Oh, and:
And Turki? No. He was an outspoken opponent of AQ and IIRC won a libel suit against someone who claimed he was involved in financing the attacks.
This Turki al Faisal?
I’m not sure that his hstory makes the case you’d like it to make.
FinnAgain, thanks for the cites regarding the Taliban/AQ link pre-9/11. Personally I do not think they establish that “AQ was an official part of the Afghan government” rather they support the contention that there were close links between the two groups and that AQ received direct support from the Taliban government in Afganistan (and that the Taliban received financial support from AQ). Anyway, it is mainly a matter of definition and interpretation and has no real baring on Try2B’s argument.
Actually I am pretty confused as to what Try2B is arguing! I think he is trying to construct an case that the REAL motivation for American (plus British, Australian, Dutch, Canadian, … ) action in Afganistan post 9/11 was the replacement of the Taliban with a friendly government that would allow the construction of an oil (or possibly gas) pipeline from the central Asian fields to the Indian Ocean and that Al Qaeda was just a convenient excuse. In support of this I think he is positing:
-
Al Qaeda did not have training camps in Afganistan
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The American led campaign in late 2001/early 2002 attacked the Taliban, not AQ, in bid to control the country.
Try2B - is this right? Please correct me if I have misunderstood your points.
On (1) I don’t see how there can be any dicussion of this. I don’t think either the Taliban or AQ have ever disputed it.
On (2) I think we keep running up against Try2B’s lack of knowledge of military realities. Yes, the action in Afganistan was aimed at removing the Taliban from power, not directly at the AQ bases but that was the clear means of achieving the objective of the mission - eliminating AQ and preventing Afganistan from being used as a safe haven in the future. Until the Taliban were removed it is difficult to see how the first part could be achieved and their removal was certainly required for the second part.
I am not sure how the discussion of Saudi money comes into the consideration of the US government’s post 9/11 actions. There does not seem to be any agrument that money from Saudi Arabia was partly funding AQ and little that Saudi money was also reaching the Taliban but where does that lead in terms of US action?
Yes that one.
Here’s one cite. It describes a transaction in which Prince Turki al Faisal hands a check for a billion Saudi dollars to a top Taliban leader. Other members of the royal family are implicated in funding AQ and other groups, though some of it is money to charities which fund militants.
More later.
Considering that you’ve been arguing throughout this thread that you’re unconvinced that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were working together, I find it amusing that your ‘proof’ of Saudi funding of Al-Qaeda involves a payment to the Taliban.
Fair enough, but yah, I’d think that being able to put official “ministry of defense” license plates on your car would mark you as officially a member of the ministry of defense. I can accept that there’d be disagreement on that point, though…
Bait and switch. Your claim was that he gave money to AQ, not to the Taliban. That SA, as a nation, supported the Taliban is common and public knowledge. That it supported AQ is simply unproven.
And as pointed out, if you’re arguing that there wasn’t a powerful link between AQ and the Taliban, why are you now using a payment to the Taliban to argue that it was support for AQ?
When Bush announced that we had to go to war in Iraq, because of 9/11, my gut feeling was that our own govt had engineered it. That’s all I have to go on, it may or may not be true.
When did he announce that? I seem to recall his justification for invading Iraq having more to do with WMD, and their being a terrorism supporter against Israel.
Hmmm
So an anonymous source claims that at least three years prior to the WTC/Pentagon attack, an “emissary”–purportedly from al Faisal–gave a lot of money to the de facto government of Afghanistan which has close religious ties to the variant of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia. There is no name, no follow up, and no indication that the Taliban passed that money on to al Qaida.
It looks, to me, like a bit of “friend of my friend, enemy of my enemy” background business without any serious connection to al Qaida or terrorism. Given his known actiities at other times in regards to bin Laden, this event–if it even occurred–seems to have no relevance. (Look into which governments supported the Marxists and which the oil companies in Angola some time.)
Given all the evidence against, I’m going to go with ‘not true’.
Try the Pepto.
If the point of ‘engineering’ 9/11 was to justify going to war with Iraq, wouldn’t it have made sense to engineer things so some of the hijackers would be Iraqis? Instead, they engineered a scenario that pretty much required us to go to war with Afghanistan first and push back the war with Iraq by two years.
All right, one thing at a time.
Thanks for the posts about Al Qaeda in Sudan, Lute Skywatcher. I’m going to pick apart the articles a little bit next, but don’t take that personally. I think they add to the context nonetheless.
Ok, so here’s what we got- An Al Qaeda group in Sudan
My first question is what, if any, link this group has to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. I’m just asking! Because later in the article, the name of the group is cropped:
Which might cause confusion, depending on what point you’re trying to make.
obviously they aren’t our friends
Bush isn’t the only guy in the world with reprehensible motives for killing people. And- John Granville sounded like way cool guy.
