Why, thank you, Psycho4Bud, for the welcome (<bow>), and a toast to Man Beast's debut as well. I have been keeping up with these forums for a few months now, but have only recently made up my mind to become a member of this community, in part - perhaps selfishly, I will admit - due to a legal quandary I got myself into for which I was hoping I could get some counsel (see my post in "Legal"). But I'm glad I finally got around to registering for one reason or another, and I'm happy to be here among you people.

As far as Fishman's all-too-popular misbelief is concerned, I would have it in me to write twenty pages worth of threads arguing against it, but I'll settle for jotting down just a handful of additional facts in order to keep Mr. Khodada's lone interview-excerpt some company:

- Photographs taken in 2000 show Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Midhar and Salem al-Hazmi and Tawfiz bin Atash at a meeting with Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi intelligence agent. Al-Midhar and the al-Hazmi brothers went on to take part in the 9/11 hijackings, and bin Atash went on to plan the bombing of the USS Cole.
- Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made public, before the U.N. Security Council on February 6, 2003, evidence that bin Laden met with representatives of Iraq's Special Security Organization (at the time run by Qusay Hussein) on at least eight different occasions.
- In 1998, Saddam vowed to aid Al Qaeda in the area of "weapons development." Writes Stephen Hayes on the Weekly Standard of June 28, 2004: "The following year, according to 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 15, bin Laden took the Iraqis up on their pledge. Farouk al-Hijazi (an Iraqi intelligence officer) told his interrogators in May 2003 that bin Laden had specifically requested [from Iraq] Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines as well as training camps in Iraq."
- Abdul Rahman Yasin (look him up) was given a house and a monthly salary by Saddam's regime once he returned to Iraq in 1993.
- This one, in my view, should do it for anyone: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was working out of Iraq long before the coalition intervention. When he was wounded by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in May 2002, he went on to be treated at the Olympic hospital in Baghdad, at the time run by Uday Hussein. He began setting up training camps in northern Iraq immediately after his recovery. The U.S. asked Iraq to hand him over on two different occasions. Saddam refused to both times. (Source: section, which has yet to be disproved, of "Deeply Troubling Evidence on Iraq," Powell's case before the U.N. Security Council.)

This is getting way too long, even for the standards of a forum titled "Politics." For the sake of the reader's patience, I will stop here, but without first assuring that there is much, much more to be read on the issue.