Keeping the al Qaeda report under wraps

March 12, 2008

Following up on an item from yesterday, the Pentagon has prepared a new report on non-existent ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. The document is the culmination of an exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Not surprisingly, officials discovered what we already knew — there was no “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion.

Obviously, this is at least mildly embarrassing for the Bush administration, given that they made frequent efforts to connect Saddam to al Qaeda before the invasion, in order to sell the war to the public. But how far would the Bush gang go to conceal its humiliation?

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won’t be emailed to reporters and it won’t be posted online.

Hmm. They scheduled its release, then cancelled it. They scheduled a briefing, then cancelled it, too. And if asked, I’m certain Dana Perino would insist, with a mostly straight face, that the White House never contacted the Pentagon about this, and it was solely the decision of military officials, who, for whatever reason, preferred to hide its own report.

And no one will believe her.

March 12, 2008 at 3:37 pm

I wonder what percentage of us still believes they were connected? THAT is the bedrock of support for the neocons, and the foundation of their case for war with Iran, which, make no mistake, is a distinct possibility now that Fallon is out of the way.

This report, and the lame attempt to hide it, should be an ideal opportunity to ask Americans if they believe that there ever was an Iraq-9/11 connection. That myth needs to die, and the media has done very little to kill it after they allowed BushCo to create it.

The life of the American conservative is a perpetual crisis of cognitive dissonance, especially when it comes to the run-up to the Iraq war. So three new stories this week are certain to cause right-wing minds to explode, or at least to seek the safe harbor of denial.

First came word of a new book from Rumsfeld aide Douglas Feith revealing that President Bush declared “war is inevitable” in December 2002, months before UN weapons inspectors produced their report on Iraq’s WMD. Later this week, the Pentagon will release the results of its massive study of pre-war intelligence confirming that Saddam and Al Qaeda had no operational relationship. Last, the Senate Intelligence Committee will soon publish its long-delayed critique of the Bush administration’s claims in the buildup to war with Iraq.

For the details, see:
“Three Iraq Stories, More Conservative Exploding Heads.”

I’m normally opposed to spam but this report would be a good candidate for emailing to 100 million addresses.

Gotta give ABC some credit for this, even though it’s at the end of the article, and the article has the stupid headline “Pentagon Report on Saddam’s Iraq Censored?”:

Bush administration officials have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror group in their justification for waging war against Iraq.

“What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network,” former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations February 5, 2003.

On June 18, 2004 the Washington Post quoted President George W. Bush as saying: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” Bush said.

“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda,” The Washington Post quoted Bush as saying. “We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.”

“We know he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization,” Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC’s Meet The Press March 16, 2003.

“But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda, the cost to the United States of what happened on 9/11 with billions and billions of dollars and 3,000 lives. And the cost will be much greater in a future attack if the terrorists have access to the kinds of capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed,” Cheney said.

”There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq,” former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a interview with Infinity CBS Radio, Nov. 14, 2002.

Of course there are many other examples, my favorite is when Bush told us all from the flight deck of the USS Lincoln that he had “removed an ally of al Qaeda”.

LIAR.

Darn. Some poor soul will have to scan the report page by page before they can post it on the internets. I wonder how long it will take?

From CB’s link:

Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: “We’re making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we’ll send it out via CD in the mail.”

So let me get this straight…

They refuse to post it online, but they’ll mail a CD to anyone who wants one. Don’t they realize it will be all over the internet in a matter of minutes after the first blogger or reporter opens his package?

Worst. Orwellian. Government. Ever.

The other problem is that the only people who still believe Saddam had operational ties to Al-Qaeda would be just as likely to believe that the Pentagon report was a fabrication of America-hating, Birkenstock-eating, Islamocommuno-fascist liberal mole in the Pentagon.

This isn’t just an indictment about the brutal lack of honesty of this administration, but also an indictment of the lack of tenacity of today’s press. Will reporters protest the withholding of news and the blatant dishonesty flowing from that, or will the lack of released information vanish quietly into the night as a non-event since the media never received a press release to stenograph?

The media should quit enabling this behavior and go out and do its job, if their corporate owners would let them.

From what I can see that it might be possible to request a hard copy though. I have to say if it was too much of a political hot potato, why they think this procedure will mitigate that I have no idea. It isn’t like someone won’t get that hard copy and scan and post the darn thing. Heck ABC has the pdf of the executive summary already up. Why bother? Just so freakin’ petty – pretty much a description of the administration and most of it’s players.

This administration is phoning it in and sadly getting away with it.