Ok, there are the 5 guys on trial for murder and probably also conspiracy to commit murder, and apparently other people spray painting ‘Al Qaeda’ on walls. So maybe there are yet more terrorists, or maybe there are some kids who conflate Al Qaeda with Metallica.
I think this is more a description of gang violence than international terrorism. Yes, they killed a very cool American and so have become our problem, but to confuse this with the Al Qaeda of the 911 attacks would be a big mistake.
I should probably expand on my point about terrorists relocating from Sudan to Afghanistan. Let’s say there are two competing pictures. In one, OBL is riding the lead camel in a train of international terrorists, a unified group of loyalists fighting for a cause by, in this particular moment, following their leader across the desert to a new homeland.
The other picture involves OBL shutting off the nozzle of Saudi money and placing it in his pocket. Once he arrives in Afghanistan, he produces the Saudi money nozzle and begins attracting a new crowd of fanatical recruits.
The key difference between the two versions is that one is centered on OBL as the key driver of the whole situation. In the other version OBL is more of an agent, wielding someone else’s power.
The articles paint a picture of Al Qaeda terrorists in Sudan, but they don’t depict terrorists following OBL from Sudan to Afghanistan.
Yer right, Tom. If I ignore the BS I’m a happier person.
This is a disturbingly common notion, and frankly it’s logic for the townspeople of a Monty Python skit. Did it ever occur to you at all that if our government engineered 9/11 in order to go to war with Iraq they might . . . you know . . . frame Iraq?
The logic issue has already been addressed a couple of times, but in the interest of the Straight Dope, I need to point out the historical error, as well:
While Cheney repeatedly linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to the WTC/Pentagon attacks, Bush was generally careful to avoid making a direct connection, relying more on the theme that the WTC/Pentagon attacks were a wake-up call, telling us to go forth and eliminate terrorism wherever we found it in the world, (unless the terrorists were our friends, of course, or even if the “bad guys” were not actually terrorists, as in the case of Hussein and Iraq).
(There was at least one occasion when Bush declared that Iraq was “probably not” tied to the WTC/Pentagon attacks on Sunday while by Friday Cheney was repeating the lie that they were linked.)
The fact that these guys even exist are prompting people to talk about al Qaeda’s presence in Sudan.
I had the month wrong but:
Point is, the number of Sudanese that support al Qaeda is definitely not zero.
Well, I have to agree with the other poster that Ministry of Defense license plates don’t necessarily make someone a member of the Ministry, but it is a far cry from living mostly as a fugitive as I have imagined. That one is news to me, thanks.
The Observer article is right to the point too, good one, I have not seen any of that information until now. I will probably have to capitulate on the point that the Taliban was not a fair target.
Good for you, seriously.
Ok. My hangup about the location of the training camps isn’t to deny their existence. I don’t know where they are or how many there are, and the difficulty in finding this information made it seem like it is some kind of secret. My feeling was that there are not very many of them and that they are along the Pakistan border. No way to confuse them with the entire territory of Afghanistan. To go with this, I still can’t get an estimate of the number of AQ guys in Afghanistan. I suspect it could be a very low number, maybe just tens of guys. Taken together, AQ seems to me pretty easy to take out militarily- destroy the camps, kill everybody there, and then it is a matter of chasing down a few fugitives. It would probably involve peeving the Taliban mightily, but wouldn’t require an occupation. It could be over almost as soon as it started.
Obviously that isn’t how it went down. You’re right about #2. If I could find a good set of maps of the first year or so of military action, I could compare it to the location of the camps and, I thought, be convinced that taking out the terrorists was a sideshow.
I considered a pipeline as a motive, but that idea didn’t go anywhere- it was discussed probably a dozen pages ago. Depending on how responsible the Saudis really are for the Taliban/AQ, and considering the political near-impossibility of war with them, I thought it might be a way to break their toys while still doing business with them. Or maybe it had to do with the blank check a wartime president gets from Congress. W and Cheney were a rather suspicious pair, who knows what they could be trying to do? I looked into various things and learned some things, but I never had much certainty about the underlying motive.
I always thought the camps could be destroyed and AQ eliminated without occupying the country. I thought would be at least worth a try. I saw AQ as operating pretty much independently of the Taliban, which made attacking the Taliban either a big mistake or some kind of exploit of people’s post-911 feelings.
It depends on how responsible the Saudis are for the Taliban and AQ. Since our relationship with the Saudis is so important, I don’t believe we would participate in a major conflict with them under almost any circumstances. Maybe for this reason their role was hidden? Talk about Saudi involvement was in fact omitted from the 911 commission report… Where does it lead in terms of US action? Who knows? If information about a major player in the terrorism picture is omitted, what is left might be portrayed or acted upon in a variety of ways.
But it looks like FinnAgain has filled in some of the blanks for me. I wasn’t convinced the Taliban were cooperating actively with AQ. Now that I have reason to believe they probably were, well, the Saudi money issue might still be significant, maybe not. It is still something of a developing story, I’ll just keep an eye on it.