Al Qaeda were not there in significant numbers
Define significant. Nineteen terrorists killed over 3000 people on 9/11. A handful plotted and planned an attack on Jordan from Baghdad before the invasion of Iraq ... an attack that they hoped would kill tens of thousands (some estimates are as high as 80,000) ... including EVERYONE in the US embassy in Amman. It doesn't take very many terrorists to do significant damage or kill huge numbers of people ... especially if they were to get access to WMD.
and were not there because Saddam wanted them there.
You have no basis at all for claiming that. None whatsoever.
Saddam OPENLY APPLAUDED the actions of the 9/11 hijackers. He was the ONLY head of state in the entire world to do that. After 9/11, he had murals with his face celebrating the event painted and put up in Iraq. Like this one:
http://www.nationalreview.com/images/mural3.jpg . We know that Saddam gave safe haven to one of the 1991 WTC bombers and other notorious terrorists.
We know that in the decade before our invasion, all the way up to the invasion itself, that Saddam's regime was friendly with and supportive of terrorist movements around the world. Saddam awarded the families of homicide bombers in Israel cash, thus encouraging such attacks. He supported the terrorist movement in the Philippines. In fact, a fax sent on June 6, 2001 shows that Saddam's government provided financial aid to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf is an al-Qaida offshoot co-founded by bin Laden's brother-in-law.
But not just money was provided.
http://www.lauramansfield.com/j/031706_iraq.asp reports that "Declassified documents from Iraq show 3,000 Saudi and Iraqi mujihideen depart Iraq in Nov 2001 to fight US in Afghanistan. The newly declassified documents ... snip ... show that Saddam Hussein’s government was aware not just of the presence of Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi, but also was aware that the Anbar province in Iraq was being used as a launch point for organized groups of jihadis headed to fight the United States in Afghanistan."
During the invasion, our forces discovered suicide bomb making factories and were attacked by numerous individuals clearly using terrorist tactics and Iraqi civilians as shields. Numerous sources indicate that camps for training terrorists were built by Saddam's regime including the notorious Salman Pak. During the invasion, our soldiers found clear evidence (including videos) that show the camp was used to train terrorists. Numerous non-Iraqis were encountered in the vicinity and locals said the camp was used to train al-Qaeda. Marine Corp General Vincent Brooks stated on April 6, 2003: "There was a raid last night by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. What they raided was a training camp near Salman Pak....This raid occurred in response to information that had been gained by coalition forces from some foreign fighters we encountered from other countries, not Iraq. And we believe that this camp had been used to train these foreign fighters in terror tactics.... That's just one of a number of examples we've found where there is training activity happening inside of Iraq. It reinforces the likelihood of links between his regime and external terrorist organizations, clear links with common interests. Some of these fighters came from Sudan, some from Egypt, and some from other places, and we've killed a number of them and we've captured a number of them."
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/024eyieu.asp "John Murtha's claim--that there was no connection "with terrorism in Iraq itself"--might come as a surprise to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines. In early April 2003, they found a ten-acre terrorist training camp ten miles outside of Baghdad. In an interview at the time with an embedded reporter from Stars & Stripes, Captain Aaron Robertson said: "We believe this is a training camp where Iraqis trained forces for the Palestine Liberation Front. This is what we would refer to as a sensitive site. This is clearly a terrorist training camp, the type Iraq claimed did not exist." ... snip ... The Marines recovered training manuals in Arabic and English, along with rosters of Palestinians trained there. Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an Iraqi "intelligence-coded" memo that included lists of "Palestinians trained in Iraq." In fact, Saddam Hussein boasted of his support for Palestinian terrorists and provided the families of Palestinian "martyrs" rewards of $25,000. Another captured document details those payments."
And Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard reported similar training also took place at camps in Samarra and Ramadi under the direction of elite Iraqi military units. He reported (
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/550kmbzd.asp ) that documents reveal that "in 1998, Iraq began training 2,000 Arab Islamic terrorists a year and that this training continued through 2002. ... snip ... As a U.S. intelligence official explained to this author, the United States has interrogated the Iraqis who trained the foreign terrorists and has their accounts of that training, along with material like group pictures of the graduating classes."
