Posted 1:12 AM by Steve
Senator McCain responds to Senator Byrd.

EDITOR’S NOTE: These are comments Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.) made on the Senate floor on March 19, 2003.




observed the comments of the distinguished senator from West Virginia concerning the events which are about to transpire within the next hour or so, or days. I did not really look forward to coming to the floor and debating the issue. It has been debated. It has been discussed in the media. It has been discussed at every kitchen table in America. But I felt it would be important for me to respond to allegations concerning the United States of America, its status in the world, and, in particular, what happens after this conflict is over, which I do not think we have paid enough attention to, perhaps understandably, because our first and foremost consideration is the welfare of the young men and women we are sending in harm's way. But to allege that somehow the United States of America has demeaned itself or tarnished its reputation by being involved in liberating the people of Iraq, to me, simply is neither factual nor fair.














The United States of America has involved itself in the effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, and now freedom for the Iraqi people, with the same principles that motivated the United States of America in most of the conflicts we have been involved in, most recently Kosovo and Bosnia, and in which, in both of those cases, the United States national security was not at risk, but what was at risk was our advocacy and willingness to serve and sacrifice on behalf of people who are the victims of oppression and genocide.
We did not go into Bosnia because Mr. Milosevic had weapons of mass destruction. We did not go into Kosovo because ethnic Albanians or others were somehow a threat to the security of the United States. We entered into those conflicts because we could not stand by and watch innocent men, women, and children being slaughtered, raped, and "ethnically cleansed.'' We found a new phrase for our lexicon: "ethnic cleansing.'' Ethnic cleansing is a phrase which has incredible implications.

The mission our military is about to embark on is fraught with danger, and it means the loss of brave young American lives. But I also believe it offers the opportunity for a new day for the Iraqi people.

Madam President, there is one thing I am sure of, that we will find the Iraqi people have been the victims of an incredible level of brutalization, terror, murder, and every other kind of disgraceful and distasteful oppression on the part of Saddam Hussein's regime. And contrary to the assertion of the senator from West Virginia, when the people of Iraq are liberated, we will again have written another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America, that we will fight for the freedom of other citizens of the world, and we again assert the most glorious phrase, in my view, ever written in the English language; and that is: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The people of Iraq , for the first time, will be able to realize those inalienable rights. I am proud of the United States of America. I am proud of the leadership of the president of the United States.

It is not an easy decision to send America's young men and women into harm's way. As I said before, some of them will not be returning. But to somehow assert, as some do, that the people of Iraq and the Middle East are not entitled to those same God-given rights that Americans and people all over the country are, that they do not have those same hopes and dreams and aspirations our own citizens do, to me, is a degree of condescension. I might even use stronger language than that to describe it. So I respectfully disagree with the remarks of the senator from West Virginia. I believe the president of the United States has done everything necessary and has exercised every option short of war, which has led us to the point we are today.

I believe that, obviously, we will remove a threat to America's national security because we will find there are still massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Although Theodore Roosevelt is my hero and role model, I also, in many ways, am Wilsonian in the respect that America, this great nation of ours, will again contribute to the freedom and liberty of an oppressed people who otherwise never might enjoy those freedoms.

So perhaps the senator from West Virginia is right. I do not think so. Events will prove one of us correct in the next few days. But I rely on history as my guide to the future, and history shows us, unequivocally, that this nation has stood for freedom and democracy, even at the risk and loss of American lives, so that all might enjoy the same privileges or have the opportunity to someday enjoy the same privileges as we do in this noble experiment called the United States of America.

Posted 5:35 PM by Steve
It's impossible to intelligently discuss the issue of war against Iraq without addressing the various issues involved in such an undertaking.

The first major issue for you to consider is the conservative argument of state-sponsorship. State sponsorship provides terrorists with refuge, training, weapons and logistical support that they would not have had otherwise. Iraq's terror ties are neither as nefarious as Saddam Hussein pulling all the strings and commanding al-Queda as a private army, nor as innocent as Saddam Hussein having nothing to do with terrorism.


Hussein has publicly and financially supported the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. Mohammed Atta (of the 9/11 hijackers) is known to have met with Iraq intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague 4 months prior to 9/11. Satellite photos of Iraq show the outline of a Boeing fuselage in the Salman Pak terrorist camp used for training.

I think it's safe to say that one would have to be incredibly naive to think that Iraq does not engage in some level of state sponsorhip of terrorism.

The other compelling issue to liberate Iraq is a very liberal, human rights issue. Hussein has gassed thousands of Kurds and starved millions more. Saddam uses a network of secret police to engage in kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of dissidents.
Iraq has repeatedly violated the Geneva Convention by placing civilians in harm's way to try and protect
military assets.

World opinion of the attack on Iraq may be generally unfavorable, but we need ask ourselves whether a favorable world opinion would make us any less of a target to Islamic terrorists. Prior to 9/11 world opinion of the U.S. was reasonably high but the
attack occurred obliterating thousands that fateful morning.

