Posted on 04/09/2007 10:58:18 AM PDT by neverdem
Cheney asserts Iraq-al Qaeda link ~ on radio show: “They were present before we invaded Iraq.”
BBC ^ | Friday, 6 April 2007, 16:11 GMT 17:11 UK | BBC Staff
Posted on 04/06/2007 1:54:47 PM EDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1813198/posts
See especially:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1813198/posts?page=39#39
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1813198/posts?page=42#42
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Last July (2006):
Anti-Bush Pentagon officials leak military secrets to Iran
FrontPageMag.com ^ | July 2, 2006 | David Horowitz
Posted on 07/02/2006 9:04:33 PM EDT by Eagle9
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1659503/posts
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Last April 2006:
http://www.japantoday.com/us/bbs/msg/shibumi/p7 [all posts by shibumi/p7]
Report raises new questions on Bush, WMDs
hate to cut, paste and run, but...
shibumi Click here to see member profile (Apr 17 2006 - 20:27) Rate Post | Report
This just in from Mr. Hitchens:
Clueless Joe Wilson
How did the CIA’s special envoy miss Zahawie’s trip to Niger?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 17, 2006, at 3:14 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2140058/
Nobody appears to dispute what I wrote in last week’s Slate
:
http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/?nav/fo/
to the effect that in February 1999, Saddam Hussein dispatched his former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and former delegate to non-proliferation conferences at the United Nations, to Niger. Wissam al-Zahawie was, at the time of his visit, the accredited ambassador of Iraq to the Vatican: a more senior post than it may sound, given that the Vatican was almost the only full European embassy that Iraq then possessed. And nobody has proposed an answer to my question: Given the fact that Niger is synonymous with uranium (and was Iraq’s source of “yellowcake”
:
http://www.slate.com/id/2085848/
in 1981), and given that Zahawie had been Iraq’s main man in nuclear diplomacy, what innocent explanation can be found for his trip?
The person whose response I most wanted is Ambassador Joseph Wilson
:
http://www.slate.com/id/2122963/
, who has claimed to discover that Saddam was guiltless on the charge of seeking uranium from Niger, and has further claimed to be the object, along with his CIA wife, of a campaign of government persecution. On Keith Olbermann’s show on April 10, Wilson was asked about my article and about Zahawie.....
Sounds damning, and if that was the only report on the trailers, it certainly would be. What the Post neglects to mention in its sensationalist zeal is that this was one of several teams that investigated the trailers, and the totality of their evaluations came to a different conclusion that that of the leakers who supplied this story. Skip down to the 12th paragraph, which is when Joby Warrick finally gets around to providing the context:
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. “It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides,” said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006736.php
Report raises new questions on Bush, WMDs
Report raises new questions on Bush, WMDs
shibumi Click here to see member profile (Apr 16 2006 - 21:52) Rate Post | Report
Let’s get back on topic, shall we?
More Deception From “Good Morning America”:
“...the Washington Post’s story this morning on the mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq was highly misleading. (The Post reported, as if it were an expose, that one team that was sent to examine the purported mobile labs reported that they were not intended to produce biological weapons. But buried deep in the Post’s story is the fact that three teams examined the trailers, and two of the three thought that they were indeed intended for bioweapon production.)...”
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013742.php#013742
“....the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that’s based on distortion. The latest instance is today’s story on the Bush administration’s statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows:
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006736.php
, the Post’s report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration’s claim, the trailers were not bio labs, it does not reveal until a dozen paragraphs later that two other teams of experts reached a contrary conclusion. Thus, the view of the team that the Post highlights appears to have been a minority view at the time the administration referred to the trailers as bio labs.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013739.php#013739
about that “chickenhawk” argument...
shibumi Click here to see member profile (Apr 16 2006 - 12:08) Rate Post | Report
This is what the Left really thinks of people like Pat Tillman who join up and fight overseas:
http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2004/05/03/
...and this is what the Left thinks of those of us who don’t qualify for military service, but still want to do our part:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001957.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/4/1/144156/3224
..and if you had any doubts as to whether the Left supports the troops, rest assured- they don’t:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-...
