It must be nice being able to have things both ways - it sure simplifies debate, or what passes for such with Dems.
And finding stockpiles of WMD in Iraq was a "slam dunk" according to George Tenet.
"an Administration Official"? Can you be more specific?
There is the assumption in this article that the "new" information is the same as the "old" information.
Well, duh. He didn't know the Saddam Hussein's army secret handshake.
A long, long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile and I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance and maybe they'd be happy for a while
In the first place, you never know if the CIA is making public what it really thinks.
In the second place, there are good reasons to suspect that George Tenet has been a clintonoid operative who has undermined Bush steadily. He has been subtle about it, but the Valerie Plame affair never would have happened if he had been doing his job. And he has been suspiciously insistent that Atta was not in Czechoslavakia when the Czech authorities still insist that he was. And he has been very slow to step forward and help Bush out when intelligence is under fire.
Tenet is not the last clintonoid in the CIA by any means. Bush has regretably done nothing to root them out or damp them down.
Hmmm...trying to make the case that there was no connection based on one meeting when there is plenty of other evidence available to prove a connection? Sounds like a Knut Case to me... : )
FACT: Even if they aren't the same Shakir, we know that the "al-Qaida" Shakir was provided a job by the Iraqi Embassy to greet arriving passengers at Kula Lumpar Airport. The CIA has pictures of the "al Qaida" Shakir meeting 911 hijacker Kahlid al Midhar at the airport and then leaving with him to attend a meeting with al Hazmi (another hijacker) along with other top 911 planners. Shakir quit his "job" as a greeter two days after the meeting
FACT: "al-Qaida" Shakir was arrested in Qatar, released to Jordan where he was arrested again and then released to Iraq at the request of top Iraqi officials.
Iraq has their fingerprints all over this with their questionable association with "al-Qaida" Shakir and whether he was also the Shakir in the Fedayeen is interesting, but beside the point.
This is an issue that could have major implications for the Bush Administration and the election and it must be flushed out before Novemmber. Right now we think there may be a connection but the possibility of two guys with the same name is still very real. The possibility that the names aren't quite the same is also not ruled out. What we need is a definitive answer on this issue and we certainly do not have it at this time.
Given that, I think that anything that is published on this subject needs to be brought to the attention of the greatest political research team that has ever existed, namely the members of Free Republic. Give us the data. We will figure out the truth.
This Iraq-Al Qaida link thing between the administration and the commission is one of the funniest games of two-card monty I've ever seen in my entire life. It truly gets more laughable by the day.
"The CIA" can't "conclude" something. The CIA is not a computer, it contains people. Perhaps indeed this or that group of people in the CIA "concluded" this. Note: 1. they could have been wrong in that conclusion (well, do we agree that Our intelligence needs fixing, or don't we? it seems to change), 2. since the article doesn't name who "concluded" it, we have little reason to lend their conclusion credence. Or are we supposed to find anonymous "CIA people" more believable than "Commissioner John Lehman, who was Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, [who] said "new ... documents" indicated that "at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen," an elite army unit, "was a very prominent member of al-Qaida."" ???
The administration official said the CIA and U.S. Army obtained the lists of members of the Fedayeen shortly after the invasion of Iraq last year. Some, he said, had names "similar to" Ahmad Hikmat Shakir. But, he said, the CIA had concluded "a long time ago" that...
Really strange paragraph. What "administration official"? We haven't been introduced to any in this article before this paragraph appears!
Also note that the way this is written, it almost sounds like the official's criticizing "the CIA" for having "concluded" something so incorrect. One pictures for example him sitting in a bar with the reporter saying "those idiots at the CIA wrote this connection off without even looking into it". Of course by the time this comes to press "The CIA concluded" becomes the headline.
But he [Lehman] insisted that Cheney "was right when he said he may have things we [the commission] don't have yet."
Note he didn't merely say that Cheney was right, he "insisted". Good job reporter, he knows how to spin all things properly.
An administration official familiar with the CIA intelligence on the matter identified the al-Qaida associate who met with hijackers Khalid al Midhar and Nawar al Hazmi in Kula Lampur, Malaysia, in early 2000 as Ahmad Hikmat Shakir al-Azzawi. Some of the early planning for Sept. 11 allegedly occurred at the meeting.
This seems to go along with my "the CIA are idiots and the administration is standing by the link, and calling the CIA idiots" theory. The reporter still doesn't seem to get it.
The claim that the Iraqi officer and al-Qaida figure are the same first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial on May 27. A similar account was then published in the June 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, which reported that the link was discovered by an analyst working for a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit under Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.
Ah, the link was discovered by an analyst working for a "controversial" unit. So we can disbelieve it! "Feith"!
Good spinning, reporter. Good spinning.
...and they will not be dissuaded by new facts that have arisen.
CIA has institutional biases.
Tell them to think outside the box, and they just build a bigger box.