August 21, 2008 - WND.com
© Jack Cashill

by Jack Cashill

In late April 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer replayed an earlier conversation he had had with the Iraqi foreign minister, the wily Tariq Aziz.

One overlooked part of this conversation caught the very sharp eye of aspiring filmmaker Chris Kusnell.

When Blitzer asked Aziz about the fate of missing U.S. Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher, Aziz answered that Speicher was killed in a crash on night one of the Gulf War.

As proof, Aziz volunteered that Speicher was not among the POWs released “immediately after the end of the war in April 19, 1991."

“I stopped right there,” Kusnell tells me, “and thought, ‘What the f---- is he talking about?  The war ended February 26.’”

This set Kusnell to wondering—“Why would Saddam Hussein's mouthpiece go on American television, on the worldwide face of western cable news, and state that April 19 was the day the war ended?” 

It slowly dawned on Kusnell that April 19, 1995 was the day of the Oklahoma City bombing.  “To me it sounded like a taunt,” says Kusnell, “like Saddam was slyly taking credit for something he'd never been able to take credit for.” 

Kusnell started looking for other significant dates, and the result is an eye-popping video called Genesis of Terror: Saddam, Osama and the War on America.

[Webmaster's Note: See Kusnell's video at bottom of this column.]

On August 7, 1990, for instance, American troops moved into Saudi Arabia on the first day of Operation Desert Shield. On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda blew up American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

More obvious still is the aforementioned February 26, the date on which—in 1991--the Gulf War whimpered to its humiliating end.

On February 26, 1993, the second anniversary, Ramzi Yousef and company planted their bomb under the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring more than a thousand.

Yousef just happened to be traveling on an Iraqi passport. He and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American-born Iraqi then living in Baghdad, managed to escape the country.

Scarred from spilled chemicals, Yasin fled to Baghdad where he lived under Saddam’s protection until the toppling of Saddam’s regime ten years later.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not an al Qaeda job. Osama bin Laden denied knowing Yousef before WTC I, and bin Laden was never shy about claiming responsibility where due. The Justice Department did not indict bin Laden for the crime.

When asked about financing, Yousef would cite only “family and friends.” Those friends, most notably “uncle” and fellow Baluchi Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), would finish what Yousef started on September 11, 2001.

Was Saddam willing to use surrogates to attack American interests? Of course he was. “Everyone can cause harm according to their ability and their size,” Saddam told the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in July 1990. “We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you.”

In April 1993, some Arabs tried to do just that. As President Bill Clinton explained, “the Iraqi intelligence service,” using foreign nationals as the hit men, had attempted to assassinate the former President Bush in Kuwait.

In retaliation, on June 25, 1993, Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on the Iraqi intelligence service's principal command-and-control facility in Baghdad.

“Don't tread on us,” thundered Clinton. Someone did. On June 25, 1996, terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds more.

Three weeks later, on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 was blown out of the sky off the coast of Long Island. To his credit, Kusnell does not back away from the obvious connection here.

July 17 was National Liberation Day in Iraq, Saddam’s evil Fourth of July. On that date in 1968 the Baathist Party took power. On that date in 1979 Saddam took power personally.

The TWA 800 incident followed hard on the heels of a FAX from the Islamic Change Movement, likely a name used by Iraqi intelligence, which threatened an act of shocking magnitude against the United States.

A 1999 document found in the files of the Iraqi Intelligence Services—this one planning a series of terrorist acts around the world called “Blessed July”—closes with a handwritten threat of nearly exact wording, “Their appointment is in the morning, and indeed the morning is near."

Whether the downing of TWA 800 resulted from a test gone awry, a terrorist attack or some combination of the two, the White House had been wary enough of an aerial terrorist assault to put the Navy, locked and loaded, up and down the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996.

On February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwah against America, citing its “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people” as a principle reason for the call to “kill all Americans.”

That aggression had begun in earnest on February 23, 1991, when American ground troops launched their hugely successful four day rout of the Iraqi army in Kuwait.

This all brings us back to April 19. As I have argued in detail in the video Mega Fix, the Clintons, in their desperate run-up to the 1996 election, steered all terrorist investigations to their best political outcomes.

After the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, the White House stopped looking seriously for culprits once they realized what great political fodder “right wingers” Nichols and McVeigh made.

And yes, dates mattered. April 19, 1995, we were told repeatedly, was the second anniversary of the tank assault on those “right wingers” at Waco.

As Kusnell shows, however, the elusive John Doe #2 looks shockingly like the real life al Qaeda terrorist, Jose Padilla. Kusnell also shows the troubling quotes on a possible Islamic connection from Clinton sycophant, Richard Clarke.

In Against All Enemies, Clarke addresses the simultaneous visits of Nichols and Ramzi Yousef to the Philippines in general, and Cebu City in particular.

"We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay," writes Clarke, "and were deadly when he returned." This is a connection that should have been aggressively pursued but inexplicably was not.

If we chose to cite April 19, 1995 as the second anniversary of Waco, Aziz and Saddam likely remembered it as the fourth anniversary of the day the Gulf War officially ended, the day the UN Security Council set up UNSCOM, the humiliating entity charged with forcing Iraq's compliance with Resolution 687.

“I just believe the Clintons did everything in their power to hide the fact that Saddam was waging a terrorist war against us for eight years,” says Kusnell.

Agreed.

Chris Kusnell's video (10 mins):
Genesis of Terror: Saddam, Osama and the War on America

Who is Jack Cashill?