Asking my MIHOPer friends: Why did they frame alQaeda & not Iraq?

[Bucky]

If the Bush administration was so danged fired up to start a war in Iraq that they blew up the World Trade Center, how come they made it look like alQaeda was behind 9/11 instead of Saddam Hussein?

Hold on... don't answer just yet. Let me get this asbestos suit on first.

Okay, fire away. How come they framed the wrong patsies?

[Virginia Dare]

1. It was a two-fer-oner....

remember they went to war in Afghanistan first, then Iraq.

[seemslikeadream]

2. then Iran

n/t

THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!

[Grateful for Hope]

14. Exactly

And, then they proceeded to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda with all the lies they could muster.

[seabeyond]

3. i think there is the possibility they paid and used al queda

i think they wanted to shift the blame on iraq and it didnt work. if...... they did it.

there was money that was given to taliban right before, 14 million? there were meetings with bin laden. i think they worked with these people to get it done. first thing out of bush mouth was iraq

[Atman]

4. That's easy!

They can chase Al Q all over the world, wherever they want to take the fight, like little Jeffey in a Family Circus cartoon -------------------X------------>

[DS1]

5. Look, it's as simple as this

It needed to be done in order to make people think Bush was doing something about the attacks, and helped him frame the argument against Iraq.


Look, people are calling for Rummy to go, no war in Iran, etc. But face the facts, and face the history, we ARE going into Iran, and Syria, and wherever else the neocon machine wants. They've set the process in motion, and have clearly stated that the next 10 years will be a long, hard slog. They don't care what we think, and until more than one person at a time on the Dem's side grows a f*cking spine for a change, they will continue to march through the steps clearly laid out by PNAC. It's really simple.

[Bucky]

8. I guess I'm looking for an explanation of how this band of screw ups could

do everything right in arranging the most devastating terror attack in US history without leaving a direct clue... and then not do one blessed thing right in the subsequent five years--with the possible exception of killing Paul Wellstone. It doesn't quite jell for me that the guys who couldn't plan ahead for shit could pull off this almost seamless frame up of alQaeda--and yet the very next morning (or really later that same afternoon) were already trying to pin it all on Iraq.

[DS1]

9. You think they're screwing up Iraq, I "think" they're screwing up Iraq

but they don't care. That's the difference in how they see it, and how we see it.

[Sinti]

10. MIHOP or not consider this

First and foremost, Al Qaeda is the natural first born child of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, a loosely formed group of guerrilla fighters from many nations, financed and armed by our CIA, and to a lesser extent DoD, who actually beat the Soviets back in the day. (Hurray for them!) In the early '80s we LOVED the Mujahadeen -- then all of a sudden we hated them ... but I digress.

Al Qaeda as a bad guy is very fluid, he can be anywhere, and anyone. He is present in all of the ME, North Africa, and parts of Asia. He could be your next door neighbor if we want him to be. He is the bad guy you want, if you want to follow the PNAC plan, which goes to Iran, Syria in small part, Uzbekistan, and other locales in its meandering path to world domination.

Secondly, why do you think they haven't done anything right in the past five years? I suppose to you the mess in Iraq is a real problem? Financially for their backers, and for the purpose of sustaining a military presence, I can promise you a civil war is exactly what they'd want.

Nonetheless, regardless of who caused the Emergency 911 incident, if I had to pick a bad guy to blame it on, it would be Al Qaeda (the Base), the key to open all doors.

[petgoat]

13. Seeing the benefits the Bushcists achieve from their supposed

incompetence makes me question that it's not planned.

I knew a woman once who did "incompetence" to great benefit to herself.

They didn't do everything right in the attacks. They left evidence of explosive
demolitions of the towers, the failure to defend the Pentagon with SAM missiles
(W had them at his hotel the night before 9/11), leaving Bush in that classroom
in Florida when the nation was under attack, Cheney apparently ordering the shoot-down
of flight 93 before he was authorized to do so and just as the passengers were taking
control of the plane, the necessity for major coverups re: WTC steel and the NORAD
timeline--these all look like major screwups.

Anti-arab prejudice aids the seamless frameup of al Qaeda. It could be that Osama bin
Laden aids the seamless frameup of al Qaeda. Our credulous, lazy, and craven news
media aid the frameup of al Qaeda, including docudramas staged by A&E and the History
Channel.

[Old and In the Way]

20. Perhaps Iraq is screwed up on purpose (SCRUOP)

Keep Iraqi Oil off the market means Saudi Oil worth more. Maximize the value until that runs out, then get serious about putting the Iraqi product on the market. To do that, one needs to keep Iraq destabilized and keep the oil in the ground.