Report raises new questions on Bush, WMDs
More here: http://www.japantoday.com/us/bbs/msg/shibumi/p7
ping
Of course he's correct...the question is, why the hell didn't he/Bush/Rummy do more about it when the opportunity was there to elimnate Al Qaeda in Iraq? (i.e., why didn't we commit at least 500,000 more troops in the initial stages--if we had, IMHO, there would today be a Congress firmly in the hands of the GOP, a president riding a huge wave of popular support, and a rosy future for chances in the upcoming 2008 election).
Arrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!
Cheney did NOT state anything about Saddam and al-Qaeda on the Limbaugh show and has never said Saddam was tied into 9/11. Whomever the "American Thinker" is they were duped by misleading headlines from the AP and didn't actually read the article nor the actual transcript.
What Cheney did state is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before the start of the war. And it is well known by now that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled to Iraq, along with other members of al-Qaeda, after Afghanistan fell.
Bump
500,000 was greater than the active duty U.S. Army.
I’m not going to totally justify the number of troops deployed during the invasion, but don’t forget that we wanted to deploy an additional Division for northern/central Iraq (where it would have made great effects on Al-Qaeda and Sunni/Baathist Terrorist, which was thwarted by backstabbing Turkey, whose parlament didn’t gave enough votes to allow an American invasion into Iraq from the north. Anti-American tensions rose high in Turkey, largely due to their anxiety of an Independent Kurdistan in Iraq.
Man you said it. The Al Queda/Saddam/911 thing is like saying all Germans were Nazis.
It’s maddening. Anytime Cheney mentions al-Qaeda and Iraq the MSM twists it to say that Cheney is tying Saddam and al-Qaeda together.
Nobody in the Administration ever claimed that Saddam or Iraq were behind the 9/11 attacks specifically. The Administration said that in light of the 9/11 attacks, it was no longer acceptable to have a rogue state like Iraq with access to weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.
bttt
Big Time!
ping
“..the question is, why the hell didn’t he/Bush/Rummy do more about it when the opportunity was there to elimnate Al Qaeda in Iraq? (i.e., why didn’t we commit at least 500,000 more troops in the initial stages—if we had, IMHO, there would today be a Congress firmly in the hands of the GOP, a president riding a huge wave of popular support, and a rosy future for chances in the upcoming 2008 election).” ~ meandog
NRO - April 2004:
Rumsfeld’s War, Powell’s Occupation (April, 2004 NRO article)
National Review Online ^ | April 30, 2004 | Barbara Lerner
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1616782/posts
Rumsfeld wanted Iraqis in on the action right from the beginning.
The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation. There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard). First, it’s not Rumsfeld’s occupation; it’s Colin Powell’s and George Tenet’s. Second, although it’s painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, it’s simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it. More troops may be needed now, but more of the same will not do the job. Something different is needed and was, right from the start.
A Rumsfeld occupation would have been different, and still might be. Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference.
Rumsfeld’s plan was to train and equip and then transport to Iraq some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani.
Jay Garner, the retired American general Rumsfeld chose to head the civilian administration of the new Iraq, planned to capitalize on that prestige immediately by appointing all three, along with six others, to head up Iraq’s new transitional government. He planned to cede power to them in a matter of weeks not months or years and was confident that they would work with him, not against him, because two of them already had. General Garner, after all, is the man who headed the successful humanitarian rescue mission that saved the Kurds in the disastrous aftermath of Gulf War I, after the State Department-CIA crowd and like thinkers in the first Bush administration betrayed them. Kurds are not a small minority and they remember. The hero’s welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear.
Finally, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to cut way down on the infiltration of Syrian and Iranian agents and their foreign terrorist recruits, not just by trying to catch them at the border a losing game, given the length of those borders but by pursuing them across the border into Syria to strike hard at both the terrorists and their Syrian sponsors, a move that would have forced Iran as well as Syria to reconsider the price of trying to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq.
None of this happened, however, because State and CIA fought against Rumsfeld’s plans every step of the way. Instead of bringing a liberating Shia and Sunni force of 10,000 to Iraq, the Pentagon was only allowed to fly in a few hundred INC men. General Garner was unceremoniously dumped after only three weeks on the job, and permission for our military to pursue infiltrators across the border into Syria was denied.
General Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a State Department man who kept most of the power in his own hands and diluted what little power Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani had by appointing not six but 22 other Iraqis to share power with them. This resulted in a rapidly rotating 25-man queen-for-a-day-type leadership that turned the Iraqi Governing Council into a faceless mass, leaving Bremer’s face as the only one most Iraqis saw.
By including fence-sitters and hostile elements as well as American friends in his big, unwieldy IGC and giving them all equal weight, Bremer hoped to display a kind of inclusive, above-it-all neutrality that would win over hostile segments of Iraqi society and convince them that a fully representative Iraqi democracy would emerge. But Iraqis didn’t see it that way. Many saw a foreign occupation of potentially endless length, led by the sort of Americans who can’t be trusted to back up their friends or punish their enemies. Iraqis saw, too, that Syria and Iran had no and were busily entrenching their agents and terrorist recruits into Iraqi society to organize, fund, and equip Sunni bitter-enders like those now terrorizing Fallujah and Shiite thugs like Moqtada al Sadr, the man who is holding hostage the holy city of Najaf.
Despite all the crippling disadvantages it labored under, Bremer’s IGC managed to do some genuine good by writing a worthy constitution, but the inability of this group to govern-period, let alone in time for the promised June 30 handover finally became so clear that Bremer and his backers at State and the CIA were forced to recognize it. Their last minute “solution” is to dump the Governing Council altogether, and give U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, the power to appoint a new interim government. The hope is that U.N. sponsorship will do two big things: 1) give the Brahimi government greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people; and 2) convince former allies to join us and reinforce our troops in Iraq in some significant way. These are vain hopes.
Putting a U.N. stamp on an Iraqi government will delegitimize it in the eyes of most Iraqis and do great damage to those who are actively striving to create a freer, more progressive Middle East. Iraqis may distrust us, but they have good reason to despise the U.N., and they do. For 30 years, the U.N. ignored their torments and embraced their tormentor, focusing obsessively on a handful of Palestinians instead. Then, when Saddam’s misrule reduced them to begging for food and medicine, they saw U.N. fat cats rip off the Oil-for-Food Program money that was supposed to save them.
The U.N. as a whole is bad; Lakhdar Brahimi is worse. A long-time Algerian and Arab League diplomat, he is the very embodiment of all the destructive old policies foisted on the U.N. by unreformed Arab tyrants, and he lost no time in making that plain. In his first press conferences, he emphasized three points: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani will have no place in a government he appoints; he will condemn American military action to restore order in Iraq; and he will be an energetic promoter of the old Arab excuses Israel’s “poison in the region,” he announced, is the reason it’s so hard to create a viable Iraqi interim government.
Men like Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani have nothing but contempt for Mr. Brahimi, the U.N., and old Europe. They know perfectly well who their real enemies are, and they understand that only decisive military action against them can create the kind of order that is a necessary precondition for freedom and democracy. They see, as our State Department Arabists do not, that we will never be loved, in Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East, until we are respected, and that the month we have wasted negotiating with the butchers of Fallujah has earned us only contempt, frightening our friends and encouraging our mortal enemies.
The damage Brahimi will do to the hope of a new day in Iraq and in the Middle East is so profound that it would not be worth it even if empowering him would bring in a division of French troops to reinforce ours in Iraq. In fact, it will do no such thing. Behind all the bluster and moral preening, the plain truth is that the French have starved their military to feed their bloated, top-heavy welfare state for decades. They couldn’t send a division like the one the Brits sent, even if they wanted to (they don’t). Belgium doesn’t want to help us either, nor Spain, nor Russia, because these countries are not interested in fighting to create a new Middle East. They’re fighting to make the most advantageous deals they can with the old Middle East, seeking to gain advantages at our expense, and at the expense of the oppressed in Iraq, Iran, and every other Middle Eastern country where people are struggling to throw off the shackles of Islamofascist oppression.
It is not yet too late for us to recognize these facts and act on them by dismissing Brahimi, putting Secretary Rumsfeld and our Iraqi friends fully in charge at last, and unleashing our Marines to make an example of Fallujah. And when al Jazeera screams “massacre,” instead of cringing and apologizing, we need to stand tall and proud and tell the world: Lynch mobs like the one that slaughtered four Americans will not be tolerated. Order will restored, and Iraqis who side with us will be protected and rewarded.
