Thursday, July 28, 2005
IT’S ALL ABOUT IRAQ
Imagine how much happier this Ahmed Ressam timeline may have turned out had Iraq not been invaded, thus sparing us the terrorism provoked by that awful event:
March 17, 1998:
Ressam leaves Montreal for Afghanistan. He spends several months at a camp funded and administered by Osama bin Laden. He receives training in light arms – including machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades – the use of explosives and poison gas, methods for assassination, sabotage and urban warfare. Ressam would later testify that it was during this time that he began planning on attack on U.S. soil.August 1999:
Ressam begins working out the details of his plan to bomb the Los Angeles airport. By fall, he is building timing devices for the bomb and gathering other chemical ingredients.Dec. 17, 1999:
Ressam is charged with bringing explosives into the United States three days after he was stopped at the Port Angeles, Wash., border crossing. He arrived in the U.S. by ferry from Victoria, B.C. He was carrying two Canadian driver’s licences, each in a different name, and a Canadian passport – and 50 kilograms of explosives.April 2, 2001:
Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere – described as the world’s foremost terrorism expert – tells the trial that Ressam had links to Osama bin Laden. He says as early as 1996, French intelligence learned that Ressam and six other Montreal men were trafficking in fake passports that were used to send people to train as terrorists in Afghanistan.July 6, 2001:
Ressam describes a plot two years earlier to set off a bomb in a neighbourhood in Canada with “Israeli interests.”
October 23, 2002:
US President George W. Bush announces “no invasion of Iraq will take place”.
November 3, 2002:
Ressam, through his lawyers, issues this statement: “I wish to renounce my career as an Islamic terrorist, which was entirely based upon the belief that following September 11 the US would invade Iraq. Boy, was I ever wrong! You guys are the best—Ressam.”
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)