[DemInDistress]

24. they buried the clues under "Executive Privilege" and shut

others up with "State Secrets Act" NO? Also, don't forget the denials of FOIL...

correct me if I'm wrong

thanks

[MadHound]

6. Because Iraq didn't control the vital territory

That Afghanistan does, where the natural gas pipeline is to be built. Remember, back in June of '01 Colin Powell was in Afghanistan, promising their leaders "either a carpet of bombs or a carpet of gold" depending on how those Afghan leaders decided on the pipe line. Funny, they decided against it, and six months later they were getting that "carpet of bombs", neatly tied into our search for Osama.

Bushco knew that with manipulation of the media, it would be easy to get people in favor of going after Iraq. A few lies here, a little inuendo there, presto, instant war. Would have been tougher if they had reversed matters, initially tying Iraq to 911 and then trying to drag Afghanistan along. After all, it wasn't that long ago that Afghanies were "freedom fighters", while Iraq and Saddam have been hated for a long while now.

[libertypirate]

7. They tried.... Links provided :)

http://miawmdwtfw.blogspot.com/2001/09/bush-administration-officials-tried-to.html

It is also in the Constitution in Crisis report from Conyers..


http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/iraqrept.html


Former General Wesley Clark tells Tim Russert on Meet the Press that Bush administration officials tried to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks, beginning on the day of the attacks. Clark states:“There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein. Well, it came from the White House, it came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, ‘You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein,’ I said, ‘But–I’m willing to say it, but what’s your evidence?’ And I never got any evidence.”
“Media Silent on Clark's 9/11: Comments Gen. says White House pushed Saddam
link without evidence” FAIR. 20 June 2003. Available:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842

[dailykoff]

11. Al Qaeda was already on the payroll.

That's a good question and I think the answer is that AQ is basically a CIA front organization used to carry out terror attacks wherever needed.

It's pretty well known that the title means "database" in Arabic and it was originally compiled as a kind of rolodex of CIA helpers in the Middle East. The official story is that it rebelled and became a fundamentalist Islamic terror outfit but I find that hard to believe.

[Chomp]

12. Very good question Bucky

I want to highlight what I think is an a important misconception that has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread.

Some people are misinterpretting the attempts of the * admistration to connect Iraq with AQ post-9/11 as evidence that the admistration tried to blame 9/11 on Iraq. This is supposed to be an answer to Bucky's question: "They tried to blame Iraq, but didn't pull it off".

WRONG. That is an utterly, utterly misguided reading of the events.

If the administration truly wanted to MIHOP and then blame it on Iraq, then surely they would have fitted up some better "evidence" than the soft, generalised accusations we saw from them post 9/11? Wouldn't we have seen fake documents? Wouldn't we have seen Colin Powell at the UN with schematic maps of the movements of terrorists in and out of Iraq? Wouldn't we have seen Iraqi "dissidents" blaming Saddam for the attack?

Of course we would. We would have seen all this and a lot more. THAT is how it would have looked if they were trying to "blame" Iraq.

Instead, we got an endless drip-drip of diffuse, abstract, tangential connections between AQ and Iraq from Runsfeld, Cheney et al. All kinds of soundbites and lies and half-truths featuring AQ and Iraq in the same sentance.

But that was NOT a serious attempt to blame Iraq. No, it was an attempt to justify the Iraq policy through muddying the waters and planting in people's minds the notion that all these bloody ragheads are the same and all we need to just go kick any of their asses.

Making clearly bogus, generalised, unsubstantiated claims about Iraq and AQ was an attempt to further confuse a confusing picture. It was NOT a serious effort to directly blame.

[seemslikeadream]

15. The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm9.showMessage?topicID=84.topic

The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

Martin A.Lee
RAZOR Magazine September 2004

Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.

The CIA often works in mysterious ways - and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly - an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.

“The Muslim Brothers are at the root of a lot of our troubles,” says Col. W. Patrick Lang, one of several US intelligence veterans interviewed for this article . Formerly a high-ranking Middle East expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency Lang considers al-Qaeda to be “a descendent of the Brotherhood.

For many years, the American espionage establishment had operated on the assumption that Islam was inherently anti-communist and there fore could be harnessed to facilitate US objectives. American officials viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as “a secret weapon” in the shadow war against the Soviet Union and it’s Arab allies, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA case officer who was right in the thick of things in the Middle East and Central Asia during his 21 year career as a spy. In Sleeping with the Devil, a book he wrote after quitting the CIA Baer explains how the United States “made common cause with the Brothers” and used them “to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan and plenty of other places”. This covert relationship; unraveled when the Cold War ended, whereupon an Islamic Frankenstein named Osama bin Laden lurched into existence

more

[wildbilln864]

16. maybe because....

the plan was to take control of the entire ME and not just one small country. AQ is everywhere!

