Arabian Government, echoing an Iraqi
propaganda theme. While the origins of the FAO attack and the hijacking
were unclear, the Iraqi regime readily exploited these terrorist acts to
further its policy objectives."

This is an utterly fascinating finding, reported one year before the
September 11 hijackings, which were orchestrated by radical Saudi citizens
expelled from Saudi Arabia. The report is very short on details and
provides no names. Nonetheless, the statement is extremely intriguing. How
has it escaped our notice over the last few years?

Likewise significant, the 2000 assessment listed the various thugs that
found safe haven under Saddam's Baathist-facist regime: "Several
expatriate terrorist groups continue to maintain offices in Baghdad,
including the Arab Liberation Front, the inactive 15 May Organization,
the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the Abu Nidal Organization
(ANO). PLF leader Abu Abbas appeared on state-controlled television in the
fall to praise Iraq's leadership in reallying Arab opposition to Israeli
violence against Palestinians. The ANO threatened to attack Austrian
interests unless several million dollars in a frozen ANO account in a
Vienna bank were turned over the group."

The report said more, but still only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg.
There was no mention of Mr. Al-Zarqawi, of the April 1993 assassination
attempt on an American president traveling to Kuwait, or of the chiling
clandestine facility south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, a terrorist
training camp which drew attention after September 11 when it was reported
that terrorists there - of Saudi and Egyptian origin - had conducted
training missions on an actual 707 fuselage, where they practiced the art
of hijacking an aircraft without guns, using only knives and utensils, all
before September 11. Also, the report didn't note that Saddam had publicly
offered payment of $10,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers
who blew themselves up in the service of killing Israel's Jews, a total
that he uppped to $25,000 in April 2002. The report could not have known
of the thousands of suicide-bomber vests that American and British troops
would find in Iraq in April 2003.

The facts are painfully obvious: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was one of the
world's leading terrorist states. If it didn't top the list, it was
second. That was literally the conclusion of the final report on terrorism
by the Clinton-Albright State Department.

To borrow from the language applied to Geroge W. Bush by Madeleine
Albright and AlGore; was the 2000 report just a bunch of lies? Of course
not. It was the awful truth.

* Paul Kengor, Ph.D, is author of God and George W. Bush. He is also a
  professor of political science at Grove City College and a visiting
  fellow with the Hoover Institution. Contact Kengor at pgkengor@gcc.edu



... Ah know whut a bagel is, but whut kinda dawg is a lox?
--- Z28ROY - AIM Buddy
 * Origin: Flying \A/ Ranch, Santa Ysabel, CA (1:10/22)