A little stroll down memory lane with Saddam and Osama, Sept 12 2002 Sen.Fritz Hollings D-S.C. entered a reprint from the Iraqi state newspaper from exactly two months before the attacks of Sept 11 2001 arguably praising bin Laden and naming the targets of the attacks. Hollings, a Democrat, entered this in support of his decision to vote to authorize military action in Iraq.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S8525&position=allHere is a news story from July 21,
2001, before 9/11 of last year, in the
Iraqi news. The name of that particular
newspaper is Al-Nasiriya.
Quoting from it:
Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and a proof
also, of the inability of the American federalism
and the CIA to uncover the man and
uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations
of the world cannot find the man and
continues to go in cycles in illusion and presuppositions.
It refers to an exercise called ‘‘How
Do You Bomb the White House.’’ They
were planning it.
Let me read this to all the colleagues
here:
The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy
phenomenon in the Arab spirit. It is a decision
and a determination that the stolen
Arab self has come to realize after it got
bored with promises of its rulers; After it
disgusted itself from their abomination and
their corruption, the man had to carry the
book of God . . . and write on some white
paper ‘‘If you are unable to drive off the Marines
from the Kaaba, I will do so.’’ It seems
that they will be going away because the
revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very
convincingly that he will strike America on
the arm that is already hurting.
In other words, the World Trade Towers.
Here, over a year ahead of time in
the open press in Iraq, they are writing
that this man is planning not only to
bomb the White House, but where they
are already hurting, the World Trade
Towers.
I ask unanimous consent to print
this article in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material
was ordered to be printed in the
RECORD, as follows:
[From Al-Nasiriya, July 21, 2001]
AMERICA, AN OBSESSION CALLED OSAMA BIN
LADIN
(By Naeem Abd Muhalhal)
Osama Bin Ladin says that he took from
the desert its silence and its anger at the
same time.
He has learned how to harm America and
has been able to do it, for he gave a bad reputation
to the Pentagon as being weakened
in more than one spot in the world. In order
to follow one step taken by Bin Ladin America
has put to work all its apparatus, its
computers and its satellites just as the governor
cowboy of Texas has done. Bin Ladin’s
name has been posted on all the internet
sites and an amount of $5 million dollars has
been awarded to anyone who could give any
information that would lead to the arrest of
this lanky, lightly bearded man. In this
man’s heart you’ll find an insistence, a
strange determination that he will reach one
day the tunnels of the White House and will
bomb it with everything that is in it.
We all know that every age has its revolutionary
phenomenon. In Mexico there was
Zapata. In Bolivia there was Che Guevara,
during the seventies came out Marcos and
the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader
Meinhof Gang in Germany and there was
Leila Khaled the Palestinian woman and
others. They all appeared in violence and disappeared
quietly. During the nineties Bin
Ladin came out in the open having been
completely overtaken in his mind by the robbery
happening to his country and its treasurers.
For him it was the beginning of the
revolution. For this endeavor he mobilized
everything that he had of money, of investments
and Sudan was his first stop. Bin
Ladin ended up in Afghanistan where his revolutionary
drive pushed this stubborn revolutionary
to plan very carefully, and in a
very detailed manner, his stand to push back
the boastful American onslaught and to
change the American legend into a bubble of
soap.
Because Bin Ladin knows what causes pain
to America, he played America’s game, just
as an oppressed man entertains itself with
the thing oppressing him. He countered with
the language of dynamite and explosives in
the city of Khobar and destroyed two US embassies
in Nairobi and Dar al Salaam.
America says, admitting just like a bird in
the midst of a tornado, that Bin Ladin is behind
the bombing of its destroyer in Aden.
The fearful series of events continues for
America and the terror within America gets
to the point that the Governor of Texas increases
the amount of the award, just as the
stubbornness of the other man and his challenge
increases. This challenge makes it
such that one of his grandchildren comes
from Jeddah traveling on the official Saudi
Arabia airlines and celebrates with him the
marriage of one of the daughters of his companions.
Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and
a proof also, of the inability of the American
federalism and the C.I.A. to uncover the man
and uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations
of the world cannot find the man
and continues to go in cycles in illusion and
presuppositions. They still hope that he
could come out from his nest one day, they
hope that he would come out from his hiding
hole and one day they will point at him their
missiles and he will join Guevara, Hassan
Abu Salama, Kamal Nasser, Kanafani and
others. The man responds with a thin smile
and replies to the correspondent from Al
Jazeera that he will continue to be the obsession
and worry of America and the Jews,
and that even that night he will practice and
work on an exercise called ‘‘How Do You
Bomb the White House.’’ And because they
know that he can get there, they have started
to go through their nightmares on their
beds and the leaders have had to wear their
bulletproof vests.
Meanwhile America has started to pressure
the Taliban movement so that it would hand
them Bin Ladin, while he continues to smile
and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness
of the Bedouin of the desert about the
way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after
he destroys the White House . . .
The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy
phenomenon in the Arab spirit. It is a decision
and a determination that the stolen
Arab self has come to realize after it got
bored with promises of its rulers: After it
disgusted itself from their abomination and
their corruption, the man had to carry the
book of God and the Kalashnikov and write
on some off white paper ‘‘If you are unable to
drive off the Marines from the Kaaba, I will
do so.’’ It seems that they will be going away
because the revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting
very convincingly that he will strike
America on the arm that is already hurting.
That the man will not be swayed by the
plant leaves of Whitman nor by the ‘‘Adventures
of Indiana Jones’’ and will curse the
memory of Frank Sinatra every time he
hears his songs. This new awareness of the
image that Bin Ladin has become gives
shape to the resting areas and stops for every
Arab revolutionary. It is the subject of our
admiration here in Iraq because it shares
with us in a unified manner our resisting
stand, and just as he fixes his gaze on the Al
Aqsa we greet him. We hail his tears as they
see the planes of the Western world taking
revenge against his heroic operations by
bombing the cities of Iraq . . .
To Bin Ladin I say that revolution, the
wings of a dove and the bullet are all but one
and the same thing in the heart of a believer.