RacerX@#1, yes war with Iran is now a distinct possibility with Admiral Fallon out of the way, AND Cheney on the wat to the region to talk to our allies about the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. What ya wanna bet that he either gives Israel the go ahead to attack, promising them we’ve got their backs, or to get permission from the Saudis for a US airstrike?

It’s not over til Jan 20th 2009 at 12:01 pm

I’m actually convinced that Saddam had direct working relationships with at least one terrorist. Haven’t you seen the pictures of him shaking hands with Rumsfeld?

Mr Furious, @6,

Another angle: if it had been posted on-line, it would have been free to everyone who wanted it and not too expensive to Pentagon. If they have to burn and s-mail CDs, it may run into some serious money. So… Who’s paying?

This administration reminds me of a kid who gets an F on his math test and hides it in the bottom of his backpack, thinking that his mom won’t see it.

WHY SO ANGRY? Bush can’t win Florida, ignore global-warming, justify tax-cuts for the rich, or make (an honest) case to invade Iraq.

Reading this immediately brought me back to Forrest Gump saying’ “Stupid is as Stupid does.”

with the wealth of evidence the DNC should be collecting for the upcoming general election, if mccain wins the loss to the dems will go down in the annals of infamy right along with the oj simpson aquittal.

Makes you wonder how many of the media are actually going to ‘request’ a copy to be sent to them… that would involve ‘investigating’ the phone number, and that might be too much to ask.

If it isn’t given to them, it must not be worth reporting.

On another note… Although I didn’t agree with Spitzer resigning, it sure will take the wind out of the Republicans. Now that he has resigned, they can’t really get too much mileage out of it any longer. By next week that will be old news…

Too bad for the Bushies… we’ll have to focus on those nasty facts about the war on terror and the economy and the deficit…. All getting worse by the minute.. and nothing from the democratic side of the isle to use as an excuse.

The title of the McLatchey headline is Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida. The first paragraph says, “An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.” So, how did “no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links” become “no link”, as in the headline? The third paragraph states the following [emphasis mine]:

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

So what we have is “no direct operational links” becoming “no operational links” becoming “no links”. All that was needed was to remove two key words, words that matter, and that is how this conclusion is based. Except for one problem; taking away one or two words changes the meaning of what is actually written.

Allow me to explain. No direct operational links could easily be construed as indirect operational links, or some other link that is not direct, but financial perhaps; maybe Saddam thought Al Qaeda needed some ready cash from his Oil-for-Food trough. Even no operational link could also be construed as strictly financial; he gives them money, he doesn’t want to know what is being done with it. Doesn’t care. Even having Zarqawi in Kurdistan with Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam, with the excuse that the big, bad U.S. is not allowing him to get such a terrorist, would not be an operational link, but would still be a link (because a guy with 250,000 security forces, not to mention at least that number of regular army troops, could scour the countryside to either arrest or kill Zarqawi, or even work with him, without the U.S. knowing about it). But when one says no link? Uh-uh. Even the Senate intelligence reports on pre-war intelligence say it happened. Now, the McLatchy piece is no longer news, but an editorial disguised as news. That’s dishonest.

Of course, sometimes words get added. Nearly two months ago, one of Soros’ front groups put out a phony item regarding the “lies of the Bush administration”, which was amazing as a document about history since it purports the beginning of the universe to be Sept. 11, 2001. Even creationists believe the universe is a few thousand years older than that. Anyway, they mention this regarding Rumsfeld [emphasis mine]:

In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: “Sure.”

See that? One word: relationships. Not what kind, not direct, not operational, just relationships, which we know existed because members of the Iraqi government had met Al Qaeda (I’m not talking about the Prague meeting), but nobody knows what came about. Here’s what the Soros flunkies added [emphasis mine]:

In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of “compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.

By adding two different words, “relationships” became “direct cooperation”. But anything about “direct cooperation” wasn’t what was asked by the reporters, only “relationships”. What is better is the Soros goons added this, which undercuts their statement and confirms Rumsfeld’s [emphasis mine]:

” What’s more, an earlier DIA assessment said that “the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.”

That means the DIA didn’t know exactly, but doesn’t say it didn’t happen (when everyone knows it did). Rumsfeld wasn’t asked what kind of “relationships”, and didn’t offer any more than “Sure”, and the DIA didn’t say either way. But when the Soros clowns added their two words, they completely changed the meaning of what was really said. Not only is their universe less than seven years old, they can’t even write the history of it right.

So I can understand why this report isn’t being made available to the media without a request first. What’s come out from the media about it hasn’t been the truth.

By the way, can someone explain to me how making the report available on request instead of on a website “Keeping the Al Qaeda report under wraps”? So, put in a request.

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