By this time you all heard that “Saddam ‘had no link to al-Qaeda” report, but there are two events happened at the same time, which I couldn’t find on the western media.
One day before the release of this report, Aliraqnews said the following:
We demand the release of Saddam Hussein and to include Baathists in the reconciliation conference as a condition for the achievement of security and stability, not because we are loyalists, but to close this file.
[Remember..? James Baker met the Sunni leaders few days ago]
The second event came for Arabic newspaper Al-Watan:
Request from Saudi Arabia and the US: News of Yemen, Qatar negotiating for the return of the former Iraqi regime’s rule
Intensive diplomacy carried out by Saudi Arabia, on regional and international levels to prevent the domination of Iran on the region after the defeat by Israel in the recent war on Lebanon and Hezbollah, which is considered by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, politically a strategic victory for Iran and Syria, and threaten security and stability in these countries.
The White House to negotiate indirectly with the leaders of the Baath Party and the former Iraqi regime to persuade them to return to the government and headed by President / Saddam Hussein as the only one capable of settle the situation to what it was before the invasion.
Coincidently?
“We demand the release of Saddam Hussein”
It’ll never happen.
Security developments in Iraq, Sept 8
Following are security and other developments in Iraq reported on Friday, as of 1430 GMT:
NEAR MUSSAYAB — Four people were killed and six wounded when mortar rounds landed on a road between Mussayab and Kerbala, south of Baghdad, police said. Among the casualties were pilgrims walking to a Shi’ite festival in Kerbala.
MUSSAYAB — Two people were killed and 19 wounded late on Thursday night when mortar rounds landed in Mussayab, about 60 km (40 miles), south of Baghdad, police said.
HASWA — A car bomb exploded and mortar rounds landed near a Shi’ite mosque in Haswa, 50 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, on Thursday, killing two people and wounding 15, police said.
FALLUJA — Clashes between insurgents and U.S. troops after a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. convoy on Thursday in Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, residents and police sources said. Raed al-Ani, a hospital doctor, said three Iraqis were killed and six wounded. Residents said U.S. troops used loudspeakers to demand people turn in insurgents or face a “large military operation”. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he had no reports of such incidents.
BAGHDAD — A car bomb targeting the convoy of Colonel Ali Mohammed, police chief for the city’s Karrada district, exploded in Zayouna district, central Baghdad, killing one policeman and a bystander, police and Interior Ministry sources said. Six others, including four policemen, were wounded in the blast.
HAWIJA — Gunmen killed Ibrahim al-Khalaf, leader of the Sunni Arab Bagara tribe, and seriously wounded his guard and a member of the city council in a drive-by shooting in Hawija, 70 km (45 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, a security source said.
BAGHDAD — The six bodies of blindfold people with multiple gunshot wounds, showing signs of torture, were found overnight in different areas of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said. Two of the bodies were found in Shula, two in Sadr City and two others in Doura, he said.
NEAR SAMARRA — An Iraqi soldier was killed and two were wounded when gunmen ambushed their patrol 15 km (10 miles) south of Samarra, 100 km north of Baghdad, the U.S.- Iraqi Joint Coordination Center said.
DIWANIYA — The body of Haider Hamza, an interpreter working for Danish troops in Iraq, was found shot dead in front of his house in central Diwaniya, 180 km (115 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. He had been kidnapped three days ago, they added.
BAGHDAD — Iraqi border guards accused Iran of shelling their territory and taking six soldiers prisoner after a clash on the border northeast of Baghdad.
Security developments in Iraq, Sept 9
Following are security and other developments in Iraq reported on Saturday, as of 1330 GMT:
MAHMUDIYA — Sixteen bodies — shot, bound and blindfolded — were found in different areas of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. Police said they were unable to identify them because they were not carrying identity cards.
BAGHDAD — The bodies of 14 people, all of them with gunshot wounds and hands tied, were found in different areas of Baghdad on Friday, police said.
BAGHDAD — A suicide car bomb attack killed one policeman and wounded 10 civilians after police at Baghdad’s Adhamiya police station fired at the approaching car and forced it to detonate early, an Interior Ministry source said.
BAGHDAD — A car bomb targeting police patrols in northern Baghdad killed one policeman and wounded six people, including four policemen, Interior Ministry sources said.
KIRKUK — A roadside bomb killed two policemen and seriously wounded 12 people, including civilians, as they travelled on a highway just south of Kirkuk, police said.
