According to the Melbourne Herald Sun the White House has released a 25-page document showing a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
A high-ranking al-Qaeda operative in custody disclosed that Iraq supplied the Islamist militant group with material to build chemical and biological weapons, the White House said today.
"A senior al-Qaeda terrorist, now detained, who had been responsible for al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, reports that al-Qaeda was intent on obtaining (weapons of mass destruction) assistance from Iraq," the White House said in a report.
The report goes on to state:
"Iraq agreed to provide chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda associates starting in December 2000," the report said.
"Senior al-Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, along with approximately two dozen al-Qaeda terrorist associates."
"This group stayed in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq and plotted terrorist attacks around the world."
The al-Qaeda associate named in the report is also the same Jordanian al-Qaeda associate responsible for the recent truck bomb in Jakarta.
This is potentially huge news, and it seems odd that it hasn’t made much of a flap domestically yet. So far there’s no confirmation or dismissal of the news, so there’s reason to react with a certain amount of skepticism to the report. However, if this does turn out to be true, it would prove that there was a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda involving the transfer of WMD technologies – something that would prove the admittedly weakest part of the US and UK case against Saddam Hussein.
Seems as if the “cry wolf” crowd is learning the same lesson the little boy who cried wolf did. Tell enough fibs and people will quit listening to you. I’m sure it’s hard for the media or even politicians to put much credibility on the current claims, since the last 32 or so have all proven erroneous.
It only takes one.
And it’ll happen.
As I suggested earlier – shall we revisit this question in a year?
I have yet to be wrong about this sort of thing.
Do you by any chance remember the 1980’s TV cop show spoof “Sledge Hammer!”? Your post brought back memories of that character who, despite his bumbling incompetence always provided the reassuring one-liner, “Trust me. I know what I’m doing” whenever someone questioned his cartoonish overconfidence. The last time this TV character said that line, he pulled the wrong wire when attempting to disarm a nuclear warhead and Los Angeles erupted into a mushroom cloud. So far, the hubris of you and your ilk in regards to WMD’s and anything else related to waging “pre-emptive war” in Iraq has been only slightly more assuring than the hubris of a TV character who destroyed the civilized world.
One of Jay’s favorite lines is “even a broken clock is write twice a day.” Perhaps one of your “smoking gun declarations” of WMD discovery in Iraq will prove you right. Maybe it will be the 79th declaration….or perhaps the 136th declaration. The law of averages says that if you predict something long enough, there’s a chance it may come true. Considering that the intelligence we relied on ensuring us that Iraq had WMD’s turned out to be manipulated, I’m not counting on winning the lottery, being struck by lightning or discovering WMD’s in Iraq anytime soon though.