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Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article which first reported on the memo, comments on it in today’s LA TIMES.
Nor do the Democrats appear to have taken into account this piece of information from a U.S. interview with Farouk Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence: “He said that in a 1994 meeting with Bin Laden in the Sudan, Bin Laden had requested that Iraq assist Al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines Bin Laden also requested the establishment of Al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq.”
According to other reporting in the Feith document, Bin Laden eventually got at least some of those training camps. What happened there? “An Iraqi intelligence officer said that as of mid-March, the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was providing weapons to Al Qaeda members located at a training camp in northern Iraq, including rocket-propelled grenade (RPG-18) launchers.”
Other information in the document points to a secret operational relationship between Bin Laden and the Iraqi leader that goes well beyond mere “contacts” or “links” or “connections.” According to one entry, a “sensitive source” reported that “Iraq’s contacts intensified after Al Qaeda’s successful attacks against the U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998.”
The LA TIMES also prints a rebuttal, from Christopher Scheer. Scheer’s article makes no attempt to refute any point made by Hayes. He starts by saying that the leak of the memo was timed purposely to back up the Bush administration position. Duh. Most leaks are made to back up someone’s position. This doesn’t refute the points in the leaked memo.
Scheer concludes with this:
The simple fact is, Al Qaeda didn’t need Iraq to pull off 9/11 or any of its other savage attacks, and even if all the anonymous statements in Feith’s memo panned out, there still would be no evidence Iraq significantly aided the extremists. We are, whatever the neocons might want us to believe, waging the wrong war in the wrong way.
So his conclusion is that all the points in the memo might be true; Al Qaeda may have been helped by Iraq; but Al Qaeda didn’t “need” Iraq. Therefore, Scheer concludes, we were wrong to attack Iraq.
So according to Scheer, most people who help terrorists kill Americans should be left in peace unless Scheer says they were “needed”. A brilliant military strategy.
So what is Mr. Scheer’s plan? How would he prevent another 9-11? I’d like to hear his suggestions on that. But that subject doesn’t appear to interest him.
I found this surprising. But given that Christianity came from the Middle East originally, perhaps it shouldn’t be so unexpected.
Thomas F. Madden, associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University, discusses the History of Islam and of the Crusades.
Islam has always added converts via military conquest.
For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggressionan attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianityand for that matter any other non-Muslim religionhas no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades.
One of the biggest questions we are currently addressing is, how ingrained is this bias towards war in the Islamic nations of today? Are there enough peaceful devotees of Islam for the voice of reason to prevail, ultimately, in their own nations?
Daniel Pipes has made a brilliant contribution to finding the answer to this, by suggesting questions that may be asked of Muslims to assess their standing on key issues of war and peace.
On Sunday I was telling a friend about the leaked DoD memo. He wasn’t familiar with it, and doubted that it was really the work of the government, since the major media have not reported on it yet and he’d heard nothing about it.
This report today leaves no doubt that the leaked memo is in fact the work of the Pentagon.
WASHINGTON – Senate Intelligence Committee leaders plan to ask the Justice Department to investigate who leaked a top-secret Pentagon memo sent to the committee.The Oct. 27 memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith provided details of intelligence linking Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network and the toppled Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Details of the memo were published in the Nov. 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he expected to ask the Justice Department and the Pentagon to determine if the leak constituted a crime. If it did, a criminal investigation should be conducted, he said.
“That’s highly classified material and an egregious leak of classified material,” he told reporters.
What’s astonishing is that this memo is not yet widely known to the public. It has yet to appear on the front page of my local paper, the LA TIMES.
It debunks most of what the left has been saying about Iraq for months. Major liberal media is increasingly unabashed about its bizarre bias against the truth, against the major stories of the day, in support of positions which are supported by neither.
It’s beginning to be indistinguishable from the state-controlled media of communist countries of the past.
How can the liberal media refuse to report such a major story?
The Blogosphere is jamming with discussion of the leaked DoD memo, documenting ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The memo concludes:
...there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.
Yesterday Daniel Pipes participated in a panel including discussion moderated by Michael Medved and also including John Podhoretz and Larry Miller, hosted by the Jewish Policy Center, at the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles.
Afterwards I had occasion to ask Daniel if he had any comments on the leaked memo. He expressed no doubts or reservations at all about the accuracy of the memo. This document of course thoroughly debunks most of what the left has been saying about Iraq for the last several months.
Daniel’s other comments in response to my question were along the lines of the article on his web site, Who is the Enemy?
Evidence of al-Qaida’s Role in Baghdad Attacks Grows
WASHINGTON Evidence is growing that al-Qaida is making its presence felt in the recent wave of bombings in Iraq, which U.S. officials say is becoming a magnet for Islamic militants worldwide who seek a violent confrontation with America.
The bombers who struck multiple targets in coordinated strikes last week used 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives and diversionary tactics that are characteristic of al-Qaida operations, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told The Associated Press.
There are multiple benefits of this.
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