WOA there, your way outta line. Lets not confuse this movie with your Anti-America agenda Myrk.

I love how people can say we yanks deserve to have our innocents killed because we are consumer based society. Lets face it is America was to just go poof tomorrow, your country and the rest of them would just die off slow painful deaths. America supports the world. We are the Super Power. And you can just be mad as hell that we are all you want.

We have been bombing people in Iraq, no we have been bombing terrorist and attacking militia in Iraq, not only to protect American lives but lives of everyone in the world. We are also dumping billions of dollars into iraq rebuilding schools, and hospitals. I love how a closed minded fool like yourself can watch the news and assume that what he sees is the only truth. We do a lot of good over there. So I take great offence to you saying we deserve it.

As for all the money in the world.. We already have it. We could buy your country, and iff not we could nuke it off the face of the earth and wait tll it was ready to be re populated, so just stop acting like America has some hidden agenda and we are the bad guys of the world.

then he would also have to believe that the Iraq people had it coming to them as well, hell after attacking their neibors, flying planes into our twin towers etc etc..

One mans facts is another mans rubbish.

For me, V prompted this question: to Fatstrings and all those who think along similar lines, what are you doing? If you honestly believe that the American government allowed or encourage terrorists to attack Americans, what are you doing writing about it on the internet? Shouldn't such extreme action invite outrage or protest beyond the formulation of conspiracy theories?

anyone that's taken highschool econ will agree.. to an extent.

HAY GUYZ WLECOME TO CHINA!!11

seen our gas prices? we havent hit a major new source of oil in years.. hence the push for drilling in alaska. if we made it a practice of bombing for oil, i wouldnt have to pay $30+ to fill my camaro. get a clue. (again, the oil fields in iraq belong to the iraqis... not us. we WILLINGLY gave them up after invading.)

as it looks to me, iran would have caused many many more casualties without the immediate payoff. both iraq and iran threaten the USA and their neighbors, but iraq was more immediate and more vulnerable. if we marched into iran, there would have been a massive army with heavy artillary waiting for us rather than a few republic guards with ak47's. again, just speculation, but that's what i would have done. at the time, saddam repeatedly made threats on the USA and praised the terrorists that attacked us. (not to mention the WsMD, but maybe i shouldn't bring that up again.. such an easy point to defeat.) take a gander at the film "FahrenHYPE 9/11". Really puts things in perspective.

This isn't my point. I'm attacking the logic behind "making the world a safer place" by

a) starting a war, and poorly supporting the invasion afterwards - in turn letting Iran exert more sway over an already troubled region.
b) giving more "reasons" and fuel for terrorists to exist. It's complicated to explain, but by invading Iraq the world ISN'T a safer place, and the US has diminished it's capacity as a superpower greatly. No-one wins, really.

how about some shameless copy and pasting? read em all.. don't stop once you find something to dispute.

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddams hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

So therefore he must actively have been seeking to plot against the US. I wonder if General Pinochet was plotting a coup d'etat when he was in the United Kingdom? Every government harbours characters of questionable morals.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddams mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

The same presentation which was later debunked as being nonsense eh? I wonder how many times our chiefs met Saddam Hussein in the 80's? Didn't Powell resign over all of this? Again, meetings may have been undertaken but how is that a link between

a) Iraq being involved in 9/11
b) Iraq actively funding and aiding the al Qaeda network. You might have a credible argument if you talk about Syria.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

So we're now splitting up the occasions bin Laden met with Iraq? If I wrote this evidence I would surely have lumped this gem with the stuff above. Since when did we all trust the Sudanese anyway? Surely the native government has fish to fry over it's dislike of janjawid and Arab firestarters in it's country. It's also worth noting a large proportion of governments around the world will toe the line the for the US because of economic pressure exerted on them.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

According to Mr Powell. Evidence?