The 9/11 Commission Report clearly states, “There are indications that [by 2001] the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam (
BAC - the al-Qaeda group in Northern Iraq) against the common Kurdish enemy.” In her book, Masters of Chaos, author and U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson describes Ansar al Islam's camp at Sargat near the Iranian border. “[A Special Forces sergeant] believed, given the heavy fortifications, ample weaponry, and quality of the fighters, that his team had just invaded the world’s largest existing terrorist training camp since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” writes Robinson. “This was no way-station, in his view. It was remote yet in the heart of the region, so radicals could wreak havoc all over the Middle East.” According to Robinson, the American Green Berets discovered among the dead in Sargat: foreign ID cards, airline-ticket receipts, visas, and passports from Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran."
“There were terrorists training in Iraq prior to our invasion of that country,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John Bruce Blount, former chief of staff of Allied Forces Southern Europe. “No question about it. There also were many things Saddam was doing – money, passports, visas, you name it – to further the terrorists ability to operate in other places throughout the world.”
After the fall of Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi received medical care in one of Baghdad's hospitals. While he was there, terrorist plots were hatched against us and our allies, including the one against Jordan and the US embassy in Amman. And when Iraq was told about the presence of al-Zarqawi, nothing was done to capture him. In fact, when one of al-Zarqawi's *associates*, Abu Yasim Sayyem, finally was detained by the IIS, the CIA reported that Saddam himself ordered his release ... even over the objections of the IIS official who detained the man. And documents discovered after the war and publically released confirm this event. And according to the CIA, a former IIS officer believed that Saddam released Sayyem because he "would participate in striking U.S. forces when they entered Iraq."
A 2002 CIA document summarized its overall view of possible Iraqi complicity regarding al-Zarqawi's presence and activities this way: "The presence of al-Qa'ida militants on Iraqi soil poses many questions. We are uncertain to what extent Baghdad is actively complicit in this use of its territory by al-Qa'ida operatives for safehaven and transit. Given the pervasive presence of Iraq's security apparatus, it would be difficult for al-Qa'ida operatives to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or without at least their acquiescence."
During a 2004 visit to Kazakhstan, the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."
US intelligence revealed a letter by a member of Saddam's Al Mukabarat to a superior, dated Sept. 15, 2001, reporting on a pre-9/11 conversation between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani consul. The letter indicated bin Laden and the Taliban were in contact with Iraq, made a specific visit to Baghdad, and said the U.S. had proof Saddam's regime and al-Qaida were cooperating to hit a target in the U.S..
Among the documents captured during the invasion was a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals. The letter asks members of Saddam's military for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for a suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests."
http://iraqdocs.blogspot.com/ "You will note that all three translations of this document -- performed by three different people working independently of each other -- all translate this section almost identically. All three explicitly show that the Iraqi military had ordered a call for volunteers to carry out suicide attacks on American interests, six months before 9/11 and two years almost to the day prior to our invasion."
Another document, from 1999, revealed plans for a "Blessed July" operation. According to a translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, the magazine Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."
Saddam is heard on a 1997 tape predicting terrorism would soon be coming to the U.S., while his son-in-law, who was in charge of Saddam's WMD effort, gloats about lying to U.N. weapons inspectors to hide the extent of Iraq's WMD program. Saddam, knowing he's being taped, declares Iraq would never be the one to do that ... but the statements made by his staff on the tape seem almost enthusiatic about the prospect.
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/768rwsbj.asp "From the March 1, 2004 issue: An Iraqi prisoner details Saddam's links to Osama bin Laden's terror network. ... snip ... a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al Qaeda." Read that carefully ... it's an eye opener. There were far more connections between Saddam's regime and Ansar al Islam than the anti-war community will acknowledge.
In the above, I've only touched the surface of the evidence showing you are completely wrong about Saddam's links to terrorism and the threat he posed to us in that regard. Care to comment?
Would there have been a better way of dealing with them?
And I'd really like to hear what you would have done about that if you want to insist that invasion was not the solution. Specifics, please. And don't just ignore the rest of the threat posed by Saddam, either.
And you still need to address the Lancet 2 data since the same researchers did it and they said it was a better study. ROTFLOL!