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WARNING: The page you have accessed is dependent on JAVASCRIPT which is not supported by your browser. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. The 9/11 Commission Describes the Link From the August 2, 2004 issue: Its final report demolishes the claim that there is no evidence of Iraqi support for al Qaeda.by Stephen F. Hayes 08/02/2004, Volume 009, Issue 44 "THERE WAS NO QUESTION in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." Those are the words of Thomas Kean, the Republican co-chairman of the September 11 Commission. He...

The final report of the September 11 Commission, to be released tomorrow, cites many examples of "friendly contacts" between Iraq and al Qaeda, while concluding that those contacts do not appear to have resulted in a "collaborative operational relationship" for "carrying out attacks against the United States," according to sources familiar with the commission's work. The findings in the final report appear to differ from last month's Staff Statement No. 15 in several important respects. The staff statement, which declared simply that Iraq-al Qaeda contacts did not appear to have resulted in a "collaborative relationship," led several leading news outlets...

Did al Qaeda and Iraq have a "collaborative relationship"?THE FINAL REPORT from the 9/11 Commission is scheduled to be released this Thursday. It will be a dense thicket of chronology, narrative, analysis, and proposals for reform. But one issue is likely to be prominent in the news coverage. In fact, it already has been. "9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance." That was the headline over a July 12 New York Times report. We hope the Times is mistaken. It doesn't have a great track record on the issue, insisting (erroneously) that the commission's staff statement last month found...

The news service giant puts words in the president's mouth and then looks the other way on connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. President Bush continued to insist Monday that there was an operational link between former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida despite reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the commission that's investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no evidence that Saddam and Islamic terrorists collaborated to kill Americans. – (Jonathan Landay and William Douglas, Knight Ridder Newspapers, July 12, 2004) [Emphasis added] That sentence is false. It was the lead passage in a story about...

Additional Views Jay Rockefeller takes the president to task for using faulty intelligence in making the case for war. But what did Rockefeller say back in 2002? by Stephen F. Hayes 07/12/2004 8:40:00 AM DEVASTATING. CRITICAL. SCATHING. Those are just some of the adjectives used to describe the report on prewar Iraq intelligence by the Senate Intelligence Committee. I'd like to add another: Hilarious. Okay, not the whole report. But the "additional views" section contributed by the committee's vice chair, Senator Jay Rockefeller (Rockefeller was joined in his view by Senators Carl Levin and Richard Durbin): The Bush Administration's case...

Carl Levin distorts and exaggerates intelligence on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. The Bush administration was careful with its words, the Michigan senator is not.DOES SENATOR CARL LEVIN believe in preemption?The Michigan Democrat, one of the fiercest partisan critics of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, held a bizarre press conference Thursday to criticize the Senate Intelligence Committee's not-yet-released report on prewar intelligence. Levin faulted the exhaustive document for failing to include a critique of the Bush administration for its alleged "exaggeration" of the connection between the former Iraqi regime an al Qaeda.No one in the Congress has had...

A Manning youth was shot Friday when he and his companions refused to leave the premises of Willie McCray of Turbeville. Jacob A. Cantey, age unknown, was shot once in the chest with a .22 caliber handgun. According to Chief Deputy Joe Bradham, Cantey, along with Patrick A. Fordham, 18, of Manning and Jarrod J. Fordham, 20, of Pinewood, went to the McCray home to see McCray’s daughter. “ Patrick Fordham and McCray’s daughter have a baby together,” Bradham said. “Mr. McCray approached the three men in his front yard and Fordham said he wanted to see McCray’s daughter. McCray...

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION Tuesday received further support for its claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda from an important source: new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi, who has long claimed knowledge of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, reiterated these beliefs in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. Brokaw: I know you and others like you are grateful for the liberation of Iraq. But can't you understand why many Americans feel that so many young men and women have died here for purposes other than protecting the United States? Allawi: We know that this is an extension to...

  New Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi still thinks that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda. THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION Tuesday received further support for its claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda from an important source: new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi, who has long claimed knowledge of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, reiterated these beliefs in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. Brokaw: I know you and others like you are grateful for the liberation of Iraq. But can't you understand why many Americans feel that so many young men and women have died...

the Connection From the June 7, 2004 issue: Not so long ago, the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda were conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom was right. by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED THE COUNTRY with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on...

NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, in the introduction to an hour-long PBS documentary called Saddam's Ultimate Solution, former Clinton State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said:"Tonight, we examine the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Ten years after the Gulf War and Saddam is still there and still continues to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Now there are suggestions he is working with al Qaeda, which means the very terrorists who attacked the United States last September may now have access to chemical and biological weapons."The documentary, broadcast on July 11, 2002, laid out in exhaustive detail alleged Iraqi...

Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that suggestions the former Iraqi regime did not have a relationship with al Qaeda are "not accurate," and said he would like to see the U.S. government declassify some of the intelligence that supports Bush administration claims about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. "I think we should declassify as much as we can," Cheney said in a wide-ranging, 45 minute interview in the vice president's residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Cheney said the desire to make public some of the intelligence about Iraq and al Qaeda must be balanced against the need to...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Stephen F. Hayes, the author of The Connection: How al-Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. FP: Mr Hayes, welcome back to Frontpage Interview. Hayes: Great to be here with you again. FP: First things first, what did you think about the 9/11 Commission report? Hayes: It was poorly worded, self-contradictory and vague. It seemed to reach conclusions not warranted by the evidence. And it added to the confusion on an already difficult issue. The staff statements felt like the cursory treatment given to an issue by an individual – or group of...

According to Knight-Ridder, the mysterious Iraqi was "employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer" and later "accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000." Interesting, no?THE WASHINGTON POST reported yesterday morning that an Iraqi present at a key al Qaeda summit may not be the same Iraqi listed on lists of officers of the Saddam Fedayeen captured in postwar Iraq. In Al Qaeda Link to Iraq...

Did the 9/11 commission staff statement really say that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?LAST WEDNESDAY, the September 11 commission issued a staff "statement" that further complicated an already confusing issue: the nature of the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. On the one hand, the statement confirmed several contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda terrorists, including a face-to-face meeting between a senior Iraqi intelligence official and Osama bin Laden in 1994. Then, calling into question its own findings, the statement reported that two al Qaeda terrorists denied the existence of any ties...

MSNBC has continued to try to flog the dead horse by this morning repeating on one of its news shows the big lie that the 911 Commission contradicted the Bush administration with the finding that there was no terrorist relationship between Al-Quaeda and Saddam Hussein; to back this up they brought in Commission member and long-time 'rat shill Richard Ben-Veniste instead of, for example, relying on statements from the Commission chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton that the findings were being misinterpreted. Nonetheless the NBCABCCBSNYTIMESWASHPOST cabal seems to have failed to convince the public of this disinformation, in part perhaps...

IT'S SETTLED, APPARENTLY. Saddam Hussein's regime never supported al Qaeda in its "attacks on America," and meetings between representatives of Iraq and al Qaeda did not result in a "collaborative relationship." That, we're told, is the conclusion of two staff reports the September 11 Commission released last Wednesday. But the contents of the documents have been widely misreported. Together the new reports total 32 pages; one contains a paragraph on the broad question of a Saddam-al Qaeda relationship, the other a paragraph on an alleged meeting between the lead hijacker and an Iraqi agent. Nowhere in the documents is the...

The Terror Ties That Bind Us to War Osama and Saddam — two peas in a terror pod? Stephen F. Hayes, a staff writer for The Weekly Standard and former NRO contributor, is author of the new book The Connection: How al Qaeda's Cooperation with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. On publication day, Tueday, he e-mailed with NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about his book and the evidence linking the former Iraq regime and al Qaeda. NRO: Your new book is on connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Isn't that all a neocon myth? Isn't bin Laden on record dissing...

The Connection, The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda. From the June 7, 2004 issue: by Stephen F. Hayes 06/07/2004, Volume 009, Issue 37 Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and...

GET THIS BOOK! NOW AVAILABLE FOR ORDER AT AMAZON.The Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes (Author) According to John Batchelor and John Loftus (WABC), Stephen F. Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, is going to be on Meet The Press this Sunday with Tim Russert. Batchelor and Loftus said that information in this book is going to be explosive.