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddams men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

So they've always been good friends. I thought that al Qaeda was liaising actively with Iraqi intelligence in Khartoum, say, in 1994? That's not the mid 90's, is it? Unless of course they were liasing over the issues that the operative has raised here - ie trying to stop clashes between Shia majority groups (such as the assasination attempt against Hussein) and call peace. Doesn't smack of cooperation or good relationships to me. And surely a confession is clouded in doubt anyway, as being the words of others and/or gained under questionable interrogation methods.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraqs mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

Was the Guardian right? I've seen newspapers get things wrong before. It may have reported it, it doesn't make it true.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Janes Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Janes reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaedas No. 2 man.

Now al Qaedas number 2 man. What was he when the communications were underway? This sentence would suggest that he wasn't al Qaeda.

* As recently as 2001, Iraqs embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

Proof? I can't accept this UN speech, when much of it has proved to be false. I don't see why the US Government would knowingly indict Pakistan (indirectly) as turning a blind eye to such activities, when they needed them on side. Again this smacks of speculation.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," Londons Independent reports.

Did he attend the party?

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Ladens fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddams Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: Youll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Ladens group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq."

I can't really dispute this much, but i'd hesitate to take the word of a defector who almost certainly has an agenda to follow.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddams son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Quotes? Again, an agenda to push.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiris bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

Claims to have been. Again unsubstantiated, and hardly surprising that he would meet with Hussein in a extremist pan Arab climate of anti Americanism following the debunking of the Kuwait invasion.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaedas global network.

So they were in Baghdad, operating. By this logic you should go to war with Britain, France, Spain, the USA, hell - just about every country in the world. Terrorist cells of all kinds operate everywhere. Doesn't necessarily mean that there is a link between that and state aided terrorism.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was good," according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

What does that mean, exactly?

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

That's the logical travel route considering Jordans ultra tight security.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawis Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawis cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

Post 2001. I am working on the basis that the CIA, and Colin Powell were implying that Iraq was heavily involved in the September 11th attacks. Either way, he could probably have freely operated within Iraq - the country was run down and not functioning effectively for many years whilst it was under sanctions from the UN Security Council. Considering it's vast desert areas and minimal security intervention in the hostile lands of the Kurds, I wouldn't be surprised if terrorists had training camps there. Wasn't there one in some part of mid-west America? Again, this fails to prove any relation between the state of Iraq being involved in al Qaeda operations.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

Hey look! They met in Iran, kneejerk reactionaries and terrorist sympathisers of the world. How shocking.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did meet. Knowing the invasion of Iraq was imminent, wouldn't it be the logical plan to establish a forward plan for causing havoc for the US occupation forces? Not too hard a job considering the lax border controls and seizure (of lack of) of weapons post invasion.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaedas military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

These are the same chemical weapons plants that have produced so many chemical weapons, and were used by Saddam to prop up his massive arsenal of WMD's eh? Oh, I see.

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddams regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

See above.. also, this doesn't prove anything, again.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

Can't really dispute this, but I fail to see how it plays into the reasoning behind the invasion, which was primarily WMDs.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a Londons Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

HQ to be established - was it? I don't see anything to suggest it was.

Also, the link between Iraq, al Qaeda and the ADF is tenuous at best. Just look at it again.
Also, as I said several times earlier, I wouldn't be surprised at some of these activities, particularly Iraq meddling in other countries affairs. They may have been poking the hornets nest in Uganda, but I'd be certain that they were doing it for their own aims. They don't exactly get along famously with the US, or anyone for that matter. Making (installing) new friends in Uganda is in their foreign policy interests.

You should see some of the groups and activities the US has courted in it's forays and fiddlings in international politics and affairs.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 to undertake jihad," Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekars group was funded by "Saddam Husseins regime in Baghdad."

But it's not al Qaeda. Splitting hairs, but it's true. Again, relates to points I have made earlier.

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islams strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Believed to have. Not did, believed to have.

how about some shameless copy and pasting? read em all.. don't stop once you find something to dispute.

If saddam gave you evidence that the USA was doing something bad, you'd jump at the chance to tell everyone about it and whine about how the US is such a horrible bunch of a-holes,