Barbara Lerner is a frequent contributor to NRO.
7 posted on 11/02/2006 9:10:53 AM EST by Matchett-PI (To have no voice in the Party that always sides with America’s enemies is a badge of honor.)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1730632/posts?page=7#7
Rumsfeld’s Prophecy Has Come True
By Cal Thomas October 26, 2006
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/rumsfelds_prophecy_has_come_tr.html
At lunch Monday with a small group of columnists, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld handed us a speech he’d delivered in 1984 on the occasion of his receiving the George Catlett Marshall Medal.
It was Oct. 17, three weeks before a critical election that would give Ronald Reagan an overwhelming electoral victory. It was also a time when voices in the media and Democratic Party were calling for the United States not to introduce Pershing II missiles into Western Europe to counter missiles the Soviet Union had placed in Eastern Europe. The left wanted an accommodation with Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan believed in victory over communism, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of the Soviet bloc nations is testimony to his sound judgment.
Even before those exciting events, Rumsfeld saw another threat coming in as the tide of Soviet communism rolled out. He spoke of terrorism. Remember, this was 1984, 17 years before 9/11 at a time when most of the world thought terrorism was an isolated phenomenon confined mainly to Israel.
“Terrorism is growing,” Rumsfeld said then. “In the 30 days ending last week, it is estimated that there were 37 terrorist attacks, by 13 different organizations, against the property or citizens of 20 different countries.”
Even then, Rumsfeld noted terrorism is “state-sponsored, by nations using it as a central element of their foreign policy... terrorism has a home.”
He said terrorism works because even a single attack by a small and weak nation can influence public opinion and lower morale and can “alter the behavior of great nations.” Isn’t that precisely what is happening now? As the terrorists watch the American electorate grow tired and frustrated with the war against insurgent terrorists in Iraq, do they not think all they have to do is hold out a little longer and America will sign anything and do anything to preserve the lives of its people? Why should they believe anything else?
Using a justification for fighting terrorism that would resurface in the current war, Rumsfeld said, “Terrorism is a form of warfare and must be treated as such... weakness invites aggression. Simply standing in a defensive position, absorbing blows, is not enough. Terrorism must be deterred.”
In his 1984 speech, Rumsfeld said terrorism cannot be eliminated, but it can be made to function at a “low level” that will allow governments to function. He repeated that thought at lunch and added that the United States is somewhat at a disadvantage because the terrorists don’t have a media that challenges their policies, they have no hierarchy and they “get to lie every day with no accountability.” Speculating again about the future, Rumsfeld said, “there will be no conventional wars in the near future and no way the military can win or lose a war.”
I asked him what he meant. He replied, “We’re socialized into believing the American military can go find somebody and kick the hell out of them, or find a battleship to sink, or an air force to shoot down. You can’t do that in the 21st century.”
Noting the length of the Cold War, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - who was also at the luncheon - agreed the terrorists can be deterred “if the American people will just give us the time.”
Later that day, I spoke with Haley Barbour, Mississippi governor and former Republican National Committee chairman, about the apparently slim GOP prospects in the coming election. Noting how the polls show Iraq has hurt Republicans, Barbour said, “The public gets tired of long wars.”
That is precisely what Osama bin Laden and his bloody associates are counting on. Their plan for victory is to exhaust the United States.
In 1984, Rumsfeld recalled Winston Churchill’s lesson from World War II that weakness invites aggression. And he warned, “Ours is a dangerous world, a world in transition.”
We have now transitioned from dangerous to even more dangerous. If we grow weary in this battle, we can be sure our enemies won’t flag. They are prepared for a long war. We’d better be, for to be unprepared and to lack resolve means the war will come anyway, but with greater intensity and with more American (and European) casualties.
8 posted on 11/02/2006 10:02:36 AM EST by Matchett-PI (To have no voice in the Party that always sides with America’s enemies is a badge of honor.)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1730632/posts?page=8#8
ping
Cheney sure as hell *did* state that Zarqawi was in Baghdad organizing al-Qaeda operations there before we arrived.
He could not have done that without tacit approval from Saddam.
Not even a remotely similar analogy.
I am going to bookmark this thread...you have put in a lot of important links.
Thanks for posting that article..and the links.
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