BAGHDAD — Gunmen killed Abdul-Kareem al-Rubaie, an employee at the state-funded al-Sabah newspaper, and wounded his driver in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad, police said.
MOSUL — A 10-year-old boy was killed and his mother wounded on Friday after gunmen entered the home of an Iraqi soldier in the northern border town of Sinjar, near Syria, a hospital source said.
BAGHDAD — Police Brigadier Muthhir Kamil was kidnapped in northern Baghdad’s Shaab district on Friday, an Interior Ministry source said.
BAGHDAD — A car bomb killed a civilian and wounded four when it detonated near a U.S. army patrol in eastern Baghdad’s Zayouna district, police said. The blast also burned out a Humvee. The U.S. military said three soldiers were wounded in the attack.
BAIJI — Four bombs targeting U.S. forces in the town of Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad, killed three civilians and wounded three others on Friday, police said. There was no information on U.S. casualties.
BALAD — Three mortar rounds seriously wounded three women and a child in the Shi’ite town of Balad on Friday, north of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD — A bomb hit a police patrol in eastern Baghdad, wounding two policemen, police sources said.
SAMARRA — Clashes between insurgents and police wounded three civilians in Samarra, north of Baghdad, on Friday, police said.
BAGHDAD — Several mortars landed in Baghdad’s Doura district on Friday, wounding seven people, police said.
BAGHDAD — A roadside bomb wounded three people in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD — A roadside bomb wounded two Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad as their vehicle passed by, police said.
BAGHDAD — A bomb detonated at a major road intersection in Bab al-Sharji in central Baghdad, wounding two people, police said.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will make his first official visit to Iran on Monday to discuss political and security issues, a government spokesman said.
Saddam Hussein should be returned to his elected position (having received 99% of the vote)as president of Iraq. Afterall, bushman did not even receive 50% of the American vote and election cheating in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere, allowed him to be declared president after two separate elections. bushman, the vice president and dumbsfield should be convicted of treason and executed and all of the minions should be thrown in prison where they belong.
I’d have to see some additional verification before taking this seriously.
However.…if this proves true, if Saddam is restored to power, then nearly 3,000 American troops died for absolutely nothing. This would go beyond impeachment. Bush and senior members of his cabinet would have to be arrested and tried as war criminals. By us — not the U.N.
The American excuses for the illegal war which has brought so much chaos to Iraq are dissappearing one by one. What is left now apart from “oil”?
Senate reports say Saddam rejected cooperating with terroristshttp://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15474492.htm
By Warren P. Strobel and Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein rejected pleas for assistance from Osama bin Laden and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday found, casting further doubt on the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq.
President Bush and other administration officials repeatedly cited Saddam’s alleged ties to radical Islamic terrorists before the March 2003 invasion as one reason to take military action against Iraq.
The 150-page report said the administration’s claims were untrue. “Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support,” the report said.
The report was released along with a second one that said false information from the exile group Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, was widely distributed in prewar intelligence reports and used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq’s weapons and links to terrorism. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House and Pentagon officials ignored the warnings.
The reports are part of a five-report study that the Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.
The study has left the committee badly divided. Three reports remain classified, including one comparing prewar statements by Bush administration officials to intelligence available at the time. Democrats have accused Republicans of delaying the reports until after the November congressional elections.
On Friday, Democrats charged that the reports showed that the White House had manipulated intelligence to make the case for war to the American people.
“The administration ignored warnings prior to the war about the veracity of the intelligence it trumpeted publicly to support its case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of the United States,” said panel Vice Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
Republicans rejected that allegation and said the reports added little to what was already known.
“The long-known fact is that the prewar intelligence was wrong. That flawed intelligence was used by policymakers, both in the administration and in Congress, as one of numerous justifications to go to war in Iraq,” said committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.
In the run-up to the war, Bush and his advisers repeatedly sought to link Saddam and al-Qaida, stopping just short of accusing the Iraqi leader of a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“You can’t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” Bush said on Sept. 25, 2002.
On the same day, Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, said, “High-ranking detainees have said that Iraq provided some training to al-Qaida in chemical weapons development.”
The detainee Rice referred to was al-Qaida operative Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in November 2001 and, U.S. intelligence officials said, tortured by Egyptian authorities after his transfer to that country.
The Senate report says that in February 2002, months before Rice spoke, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that al Libi “was likely intentionally misleading his briefers.”
