THE TANGLED WEB OF TERRORISM

From UPI:

While Washington has yet to deliver convincing proof of Baghdad's connections to al Qaida, Saddam Hussein will have a harder time denying reports from Manila about his links to another Muslim terrorist group. The Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs said that it has intelligence reports linking an Iraqi diplomat in Manila to the Abu Sayyaf Group, blamed for a bomb blast that killed a U.S. soldier in Zamboanga City in October 2002. A U.S. Special Forces soldier and two Filipinos were killed when the bomb exploded outside a karaoke bar. A second American soldier was wounded in the blast. According to Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople, military intelligence officials traced phone calls between Iraq's Second Secretary Consul Husham Z. Hussain and ASG guerrillas. Ople said that Hussain "knows that we are monitoring his activities. The intelligence reports are very detailed but I am not allowed to fully disclose it because it will compromise their assets and sources of information."

Abu Sayyaf is, among other things, al Qaeda's Philippine branch office. It's also the group to which one Ramzi Yousef belonged. Yousef is the convicted mastermind behind both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Project Bojinka, a planned simulaneous attack on a dozen US airliners crossing the Pacific. Bojinka was foiled, leading to Yousef's arrest. According to some research I've run across here and there, Bojinka might have been one of two reasons that Terry Nichols traveled to the Philippines in the months prior to his attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The other reason, according to many sources, would have been to receive training on making the ANFO bomb that he and Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.

If Saddam has hard ties to Abu Sayyaf, that puts him a step closer to Oklahoma City, and ties him to the 1993 WTC blast. That's two terrorist attacks on US soil with possible ties to Saddam.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting piece about suspicions that US law enforcement was aware of the threat to the Murrah Building long before April 19, 1995. Its angle is that white supremacists living in Elohim City, Oklahoma had been planning to blow it up since 1983 (which seems to be true), and that the McVeigh/Nichols attack was the fulfillment of that long plot. April 19 was significant in this scenario because a confederate of Elohim City was executed for an unrelated crime on that date. It is apparently true that McVeigh had close connections to Elohim City (which was more or less a racist commune), but it's equally apparent that US intel sources also had some warning that something big was about to happen in the heartland, and that it had radical Islamic fingerprints. In particular, the Saudis had reportedly warned a CIA agent that Iraqi agents were in place and about to strike just a day or two prior to the deadly explosion. Which story is true? Well, they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. White supremacists and radical Islamicists had a confluence of interests, which was opposition to the US government. It's not unreasonable to imagine them working together, with the American contingent providing the necessary mobility and access that US citizens have, while the Islamicists may have provided training and other support. Oklahoma City is sort of like a fractal--the more closely you examine it, the more confusing detail you see.

(thanks to Chris and Dave)