"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
thunder wrote:
On Fri, 28 May 2004 22:35:22 -0400, NOYB wrote:



http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...0/004/152lndzv
..asp?pg=1


Maybe, maybe not.

http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?...3_archive.html


You fellows must be unfamiliar with the Weekly Standard,

How about NPR, the Washington Post, ABC News, and Newsweek?

Four days later, on January 15, 1999, ABC News reported that three
intelligence agencies believed that Saddam had offered asylum to bin Laden.


Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis
began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to
acquire weapons of mass destruction. . . . ABC News has learned that in
December, an Iraqi intelligence chief named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's
ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin
Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what
was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden has been told he
would be welcome in Baghdad.

NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of
the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report.


Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when,
according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived
in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in
Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait. . . . Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to
live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological
weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony
before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was
planning additional attacks on American targets.

By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify
these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch
that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against
Western powers."