Bin Laden and Saddam (and China)

DANEgerus enumerates more connections. Excerpts:

Disturbingly, new evidence of Sudanese involvement in planned attacks on American soil continued to accumulate. In April 1996, for example, according to the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism, a diplomat at the "Sudanese U.N. Mission" was expelled for having ties to a bomb plot against the U.N. building and other targets in New York in 1993. Two Sudanese diplomats even planned on using the U.N. building to coordinate attacks on the city.

And:

Even after bin Laden departed Sudan in 1996, however, both al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence remained active in the country. According to IIS documents first discovered by Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star and Inigo Gilmore of the Sunday Telegraph after the beginning of the Iraq war, the Iraqi intelligence station in Khartoum was still actively facilitating the relationship with al Qaeda in 1998. A "trusted confidant" of bin Laden's traveled, with the help of Iraqi intelligence, from Sudan to Baghdad in March 1998. He stayed in Baghdad for more that two weeks.

What is most instructive about this, in my opinion, is that the Radical Islamists have yet to issue any Fatwa against China, who are HEAVILY entrenched in Sudan:

Almost unnoticed by the outside world, China has become the key player in Sudan's oil industry.

Beijing has invested £8 billion in Sudanese oil through the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), a state-owned monolith. The cost of Khartoum's new refinery alone was about £350 million.

Freshly painted billboards in Khartoum carry pictures of smiling Chinese oil workers and the slogan: "CNPC - Your close friend and faithful partner". But this faithful friend is secretive about its stake in Africa's largest country. China's embassy in Khartoum and its commercial office declined to talk about oil.

So there is China, godless China, exploiting Muslim lands for profit, and, I bet you didn't know, engaged in a "crushing campaign of religious repression" against Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang region (in the name of anti-separatism and counterterrorism, sayeth the linked piece), yet no Holy War declared against China.

As I said, instructive.

UPDATE: This is a redux from a couple weeks back; the Lebanese Political Journal wonders the same thing, and they add pork and alcohol to the mix.