Why is the truth kept hidden?

Clyrinda and I attended a conference for married couples this weekend. During one of the breaks we sat down for lunch with another couple, who we know from church yet do not know well. As we ate and chatted the issue of war and President Bush came up. I understand that you all don't know Clyrinda, but let me give a hint as to her political persuasion...............if there is the slightest hint of anti-war or anti-Bush attitude within the range of her voice, she will jump at the chance to challenge that attitude. The husband of this couple mentioned that "things were so bad", and this Iraq thing was "making everything worse", and perhaps another small thing or two along those lines. I kept my mouth firmly wrapped around my sandwich waiting for the moments to pass so we could discuss other issues. Clyrinda had a different, but just as kind, approach. She asked "What would you have the President do?"

Pretty simple question, but I never expected such a simple answer. "Bring all the troops home now" the man said. Now since simple was the talk, I chimed in with "They don't want to come home". Our anti-war friend looked at me with stunned disbelief and did not say another word. I'm sure the idea that marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen on the ground in Iraq actually want finish what they started never occured to him.

How do people come to be so uninformed? (Shawn, if you read this I truly do not mean to insult you)

The misinformation about the Iraq war is astounding, yet passes off as fact. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've heard "Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda", and yet there are dozens of documented and undisputed instances of very real ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

The book Shadow War, by Richard Miniter, lists the undisputed facts which tie Iraq to al Qaeda in Apendix D of the book. I will list a few .

* "Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large int he Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. US forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a house and monthly salary"

* "In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's number two man."

* "Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly ivolved with the preparation and planning" of the September 11 attacks- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* "An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as 'Abu Mohammed', told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southesast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives-on a full sized Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The Major) said to me: "You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq."

And here is perhaps the best of them all.........

* "Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Secretary Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with the US forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May, 2002. When al-Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Al-Zarqawi's cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the US Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he recieved orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Secretary Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

None of these undisputed facts are known by the average person, who assumes the media reports of "No Ties" are correct. Why is that? The point of the book is that President Bush would rather win the GWOT (global war on terror) than win re-election so he downplayed the successes in the war. But these are well known facts (there are about 20 more in the book) so why do the anti war forces still succeed in their claims? Since Bush already won re-election, the answer must be that he still wants to win the war.

But nobody asked me to lay low and keep quiet, so I'm talking. Iraq was a major supporter of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and needed to be taken out, as did the war making capabilities of Iraq.