The question is not whether the world will hate us for liberating Iraq, but will the world even
remember Saddam Hussein in a few years? President Clinton had neither the support of congress nor the
United Nations when he bombed Kosovo to oust Milosevic. Everyone seems to have blocked this out of
their collective memories. Clinton was right back then and Bush is right now. Absolutist forms of government
like Saddam Hussein's Iraq killed far more people last century than war.

According to the facts, Absolutist regimes killed 119,000,000 of their own citizens in the last hundred years while all the wars of the last century combined killed 36 million total. War is clearly the lesser of the two evils if human life is considered.

Posted 2:38 PM by Steve



Iraqi funds, training fuel Islamic terror group

Two Iraqi Arabs held in a Kurdish prison tell of contacts among Ansar al-Islam, Al Qaeda, and aides to the Iraqi president.


HALABJA AND SULAYMANIYAH, NORTHERN IRAQ - The US Operation Anaconda has squeezed many Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters out of Afghanistan, but some of those forces are simply joining a budding conflict nearby, in Iraq, local security officials warn.

Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamic extremist group that has shaken Northern Iraq with bloody episodes of killing over the past 14 months, is being bolstered by the American rout of Osama bin Laden's diehards at Shah-e Kot, Afghanistan.

"Their numbers have been increasing, as [fighters] escape from Operation Anaconda," says a top security official in the region. "We don't know how many, but each day that goes by, they are more and more of a threat."

While Ansar is gaining strength in numbers, new information is emerging that ties the organization to both Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Al Qaeda contacts allegedly stretch back to 1989, and include regular recruiting visits by bin Laden cadres to Kurdish refugee camps in Iran and to northern Iraq, as well as a journey by senior Ansar leaders to meet Al Qaeda chiefs in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the summer of 2000.

A 20-year veteran of Iraqi intelli- gence alleges the Iraqi government secretly

provided cash and training to Ansar, in a bid to destabilize the "safe haven" and weaken armed Kurdish opponents. Any link between Baghdad and Al Qaeda could be used by Washington to help justify toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Some Kurdish politicians downplay the threat from Ansar al-Islam, and senior Islamic leaders claim to have convinced Ansar to "change their methods," meaning they won't target and kill Kurds in their fight for a more secular state as they did this past September.

Ansar al-Islam, which means "Soldiers of God," is no more than several hundred strong. But it controls a handful of Iraqi Kurdish villages that abut the border with Iran, on the eastern end of the US-protected Kurdish safe area in northern Iraq.

Iraqi intelligence link

New details about Ansar's contacts with Al Qaeda come from Rafed Ibrahim Fatah, an Iraqi Arab held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Mr. Fatah agreed to be interviewed in an interrogation room at a PUK security complex in Sulaymaniyah.

Mr. Fatah says he fled from Baghdad to Iran in the mid-1980s, and was in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Tehran. There, in 1989, he says he met two Iraqi brothers who had returned from mujahideen centers in Pakistan explicitly to make contact with another Kurdish faction, the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), "because there was jihad in Peshawar, [Pakistan], and they were fighting jihad here." The IMK is a broad political party that splintered in recent years; the breakaway extremists first created Jund al-Islam, then changed their name to Ansar.

Fatah says one of the brothers, Abu Ayoub, called himself a "military cadre working for Osama," and visited Iraqi Kurds in northern Iran for two weeks. Fatah made the trip with him, spending most of his time with Abu Ayoub's lower-ranking brother, Najjem, who he said did not attend the "big meetings."

Those ties continued in later years, Fatah says. An Iraqi Kurd called Abu Jaffar also visited from Pakistan twice a year during the 1990s, to recruit jihadis. The Kurdish Islamists, Fatah says, stroking his short salt-and-pepper beard, maintained their own house in Peshawar, like many of Islamic militant organizations in Pakistan.

Fatah himself first traveled to Pakistan in 1989, and even to Afghan training camps of the mujahideen, though he says he didn't have the stomach – literally – for the hard life of guerrillas.

The Al Qaeda-Kurdish ties appear to have grown closer by the summer of 2000, when Al Qaeda was well established, and Jund al-Islam was taking root in Kurdistan. Fatah was in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when he heard about a high-level delegation of Iraqi Kurdish militants. He says a friend introduced him to Abu Wa'el and two other Jund al-Islam leaders. They were staying in the guest house of a Taliban minister known for his support of Arab jihadists in Afghanistan, and were surprised when Fatah and his Iraqi friend showed up.

"They wanted to present themselves as a jihad group, and they were concentrating on Al Qaeda," Fatah says, recalling a conversation that took place in his presence. "They said they had already received money once from Abu Qatada, to elicit more support from Al Qaeda." Abu Qatada is a London-based sheikh who went underground earlier this year, and has been convicted in a Jordanian court of conspiring to attack US and Israeli interests.

