What
Makes People so Stupid?
By Syed Kamran Mirza
For all these years after 9/11 tragedy I was always telling my peers
that though it was orchestrated by Osama’s grand terrorist team
al-Qaeda—there must have been at least some sort of supports (Direct or
Indirect) from other Muslim countries, especially
Iraq
and
Saudi Arabia
. Why not? The famous universally true proverb could not be untrue!
Which is: “Enemy of the enemy is my friend indeed”. Undoubtedly,
America
has humiliated Saddam’s regime most, hence
America
has become the enemy #1 of Saddam. On the other side, Osama Bin Laden
already declared
America
the enemy #1. Therefore, 1+1=2, Osama + Saddam= (become good buddies)
Great enemies of Kafiir
America
—the great Satan. Even a child of 10 year can guess this equation.
Mysterious question is—why then 9/11 commission failed to understand
this simple equation?
With this above universally true perception, American public in general
immediately suspected Saddam and Osama for the 9/11 incident. This was the
only factor why the national poll on justification of Bush’s
Iraq
invasion—poll never came down below 70% even until a few weeks before
2004 election. About a few days before the election when Bush was
suffering heavily by media’s lambasting, his poll on
Iraq
invasion still remained above 50% surprisingly.
The 9/11 commission was formed mostly by some aggressive senators from
Democratic Party, some from Republican Party and a few non-partisan
American citizen. After almost year-long investigations the commission
concluded that—al-Qaeda was purely stateless and never had any
connection with the American enemy #1 Saddam’s
Iraq
. But world knows for sure that al-Qaeda was operating their heinous
terrorism right from the lap of Taliban
Afghanistan
. Question is how then al-Qaeda was stateless?
Let us judge some prudently relevant incidences:
1) According to intelligence relayed in the famous Douglas
Feith memo to Congress revealed by the Weekly
Standard's Stephen
Hayes, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (now the Number 2 in the al-Qaeda
hierarchy) paid a visit to Baghdad and immediately met with Iraqi Vice
President Ramadan on February 3, 1998. According to the Feith memo,
"the [stated] goal of the visit was to arrange for the coordination
between
Iraq
and bin Laden and establish camps in Falluja, Nasiriya, and Iraqi
Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz." This visit went well -
very well. Saddam's intelligence service in essence cut a check
directly to Zawahiri, for $300,000.
2) After he received Saddam's payout, Zawahiri immediately folded up
his tent and irrevocably merged his organization with bin Laden's. "The
merger was de facto complete by February 1998," the 9/11 Report
states.
Zawahiri most likely used it to fund the merger costs:
to regularize the training and indoctrination of jihad recruits and to
jump-start the new project initiatives of al-Qaeda.
3) Dr. Zawahiri had always enjoyed the reception Saddam gave him. He
had already met Saddam personally six years earlier, in 1992, to plot
terror. But in 1998, within a month of Saddam's payout and Zawahiri's
merger with bin Laden, Saddam suddenly started ramping up his
collaboration with al-Qaeda.
4) The 9/11 Report states, "In March 1998, after Bin Ladin's
[Commission spelling] public fatwa against the
United States
, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to
Iraq
to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to
Afghanistan
to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported
that one or perhaps both of these meetings were apparently arranged
through Bin Ladin's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to
the Iraqis."
5) One way to exact the proper revenge was to keep the money flowing
to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Former Iraqi intelligence officer Abdul
Rahman al-Shamari, now in a Kurdish jail, told Jonathan
Schanzer of the Weekly Standard that he personally was an aid conduit
to Ansar
al-Islam on Saddam's orders. Ansar al-Islam is, of course, an
al-Qaeda affiliate that was badly bombed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We
gave them money every month or two, Shamari recounted, noting that
"on one occasion we gave them 10 million Swiss dinars [about
$700,000]." Shamari's immediate boss was high-ranking Saddam
loyalist and Mukhabarat officer Abu Wael. Saddam used Ansar al-Islam
to make trouble in the pro-Western Kurdish north of
Iraq
, Shamari explained. Mullah Krekar, the spiritual head of Ansar al-Islam,
while protected by the government of Norway, actually admitted to ABC News
that Abu Wael "is an Arabic member of our shura, our leadership
council also."
7) And, of course, there was always Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi is
to this day writing letters to Osama bin Laden begging for cash to fund
his bombings of Iraqi and coalition targets inside
Iraq
. One of these was intercepted en route via courier and published by
Iraq
administrator L. Paul Bremer on the Web site of the Coalition Provisional
Authority. But Zarqawi didn't show up in
Iraq
out of a seething but justified sense of outrage over the
U.S.
occupation. Before the
Iraq
War, Zarqawi had his own camps in northern
Iraq
, where he made poisons. He was a ricin specialist, according to
Colin Powell in his February 2003 address to the U.N. Security Council.
1
2 > Next
|