Postwar information on Saddam’s relations with Islamic extremists came from numerous sources, the report suggests, including seized documents and interrogations of Saddam himself, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi.
The report, quoting from an FBI debriefing of Hijazi, said that when an Iraqi operative met bin Laden in Sudan in 1995, bin Laden asked that Saddam allow him to open an office in Iraq, give him Chinese-made sea mines and military training, and broadcast his speeches.
“According to Hijazi, Saddam immediately refused,” the FBI debriefing said.
Regarding Zarqawi, the Senate report cites information that’s surfaced since the war indicating that Saddam “attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture” him and the Iraqi regime “did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.”
Zarqawi, who operated from a part of northern Iraq that Saddam didn’t control, was a key part of Bush’s case for war. After the invasion, he became the head of the group al Qaida in Iraq. U.S. bombs killed him in June.
The second report released Friday confirms that the INC had “an aggressive ‘publicity campaign’ prior to the war to bring defectors to the attention of ‘anyone who would listen.’”
While many committee Republicans dismissed the INC report’s conclusions as unsupported by the facts, two of them, Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, voted for harsher language that Democrats proposed.
The report, which ran 211 pages, disclosed that three months after the White House approved continued funding for the INC’s intelligence collection in July 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency warned that the group “was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” including Iran’s. It’s unclear whether top White House officials were aware of the warning.
The report also confirms a report by McClatchy Newspapers that former CIA director R. James Woolsey helped get an INC defector attention from the U.S. government by referring him to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Linton Wells.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, suggested that he had knowledge of dozens of sites related to weapons of mass destruction, but none of them were ever found, and Haideri, taken to Iraq in early 2004, couldn’t identify the facilities that he claimed he knew about.
Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador Glaspie
Transcript of Meeting Between Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. — July 25, 1990(Eight days before the August 2, 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait)
July 25, 1990 — Presidential Palace — Baghdad
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie —
Ò I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years and admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship — not confrontation — regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to KuwaitÕs borders?
Saddam Hussein: -
As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.Ó
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie —
Ò What solutions would be acceptable?Ó
Saddam Hussein -
If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab — our strategic goal in our war with Iran — we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in SaddamÕs view, including Kuwait) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United StatesÕ opinion on this?Ó
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie -
“We have no opinion on your Arab — Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960’s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” (Saddam smiles)
On August 2, 1990 four days later, SaddamÕs massed troops invade and occupy Kuwait.
——————————————————————————–
Baghdad, September 2, 1990, U.S. Embassy
One month later, British journalist obtain the the above tape and transcript of the Saddam — Glaspie meeting of July 29, 1990. Astounded, they confront Ms. Glaspie as she leaves the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Journalist 1 -
ÒAre the transcripts (holding them up) correct, Madam Ambassador?
(Ambassador Glaspie does not respond)
Journalist 2 -
ÒYou knew Saddam was going to invade (Kuwait) but you didnÕt warn him not to. You didnÕt tell him America would defend Kuwait. You told him the oppose — that America was not associated with Kuwait.Ó
Journalist 1 -
ÒYou encouraged this aggression — his invasion. What were you thinking?Ó
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie -
“Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
Journalist 1 -
“You thought he was just going to take some of it? But, how could you? Saddam told you that, if negotiations failed, he would give up his Iran (Shatt al Arab waterway) goal for the “Whole of Iraq, in the shape we wish it to be.” You know that includes Kuwait, which the Iraqis have always viewed as an historic part of their country!Ó
Journalist 1 -
“American green-lighted the invasion. At a minimum, you admit signaling Saddam that some aggression was okay — that the U.S. would not oppose a grab of the al-Rumeilah oil field, the disputed border strip and the Gulf Islands (including Bubiyan) — the territories claimed by Iraq?“
(Ambassador Glaspie says nothing as a limousine door closed behind her and the car drives off.)
http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/the_new_world_order/glaspie.html
However….if this proves true, if Saddam is restored to power, then nearly 3,000 American troops died for absolutely nothing.
Well what do you think they died for, becuase Iraq/Saddam had links with terrorism or that they had WMD?
This would go beyond impeachment. Bush and senior members of his cabinet would have to be arrested and tried as war criminals. By us — not the U.N.
That would simply be a whitewash, the International Criminal Court and another Nurembourg trials is what’s needed.