So ican,
as evidence that I requested for your statements:
Quote:It was the 2001s that the Kurds chose not to attack.
It was the 2001s that Saddam could have responded to the US demands and easily removed these al Qaeda by asking the Kurds to attack and defeat them too.
Or, Saddam could have attacked and removed the 2001s with his own forces.
you post a link to your reiterations of the above statements:
Quote:The intolerance that the Kurd's expressed and acted on toward the predecessors of AaI obviously did not materialize when AaI was established.
It had to be Saddam who willingly and knowingly and tolerantly harbored al Qaeda in Iraq. Otherwise, the Kurd's would probably have again at least attempted to destroy AaI, the al Qaeda successors of their al Qaeda enemies.
Alternatively, if Saddam did not tolerate AaI there and didn't want to bother to order his troops to remove AaI, he could have simply requested the Kurd's, the proven enemies of AaI's al Qaeda predecessors, to destroy AaI.
Your reasoning here is circular.
Then, you explain that you have no evidence for your speculations. Explanation taken.
So, your speculations upon what the 9/11 commission has written are disreputable as evidence of Saddam's harboring of "al Qaeda" in northern Iraq.
About the invalidity of your sources, ican, specifically, it is Powell's UN speech that has been thoroughly discredited as evidence of Saddam's WMD, and has therefore been shown to be a questionable source of information as concerns claims of Saddam's harboring of al-Qaeda. As far as his claims concerning Saddam's harboring of "al-Qaeda"/Ansar al-Islam/al-Zarqawi, the other source of potentially corroborating evidence, the 9/11 Commisson Report, doesn't even mention al-Zarqawi. The reports it itself perused to arrive at its own speculations are self-describedly "puzzling," "third-hand;" one is even titled
Special Analysis: Iraq's Inconclusive Ties to Al-Qaida," July 31, 2002 (notice the date in which it was written, almost a year after its description of the creation of Ansar al-Islam). The commission itself states that it had "seen no evidence that these [meetings that "
MAY have occurred in 1999"] or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship." As far as
YOUR speculations that the 9/11 Commission reports a "harboring relationship"--something that is other than a "collaborative operational relationship," according only to
YOU--between Saddam and "al Qaeda," the commission's statements amount to the words "apparently," "indications," and the phrase "tolerated and may even have helped
ANSAR AL ISLAM." Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report has shown
ITSELF to be poor evidence of claims of Saddam's harboring of al-Qaeda.
I have not come across anything that has unsubstantiated the evidence I've referred to, or discredited the sources thereof.
