1. Bush recently stated that Iraq had “nothing” to do with 9/11.

And I agree, will we be proven wrong at a later date? Who knows. I do not think Iraq gave any any operational help to AQ in regards to 9/11 but I do believe, and the Saddam documents are bearing this out, that Iraq did have ties and did indeed help AQ in their overall operations. Could this include 9/11? Who knows at this point.

2. Regarding Salman Pak

Well for one thing, please don’t take Wikipedia content as gospel. It’s well known that it can be quite biased.

As far as Salman Pak I will have to refer back to the documents coming out of Saddam’s regime:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan.

3. There seems to be no indications that Czech officials stand by the Atta-in-Prague story as of 2006.

Please quote a source that tells us that Czech has now backed off of their story. I have not seen one.

4. Regarding Yasin:

Not sure what your asking about Yasin…do I believe the administrations view on him?

And as far as the lefty blog you linked to in number 5, I haven’t looked at it but will tomorrow.

Just checked out your blogs and like them….will check them out more often.

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Hey; I like your blog. I also have a blog on possible Iraq-Al Qaeda connections @ http://iraqandalqaeda.blogspot.com; check out the timelines. I currently believe that there were many instances of operational contact between Iraq and Al Qaeda, including 9/11, but there are a few facts that are hard to reconcile with my thesis. I was wondering what your thoughts are on the following issues:
1. Bush recently stated that Iraq had “nothing” to do with 9/11.
2. Regarding Salman Pak:
Wikipedia: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has since established that both the CIA and the DIA concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. A DIA analyst told the Committee, “The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa’ida.” Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel noted in November 2005 that “After the war, U.S. officials determined that a facility in Salman Pak was used to train Iraqi anti-terrorist commandos.”[Seattle Times, 1 November 2005, p. A5].
Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior U.S. official said that they had found “nothing to substantiate” the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak. [6][7] The credibility of the defectors has been questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for an invasion of Iraq.[8] “The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war,” said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News. [9]
Weapons inspector Richard Sperzel clarified that [Duelfer's] dismissal [of the claim that Salman Pak was for counterterrorism] was not backed up by any evidence.

Iraqi defectors have been talking lately about the training camp at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. They say there’s a Boeing aircraft there. That’s not true… They say there are railroad mock-ups, bus mock-ups, buildings, and so on. These are all things you’d find in a hostage rescue training camp, which is what this camp was when it was built in the mid-1980s with British intelligence supervision. In fact, British SAS special operations forces were sent to help train the Iraqis in hostage rescue techniques. Any nation with a national airline and that is under attack from terrorists — and Iraq was, from Iran and Syria at the time — would need this capability. Iraq operated Salman Pak as a hostage rescue training facility up until 1992. In 1992, because Iraq no longer had a functioning airline, and because their railroad system was inoperative, Iraq turned the facility over to the Iraqi Intelligence service, particularly the Department of External Threats. These are documented facts coming out of multiple sources from a variety of different countries. The Department of External Threats was created to deal with Kurdistan, in particular, the infusion of Islamic fundamentalist elements from Iran into Kurdistan. So, rather than being a camp dedicated to train Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, it was a camp dedicated to train Iraq to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. And they did so. Their number one target was the Islamic Kurdish party, which later grew into Al Ansar. … Ansar comes out of Iran and is supported by Iranians. Iraq, as part of their ongoing war against Islamic fundamentalism, created a unit specifically designed to destroy these people.[14]

Consensus view

Douglas MacCollam wrote in the July/August 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that “There still remain claims and counterclaims about what was going on at Salman Pak. But the consensus view now is that the camp was what Iraq told UN weapons inspectors it was — a counterterrorism training camp for army commandos.”[19]

Also, regarding Salman Pak, Stephen Birmingham makes the following counterarguments:

This raised a red flag with me because 1) a history was fast emerging of a controversial Iraqi opposition group that coached and actively promoted defectors that were patently untrustworthy, 2) there was possible motive in this case, as al-Qurairy probably dare not return home until Saddam and his sons were removed from power, and 3) the two defectors are friends and their shared account — circulated shortly after 9/11, when emotions were running high — sounded altogether too convenient.

The remainder of Birmingham’s lengthy argument can be found at http://yourplanetisdoomed.blogspot.com/2005/12/salman-pak-911-pure-fantasy.html. He also argues that Saddam’s apparent Islamization was phony in a comment on the same page.
3. There seems to be no indications that Czech officials stand by the Atta-in-Prague story as of 2006. Cheney, Tenet, etc. have dismissed it.
4. Regarding Yasin:
Vice President Cheney had told Meet the Press on December 9 , 2001, that Iraq was harboring Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing [26], and repeated the statement in another appearance on September 14, 2003, saying “We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaida sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaida organization. We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of ’93. And we’ve learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven.” [27], and once again in an interview with National Public Radio in January, 2004, stating that there was “overwhelming evidence” of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida based on evidence including Iraq’s purported harboring of Yasin [28].
5. Also, http://outsidethespectrum.blogspot.com/2006/01/disinformation_07.html has what appear to be strong arguments against the Iraq and Al Qaeda allegations of T. Joscelyn, S. Hayes, et al.

Thanks very much for your time.

WRH

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Boy oh boy…lookie what they are talking about over at Free Republic this morning:

Very interesting. Just who in the hell DID ask Murtha to intervene in the NYT story…and just WHAT did he tell them to do…Publish or Not Publish??? More than a few people are scratching their heads.

Back on topic, I heard on Fox yesterday, that there is one guy whose determined that at least four sites are completely investigated for WMDs in Iraq. Why we haven’t til now is puzzling and a little disturbing to me. Training camps have been discovered all over Iraq during the war, I thought. Am I wrong?

Carol

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I’m not holding my breath that the MSM will cover this anytime soon.

See this e I just shared with some other bloggers on Ray’s great work.

RBT

*****

OK all you Bloggers this is going to be big. SPREAD THE WORD!!!

It will crush the LL and MSM meme, “Bush Lied. Bush Died!”

See this new piece by Roy Robison at FoxNews.com

This is extremely critical if we have to face down the growing Iranian nuclear threat.

Just like the Third Reich, the Saddam Regime kept very detailed records of their attrocities. I guess it goes with this form of meglomania. Perhaps Dr. Sanity and Dr. Helen could comment on this.

These docs are a treasure trove like the Arc of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc. As you may recall we last saw the Arc languishing on a shelf in some government warehouse soon to be forgotten.

It’s amazing to me that the Bush administration is not firing back on the LL and the MSM on this and other relevation about Iraqi WMD. I’m guessing the foggy bottom folks don’t want to disclose the Russian, Chinese, and French fingerprints all over this stuff. The State folks believe their support is necessary to reign in the Mad Mullahs and don’t want to embarass them in public.

The only problem is that the President MAD and his religious mentor Imam Yazdi are on a crusade to hasten the return of the 12th Imam and bring about Armageddon no matter what the rest of the world may think or do.

See the American Thinker

and these pieces at Rocketsbrain:

Here and Here

We need to bring this story directly to the American people and screw the MSM. The MSM of late has been in bed with or at the very least stooges of the enemy in War of Information in the GWOT. We need the political support and will of the American people to topple the Mad Mullahs of Iran.

If the UN Oil for Food Scandal is any example of the MSM response, it took over a year before this story started to break the light of day. It was only through the dogged efforts of Eric Shawn (FoxNews) and Claudia Rosen (WSJ) that this story finally emerged.

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