[rman]

17. Because Al Qaeda = terrorists (= new boogieman), while Iraq/Saddam

was just a bad guy, having nothing to do with terrorism.

on edit:
Because of this it is far more plausible for Al Qaeda to commit a terrorist act, than is was for Iraq to do so. Iraq is even less plausible because it was being contained thanks to GW1 and the sanctions.

So they framed the right patsies alright.

[leftofthedial]

18. because they needed a boogeyman

that would persist far beyond Saddam

and they knew Murkans are too stupid to care about the difference.

[seatnineb]

19. 9/11 was designed to frame up and attack Saudi Arabia.

That is my personal take/opinion.

[Old and In the Way]

21. I thought it was quite odd how Saudi Arabia never really refuted the OCT.

I think that the we all aware of those fingered as the 9/11 hi-jackers had some incriminating connections to the Royal Family. Indeed 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi's. It may well be that the RF were presented with both carrots and sticks. Play along with the OCT and we'll let you stay in power...and we'll even take out that secular neighbor, Saddam Hussein. We'll move our bases and make sure the Iraqi oil doesn't flow, so you'll enjoy even higher value for your product. Don't go along, we'll make sure AQ is connected to the House of Saud and you'll be history. Perhaps that's why Dick and Rummy shared our Iraqi military plans with the Bandar.


from: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/60minutes/main612067.shtml

But, it turns out, two days before the president told Powell, Cheney and Rumsfeld had already briefed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador.

”Saturday, Jan. 11, with the president's permission, Cheney and Rumsfeld call Bandar to Cheney's West Wing office, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Myers, is there with a top-secret map of the war plan. And it says, ‘Top secret. No foreign.’ No foreign means no foreigners are supposed to see this,” says Woodward.

“They describe in detail the war plan for Bandar. And so Bandar, who's skeptical because he knows in the first Gulf War we didn't get Saddam out, so he says to Cheney and Rumsfeld, ‘So Saddam this time is gonna be out, period?’ And Cheney - who has said nothing - says the following: ‘Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast.’"

After Bandar left, according to Woodward, Cheney said, “I wanted him to know that this is for real. We're really doing it."

[seatnineb]

22. The 2 biggest guys in the House Of Saud have questioned the OTC....

Saudi Arabia, on Saudi television, Crown Prince(now King) Abdullah told a strikingly different story about who was to blame.

NBC News translated Abdullah's remarks from Arabic: “Zionism is behind it. It has become clear now. It has become clear to us. I don’t say, I mean... It is not 100 percent, but 95 percent that the Zionist hands are behind what happened.”

Prince Nayef, the Saudi Interior Minister said, “Al-Qaida is backed by Israel and Zionism.”

As for the alleged Saudi doublespeak, a Saudi official in the United States defends the remarks, arguing that Zionists and others who argue for regime change in Saudi Arabia “share the same objective as Osama bin Laden.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5218227 /

I have posted the above in several threads over the last couple of months.......

It has to be one of the most underrated articles concerning 9/11 that is out there............

[Old and In the Way]

23. Those remarks are for the home audience.

I can see that they could be telling their citizens one thing, but taking a different position with the US audience. I don't recall that the Sauds made any hi-profile attempt to refute the basic OCT with the US population.

[seatnineb]

25. Yeah!........ it proves that the Sauds are bunch of lyin' fuckers!

That being the case........why should we believe anything that emanates from Saudi Arabia.......including the allegation that 15 of their boys were among the 19 9/11 hijackers!


Check this out!

“Thank God, the commission has acquitted your country as well as Islam. This is very important for us.

I can assure you that your government is going ahead in the path of truth and justice,” Prince Abdullah said while addressing a group of citizens who voiced their support to the Kingdom’s efforts to stamp out terrorism.

Prince Abdullah reiterated that Saudi security forces would continue their campaign to hunt down the remaining terrorists on the wanted list. “With regard to the deviant group, we are after them,” he said referring to Al-Qaeda sympathizers.
http://www.arabnews.com/9-11/?article=13&d=&m=&y=

[JackRiddler]

26. Hey you know they put A LOT of money into creating al-Qaeda...

And now that it's been created, it's a true quality asset, you can chase "it" into Afghanistan (as planned, if discreetly), Iraq (as planned and yelled about for years in advance), Iran, the Phillippines, Somalia, Sudan... Saudi Arabia if that's ever judged necessary... also, every corner of the United States.

You name it, even Venezuela has been mentioned as a home of al-Qaeda.

[file83]

27. A war against a nation lasts several years. War against "terror" lasts for

decades and decades. Perpetual war is the goal. States can be accused of "sponsoring" terror, not the other way around. So as you chase terror, you can use it as an excuse to topple nations.