A number ‘pulled out of somebody’s orifice’

July 14, 2007

During yesterday’s entertaining White House press briefing, Tony Snow rolled out an oldie but a goodie.

“[T]he al Qaeda that exists today is not the al Qaeda that existed September 11, 2001. That is an al Qaeda that was a more traditional, top-down organization where you had bin Laden and a series of lieutenants and he issued orders and they carried them out.

“That organization was smashed. Three-quarters of its leadership — or, I guess, two-thirds of its leadership has either been killed or captured.”

The White House hasn’t used this line in quite a while, and for good reason — it’s a made-up number.

White House and U.S. intelligence officials declined to provide any back-up data for how they developed the new number — or even to explain the methodology that was used, which they said was classified. The absence of any explanation, as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as “meaningless” and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes.

“It’s like a shell game,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former top CIA counterterrorism official. “This kind of thing is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.”

An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks — the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate.

“It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”

Alas, so many of the White House’s talking points are.

On Saturday, Americans learned that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 cancelled a major U.S. raid into Pakistan designed to decapitate much of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. Now, a new CIA assessment details the steep price the U.S. is paying for President Bush’s failure to enforce his mantra of “no safe havens.” U.S. intelligence analysts, the AP reports, have concluded Al Qaeda has “rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

For the disturbing details about the myth of “no safe havens,” see:
“CIA: Resurgent Al Qaeda Now at Pre-9/11 Capability.”

  • The America that exists today is not the America that existed in November 2000. That was the America that was more compassionate, more democratic, more respectful of its Constitution and more appreciated on the world stage. Today we have a traditional, top-down organization where you have the Bush cabal and a series of lieutenants and they issue orders and they carried them out.

  • The America that exists today is not the America that existed in November 2000. That was the America that was more compassionate, more democratic, more respectful of its Constitution and more appreciated on the world stage. Today we have a traditional, top-down organization where you have the Bush cabal and a series of lieutenants and they issue orders and they carry them out.

  • “That organization was smashed. Three-quarters of its leadership — or, I guess, two-thirds of its leadership has either been killed or captured.”

    Let’s assume Tony is telling the truth (I know, I know). This can only mean one of four things:

    1. We don’t need to worry about AQ, and all of that scare-mongering was just a bunch of bullshit.

    2. Even with that many leaders dead or captured they’re still able to spread mayhem all over the globe and (again, according to the White House) run rings around the US military in Iraq.

    3. Thanks to the Stupendous Decider Guy, AQ was “smashed” at some point, but (depending when the smashing occured) somewhere in the past five years, AQ was able to rebuild itself to pre-2001 strength.

    4. Tony is such a stupid shit he thinks that a change in the way a group is organized means the group must be weaker.

  • Take them at their word that AQ was smashed.

    This completely contradicted the Bush claim that they attacked us. If this claim is true than AQ of Iraq has nothing to do with those who attacked us on 9/11.

  • 3/4 of Tony Snow’s credibility has been smashed since he joined the Bush Whitehouse. And he didn’t really have much to begin with.

    Can someone from the press corpse please do a poll on Tony’s believability, and then club him over the head with it at every opportunity?

    Oh wait, that would be like doing your job. Sorry.

  • If, which is a big if, that was true shouldn’t the focus shift slightly in the ongoing battle with Al Qaeda? If the leadership is smashed it should be easy to weed out the rest.

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