Reuters is reporting that US forces have captured terrorist leader Abu Abbas in Baghdad. He's best remembered for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro back in '85. The group struck a brave blow for Palestinian rights by pushing an invalid Jew into the Med. The capture of Abbas follows last year's assassination of Abu Nidal, the bin Laden of the 80's. Strangely, he was also in Baghdad. Who knows who else found their way into the city. It's almost as if Saddam were putting together a Best of the 80's Terror Tour.
Given how loudly the appeasers protested about the linkage of Saddam with terrorism, it's curious that Abbas would be in Iraq's capital. Also curious is the terrorist training camp we've uncovered, complete with airliner fuselage. Still harder to explain is the presence of the al-Qaeda affiliate "Ansar al-Islam" which operated freely in northern Iraq. And of course the bounties that Saddam was paying to the families of suicide bombers in the West Bank wouldn't rise to the level of "terrorist ties", right?
Chagrin is one emotion completely foreign to the Leftish psyche. They'll remain as willfully blind to this evidence as they are to the scenes of jubilation that greeted the "invading" and "imperialistic" Anglo-American troops.
Posted by Discoshaman at avril 16, 2003 03:02 AM | TrackBack
Gee, that's a nice straw man you set up there, Disco...but the point wasn't links to terrorism in general, it was links to al-Qaeda. For a little detail on Abbas, see the following excerpt from a Reuters story.
BTW the Italians do still want to extradite him, but if the Israelis say he's renounced violence I'm hard pressed to believe that his arrest is a blow to the war on terrorism...
Abbas was sentenced in absentia in Italy to life in prison for planning the hijacking. Although he was the target of a manhunt after the incident, Washington dropped a warrant for his arrest several years ago.
"The Palestinian-Israeli interim agreement signed on September 28, 1995 stated that members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation must not be detained or tried for matters they committed before the Oslo peace accord of September 13, 1993," Erekat said.
"This interim agreement was signed on the U.S. side by President Clinton and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher," Erekat added.
Dore Gold, an Israeli government spokesman, welcomed Abbas's arrest on Monday by U.S. special forces.
"It's been 18 years since Abu Abbas and his organisation hijacked the Achille Lauro, and now after 18 years, justice has been done at last," Gold said.
In 1998, the Israeli Supreme Court, citing the interim peace deals with the Palestinians, declared Abbas immune from prosecution in Israel over the ship's hijacking.
"The late Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by despicable people and his blood cries out, but (Abbas) cannot be brought to trial -- in any event, not in Israel," the court said at the time.
Abbas was allowed to return to the Gaza Strip by an Israeli Security Committee which concluded he had renounced violence.
1. His support of terrorism in general was a rationale for attack, not merely al-Queda. Inconvenient for you that just today the Marines uncovered ANOTHER terrorist training camp in Iraq, isn't it? And the Ansar al-Islam group operating freely in Iraq is more than enough to substantiate him lending substantive aid to al-Queda.
2. Even if the decision to allow him into the West Bank weren't fraught with politics, given that it tookplace within the pressure-cooker of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the pre-1993 amnesty, you still haven't responded to the rest of the evidences of Saddam's complicity with terrorism. Which is hardly surprising.
Posted by: at avril 16, 2003 06:40 PMYou're right, it's hardly surprising that I haven't responded to evidence you haven't presented...
Followed the link to Ansar, and the evidence looked pretty thin - "speculation" from the Kurds and the Bush administration? And the reason they operated freely is they were in the part of Iraq beyond Saddam's control.
Besides, al-Qaeda's loose structure makes it incredibly easy for lazy hacks like me to slap the headline-grabbing phrase "links to al-Qaeda" on just about any group with more than three or four Muslim members.
Bounties for suicide bombers in the West Bank - I'm honestly not sure if they should be considered part of America's war. They were going on well before September 11, and seem to be directed at a particular issue rather than just the general anti-Western hatred that I think of as the enemy in the war on terror.
Sorry, haven't seen the stuff about the terrorist training camps. (It's sorta hard to know how to search when a) you're a lazy hack and b) your main source of info is a news service that has a policy of not using the word "terrorist" for any organization.)
I'm pretty sure Saddam had some pretty nasty links to terrorism - just don't think anything that's been revealed so far reaches that level. Busting up a geriatric ward for has-beens like Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas isn't a victory in the war on terror, no matter how loudly the U.S. shouts about it.
Posted by: The Liberal Media at avril 17, 2003 12:06 PM