Fatah says the delegation said they met Abu Hafas al-Masri, bin Laden's No. 2 and military aide, but that bin Laden rarely met with such groups. Uneasy about being identified by fellow Iraqis in Afghanistan – even though analysts say that three of Al Qaeda's top 20 leaders were Iraqis – Fatah says that Abu Wa'el and the others talked little about the details of their mission.

One reason they were leery of attracting the attention of fellow Iraqis may have been clandestine support for the Kurdish Islamists from the Baghdad regime. Qassem Hussein Mohamed, a big-boned, mustachioed Saddam lookalike who says he worked for Baghdad's Mukhabarat intelligence for two decades, says that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has clandestinely supported Ansar al-Islam for several years.

"[Ansar] and Al Qaeda groups were trained by graduates of the Mukhabarat's School 999 – military intelligence," says Mr. Mohamed, who agreed to be interviewed separately in the Sulaymaniyah interrogation room. As with Fatah, there were no apparent signs that he had been compelled to speak, and Kurdish investigators say they are convinced – based on other, confirmable parts of his story – that he is a Mukhabarat agent.

"My information is that the Iraqi government was directly supporting [Al Qaeda] with weapons and explosives," he says. "[Ansar] was part of Al Qaeda, and given support with training and money."

Saddam's 'overt' help

Saddam Hussein did not create Ansar al-Islam, though Mohamed compared Baghdad's role to the overt help Iraq gives the anti-Iran Mujahideen e-Khalq forces, which are known to be completely controlled by Iraqi intelligence within Iraq's borders.

Among other known Ansar leaders, Mohamed says Abu Wa'el was the most influential, was on the Iraqi intelligence payroll, and served as a liaison between Baghdad and Al Qaeda. Mohamed says his own mission to northern Iraq – during which he was detained by the PUK – is proof of that link. "After America attacked Afghanistan, Baghdad lost contact with [Abu Wa'el]," Mohamed says. "They sent me to check out Abu Wa'el, to make sure he was not dead or captured, and to reestablish contact."

Mohamed says PUK intelligence operatives apparently had been following him for some time, and clearly knew he was trying to contact the militants in northern Iraq.

The possibility of Iraq's support for Ansar – if only to destabilize the Kurdish territory that exists beyond Baghdad's control – does not surprise Kurdish officials. They note that President Hussein has recently embraced Islamic groups, and pays $10,000 each to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel, to solidify his credentials. Supporting Ansar, too, may provide Hussein with a way to get at his Kurdish enemies.

"There has been a marked change in Saddam's thinking in the past five years," says Hoshyar Zebari, a senior Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) official, regarding Baghdad's shift from hardline secularism, to backing Islamists.

"[Ansar] are local, home-grown Islamic terrorists, inspired by Al Qaeda and bin Laden. They think the main enemy is the US, and that Islam can't be free unless they get rid of blasphemous groups and infidels, which they consider the KDP and PUK to be," Mr. Zebari says. "Saddam's intelligence is very good at penetrating small groups."

Which is exactly what has happened to Ansar, says former Mukhabarat operative Mohamed. "The government does not like this 'safe haven,' and wants to destroy and destabilize everyone, everywhere," Mohamed says. "They are using [Ansar] as a base to destabilize northern Iraq, and assassinate and kill people. Baghdad will never give up supporting them."

Several additional reports – unconfirmed – have surfaced, alleging that Ansar leaders are sheltering senior Al Qaeda figures who slipped across the border from Iran, after fleeing Afghanistan.

But Sheikh Sadiq Abdulaziz, the deputy leader of the IMK – now weakened by the loss of breakaway factions – denies there is any link to bin Laden other than the group draws its inspiration from him.

"People who see Osama on television and hear Osama, want to be like Osama," Sheikh Sadiq says in his Halabja office. Ahson Ali Abdulaziz, one of the leaders of Ansar, is the nephew of Sheikh Sadiq and the son of IMK leader Mullah Ali Abdulaziz.

Posted 5:03 PM by Steve
Here is a sobering and shocking website:

http://www.politicsandprotest.org

I hope that all Americans have the strength to face the truth and understand the reasons why we must strike Iraq. The issue is state sponsorship. The issue is most clearly understood when looked at as a spectrum. On one extreme end of the spectrum, Saddam Hussein is pulling all the strings and directly ordering every terrorist attack. No one believes that is the case. On the other extreme end of the spectrum, Iraq has no connections whatsoever to terrorists or Islamic terrorism. No rational person believes that is the case either. The reality of the situation, illustrated by the al-Queda operatives meeting with Iraqi officials in Prague prior to the attacks of 9/11 and the existence of terrorist training camps within Iraq, is that Iraq engages in some level of state sponsorship of al-Queda and other Islamic terror groups.