politicalpartypoop.com

 From the Blog Thinking Right.

Amazingly, there are still those out there who would deny Iraq’s pre-war terrorism connections. For those of you who read this blog (and you know who you are), I give you this from a speech given by Stephen F Hays:

In July 2004, a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: “The Central Intelligence Agency did not have a focused human intelligence collection strategy targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism.” And that same report quoted an unnamed Intelligence Community official who made this breathtaking admission: “I don’t think we were really focused on the [counterterrorism] side, because we weren’t concerned about the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn’t until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that.”

Again, think about that. Saddam Hussein claimed that the Mother of All Battles, as he called the Gulf War, never ended. His government harbored several of the world’s most notorious terrorists—Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal among them. Within days of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, his government facilitated the escape from U.S. authorities of the Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for that bombing. Less than two months later, his intelligence service botched an attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush on a visit to Kuwait. By the late 1990s, he was supplying chemical weapons expertise to terrorist-friendly Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan. He wired $150,000 to his intelligence chief in Prague to blow up the U.S. government’s headquarters of Radio Free Europe. An Iraqi government-run newspaper called Osama bin Laden an “Arab and Islamic hero” and there were several credible reports—including some from open sources—that Saddam Hussein offered bin Laden safe haven in 1998.

All of this, and yet the U.S. intelligence community wasn’t “really focused on the [counterterrorism] side” of the threat from Iraq. I’d submit to you that that was an oversight.

Let’s spend a moment on two of those matters:

On October 2, 2002, a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly.

The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a caf� that doubled as a karaoke bar. The cafe was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses immediately identified the bomber as a known Abu Sayyaf terrorist.

One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the “enemies of Islam”—Westerners and the non-Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls.

As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to a top official in the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein’s only contact with Abu Sayyaf.

One Philippine government source told me: “He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators. [Philippine Intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking.”

A subsequent analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an “established network” of terrorists in the country. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, 2003.

Interestingly, if the Iraqi regime had wanted to keep its support for Abu Sayyaf secret, the al Qaeda-linked group did not. Twice in two years, Abu Sayyaf leaders boasted about receiving funding from Iraq—the second time just two weeks after Hisham Hussein was expelled.

Yeah, no terrorism connections what so ever. You know, being wrong about something is one thing… being intelectually dishonest is a completely different animal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Liberal Education.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.