The Guardian is reporting that a senior Al Qaeda figure fabricated much of the evidence that George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The claim was made by Omar Nasiri, a pseudonym for a Moroccan who says he spent seven years working for European security and intelligence agencies, including MI5. He said Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran training camps in Afghanistan, told his US interrogators that al-Qaida had been training Iraqis.George W. Bush: Al Qaeda's stooge.
Libi was captured in November 2001 and taken to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured. Asked on BBC2's Newsnight whether Libi or other jihadists would have told the truth if they were tortured, Nasiri replies: "Never".
Asked whether he thought Libi had deliberately planted information to get the US to fight Iraq, Nasiri said: "Exactly".
Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the "weakest" Muslim country.
It is known that under interrogation, Libi misled Washington. His claims were seized on by George Bush, vice-president, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell, secretary of state, in his address to the security council in February, 2003, which argued the case for a pre-emptive war against Iraq.
Though he did not name Libi, Mr Powell said "a senior terrorist operative" who "was responsible for one of al-Qaida's training camps in Afghanistan" had told US agencies that Saddam Hussein had offered to train al-Qaida in the use of "chemical or biological weapons".
What is new, if Nasiri is to be believed, is that the leading al-Qaida operative wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. Nasiri also says that part of al-Qaida training was to withstand interrogation and provide false information.
2 comments:
If Al Qaeda wins what will be won?
The point is that George W. Bush has already given Al Qaeda everything they could have wanted. Al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11 in the hopes that Bush would overreact in some outrageous way, such as invading an Arab nation and radicalizing Arabs who were only looking for an excuse to engage in jihad.
That is precisely what Bush did. Nobody took issue with the invasion of Afghanistan. It was the right thing to do.
Iraq was the wrong thing to do, and if this story is accurate, it was precisely what Al Qaeda wanted Bush to do.
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