Posted on 09/09/2006 4:46:18 AM PDT by rhema
ONCE AGAIN headlines from media outlets around the country declare "No Saddam, al-Qaeda link." This time the news cycle is being fed by the release of two reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee, both of which purport to investigate the uses of prewar intelligence. The first of these two reports, titled "Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments," has pleased Democrats.
Senator Carl Levin says that the report is "a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration's unrelenting, misleading, and deceptive attempts" to connect Saddam's regime to bin Laden's al Qaeda. Senator Jay Rockefeller agrees with Senator Levin's assessment, saying the report will confirm that "the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was fundamentally misleading."
But beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, there is little merit to this posturing because there is little serious analysis in the Senate report: Far from providing the definitive word on Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, the report is almost worthless.
CONSIDER TWO BRIEF examples, chosen from many:
The committee's staff made little effort to determine whether or not the testimony of former Iraqi regime officials was truthful. In fact, Saddam Hussein and several of his top operatives--all of whom have an obvious incentive to lie--are cited or quoted without caveats of any sort. In Saddam's debriefing it was suggested that he may cooperate with al Qaeda because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." According to the report, "Saddam answered that the United States was not Iraq's enemy. He claimed that Iraq only opposed U.S. policies. He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China."
Anyone with even a partial recollection of the controversy surrounding Iraq in the 1990s will recall that Saddam made it a habit of cursing and threatening the United States. His annual January "Army Day" speeches were laced with threats and promises of retaliation against American assets. That is, when Saddam claimed that the United States was "not Iraq's enemy," he was quite obviously lying. But nowhere in the staff's report is it noted that Saddam's debriefing was substantially at odds with more than a decade of his rhetoric.
The testimony of another former senior Iraqi official is more starkly disturbing. One of Saddam's senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi's ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.
Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that "this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact."
This is not true. Hijazi's best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, "The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them."
Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just "boogie to Baghdad." Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.
There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden--yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee's report. THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked the staffers "Why not?" They replied that there was no evidence of the meeting in the intelligence or documents they reviewed.
That's hard to believe. Newspapers such as Milan's Corriere Della Sera and London's Guardian, and the New York Post reported on it. Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, approvingly cited several of these accounts (before his own flip-flop on the issue) in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes. Scheuer wrote that Saddam made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors," including al Qaeda.
All of this obviously contradicts Hijazi's debriefing; none of it is cited in the committee's report.
THE MEDIA HAS ALSO BEEN QUICK to cite the report's conclusions concerning Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's relationship (or lack thereof) with Saddam's regime. But once again the committee's staff overlooked much contradictory evidence. The report concludes, "Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."
The staff cites debriefings which support this conclusion, but do not give any weight at all to testimony which runs counter to it. For example, the Phase I Senate Intelligence report noted that a top al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah "indicated that he heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence."
Zubaydah's testimony has since been further corroborated by a known al Qaeda ideologue, Dr. Muhammad al-Masari. Al-Masari operated the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a Saudi oppositionist group and al Qaeda front, out of London for more than decade. He told the editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi that Saddam "established contact with the 'Afghan Arabs' as early as 2001, believing he would be targeted by the U.S. once the Taliban was routed." Furthermore, "Saddam funded Al-Qaeda operatives to move into Iraq with the proviso that they would not undermine his regime."
Al-Masari claimed that Saddam's regime actively aided Zarqawi and his men prior to the war and fully included them in his plans for a terrorist insurgency. He said Saddam "saw that Islam would be key to a cohesive resistance in the event of invasion." Iraqi officers bought "small plots of land from farmers in Sunni areas" and they buried "arms and money caches for later use by the resistance." Al-Masari also claimed that "Iraqi army commanders were ordered to become practicing Muslims and to adopt the language and spirit of the jihadis."
A cursory examination of Zarqawi's cell in Iraq reveals that many of his top operatives were once Saddam's military and intelligence officers. It appears, therefore, al-Masari's testimony should be taken seriously.
Yet, neither Abu Zubaydah's nor Al-Masari's statements are given any weight by the committee. Nor did they bother to examine who it was, exactly, that Zarqawi was working with in Iraq. Not that any of this matters, of course. This reports was never really about investigating the relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda.
It was about giving certain senators more ammunition against the president.
Senator Lenin is Bolshevik as usual and a Rockefeller is often in the woodwork when evil is afoot.
Perfect timing....DUmocrats exposing themselves just before an election.
These "facts" the DUmocrats spew are easily disputable. They will be proven to be the foolish frauds that they are. Not likely to keep their mind-numbed minions from voting for them though.
Never post before the second cup of coffee...
Fox just shown a clip of Rockefeller saying that Iraq was an IMMINENT THREAT, and was close to getting a Nuclear Bomb. rocky said we cannot take a chance even if the intel is wrong... it is far too grave a risk for America.
dims will go nowhere with these lies. Man, we have them on tape in their own words stating things that they accuse the President of saying, but which the President did NOT say... but dims did. It's over; they just do not know it yet!
LLS
Have you posted this list of links as it's own thread? This is MUST READ material?
I agree. Who are the republican senators who allowed this report to emerge without drawing attention to the fallacies contained therein. I hope someone smart in the WH has the equivalent of a Neutron Bomb to drop, one that indisputably ties the al Qaeda and Iraq pieces together.
No, because it's actually Peach's material.
It is a devastating compillation.
shhh, a Friday afternoon news realease is equivalent to deep sixing.
>No, because it's actually Peach's material.<
Thank you, thank you! It's so galling to hear the MSM coming out with this spew, when we know they're completely off track.
I've posted a new, stand alone thread so it's easier to bookmark or link to:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1698371/posts
The Drive-By Media has gone into full Clinton/Goebbels Template- don't even bother to spin, just lie like a cheap rug, and enough of the fools who read only headlines and hear only soundbites will believe it to matter.
"I've posted a new, stand alone thread so it's easier to bookmark or link to:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1698371/posts "
Thanks, bumped and bookmarked (but it's a travesty you have to title your thread a "vanity").
What Republicans were on this whitewash committee?
" This reports was never really about investigating the relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda.
It was about giving certain senators more ammunition against the president."
I always believed the much vaunted 9\11 Commission was coincidently convened prior to the 04 elections for exactly the same reason.It was a dog and pony show that cost taxpayers a ton of money to tell us absolutly nothing we didn't already know.The comrades in American politics aka Democraps will pull any trick in the book to gain political advantage !!!
LOL
God bless the Weekly Standard, but this rebuttal is weak.
Can't they cite better examples than this? There must be lots of evidence of the connection. Most of this is tenuous and suggests that at best Saddam was considering a relationship with AQ - especially after he knew Iraq was next on the target list and had nothing left to lose.
Now that's what I'm tallking about.
Thanks for posting this great stuff.
Thanks for looking.
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