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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/29/2008 5:47:40 AM | Well, more mortars lobbed into the Green Zone and 4 soldiers killed yesterday.
Yawn.
And we paid 3/4 of a trillion for that, too, the biggest embassy in the entire world, our HQ in the ME, city within a city for 1,000 people...........but whoops! It's open from the air!
Certain "people" over there dont like having an American city-within-a-City in the middle of their capital city.........gee, I wonder why? ... these same people can pretty much keep lobbing mortars into the Green Zone for the next 50 years, 100 years .....and they will. Darn it, they just dont like being a colony of America! Darn them, huh? I'm not sure what I'd do if some foreign country built a city within my city the size of three football fields..........I suppose I'd just bake them some cookies!!!
""""Yoooo-hoooooo, boys? You with the machine guns behind the big wall over there, would you like some fresh, chocolate chip cookies????? Hmmmmm????"
And the PTSD cases flood the VA, the system can't handle them, the dead and wounded keep coming back ........no plan for an exit.
That's not important, though! Voting in a guy that would perpetuate this awful mistake isn't important.
What's important is what people say about their grandmothers! A pin they wear. A pastor who shot his mouth off years ago and we got it on film! An associate who belonged to a radical group umpteen years ago!
THOSE ARE THE IMPORTANT THINGS!
wE'RE GOING TO "WIN" IN IRAQ! I DONT CARE HOW MANY TRILLIONS AND HOW MANY DEAD AND WOUNDED SOLDIERS COME OUT OF IT, WERE GOING TO "WIN", I JUST KNOW IT!
Just like the president of Gentleman's Wearhouse says, "Youre gonna like the way you look, I guarantee it"! Someday they are going to like us over there, just you wait and see .............. no, the best we can do isnt just an armed camp with endless combat that turns the country into a wasteland.......no, sir.........we're gonna WIN!
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/29/2008 11:16:56 AM | | steven, what aspect of your job do you enjoy most about being a communist party member? | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/29/2008 5:03:03 PM | | His chances of winning the election are worse than his chances of catching a bullet. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/29/2008 5:35:19 PM | Your right Steven!
They were much better off before. You know when there own president was killing them off... starving them.. and torchering them oh yeah and funnist of all was when he gassed them...
what the hell are we thinking!!!!!
Lets get out so they they can get back to "normal"
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/29/2008 5:56:10 PM | Steven,
In Iraq, iraqi's have reopened business that haven't been opened in years...
http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2008/pr080325.html
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 25, 2008
Press Office: 202-712-4320
Public Information: 202-712-4810
www.usaid.gov
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced today that its private-sector development program in Iraq, known as Izdihar ("prosperity" in Arabic), has helped provide more than $150 million in micro-loans since the start of U.S. government microfinance assistance to Iraq in 2003. The loans, which typically range from $500 to $3,000, are primarily used by Iraqis to start or expand small businesses. The program maintains a repayment rate of nearly 99 percent.
USAID's micro-loan program is administered by a network of nine microfinance institutions that Izdihar has supported through infusions of loan capital, technical assistance, and training for loan officers. Six of the nine are Iraqi-owned organizations that Izdihar helped to establish to meet the growing demand for small loans throughout Iraq. Many of the microfinance institutions operate several branches within a particular region to ensure accessibility to communities seeking resources for economic revitalization.
According to John Seong, Director of USAID's Economic Growth and Agriculture Office in Iraq, "USAID's microfinance program has enjoyed a warm reception from Iraqi entrepreneurs and small business owners who are eager to provide better lives for their families while helping to rebuild the Iraq economy. The program's popularity and impressive repayment rate show just how vital a role microfinance can play in helping Iraq establish economic self-sufficiency."
For more information on USAID and its programs in Iraq, please visit www.usaid.gov/iraq
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2007
Press Office: 202-712-4320
Public Information: 202-712-4810
www.usaid.gov
Washington, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded a contract for the Iraq Community-Based Conflict Mitigation (ICCM) Program to Relief International of California, and the Columbia University Center for International Conflict Resolution of New York.
Valued at $22 million, the ICCM program will work to assess the nature of community conflicts, including those that are resource-based, and offer quick response programs to address them. This will help to build conflict mitigation networks that promote local cooperation and engage the next generation of Iraqis in preventing conflict
The ICCM Program will take advantage of the access and on-the-ground knowledge provided by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which consist of USAID subject-area experts and representatives from Coalition forces and other U.S. government (USG) agencies. As part of the USG's New Way Forward in Iraq, 25 PRTs have been established throughout the country in an effort to coordinate programmatic interventions on the local level. PRTs have developed strong relationships and in-depth knowledge of local Iraqi civil society, tribal leadership, and local government. By working through PRTs, the ICCM program will coordinate with other projects already on the ground promoting economic growth, responding to humanitarian crises, developing local government capacity, and mobilizing communities.
Here is another great link for you.
http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/pdf/USAID_Strategy.pdf | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 12:35:21 AM |
They were much better off before. You know when there own president was killing them off... starving them.. and torchering them oh yeah and funnist of all was when he gassed them...
I know, yet the current regime has managed to kill them off much more effectively. Hundreds of extra thousands of deaths since the war began. Apparently American incompentence is worse than Saddam's evil. Who sold them that poisonous gas?
Also you guys torture them too, and hold them without trial. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 3:40:06 AM | | They're opening businesses that were never opened before? How very 'democratic society' of them...good for them! I wonder what kind of profits they're making being that they are only able to stay open for two hours of the business day because that's all the electricity they have? Oh, and I hope they don't use any water, because I think they're not doing so hot with the running water these days, either. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 4:55:28 AM | | Yes it is good for them, And because they are able to pay back these loans that means that there is a good chance they were even profitable to them. Oh right profit such a nasty word. I forget that repression and supression these things are much more fun. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 5:18:37 AM | Oh yeah and with the electricty problem they are having... I think you said max they have electricity 2 hours a day. That is sweet for us! That means that their carbon footprint is more like a baby toe print and now we can stay on this forum so much longer and whine about it and not have to send Al Gore money to buy more Carbon Credits. Tell me that isn't a sweet deal!!!!!!
My new motto. If you want change but don't care if they tax you poor to get it. Vote for Barrack Obama, vp Hilary Rodham Clinton. Lets just go for broke!!!!
wouldn't it be cool if they only let us have electricity two hours a day to reduce our carbon footprint too.
It could happen. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 5:21:17 AM | | Yes, living in the desert in 120 degree heat with two hours of electriciy per day is something I'm sure they are choosing to endure. Get a grip lady. They had electricity and water before the invasion....now they don't. I bet you're pretty comfy in the summer, huh? Easy to say from wayyyy across the world that we're 'bettering their lives', isn't it. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 6:15:25 AM | ^^^ Yes, and I'm sure they're also most grateful that their country has, since the US invasion and occupation, become a recruiting rallying point & training ground for foreign jihaadists and otherwise religiously twisted nutcases -- really who DOESN'T want that in their country?? It's a mark of status nowadays to have a massive suicide bombing here & there so you can be just like Israel or NYC or London or Spain. They're certainly grateful for the tens of thousands of their own civilian dead & maimed whether from the "shock and awe" US bombing or from the sectarian violence the invasion and occupation ignited. They're damn sure grateful for daily indignities or just condescending power-trip type treatment from ignorant American rednecks in uniforms -- but again what country doesn't want to experience that? Oh and speaking of that sort of thing, they can always look back and laugh about Abu Ghraib, which should probably go without saying 'thanks' for, but...... Oh and the 2 million displaced & otherwise homeless people are certainly grateful , obviously.
OBL --- remember that one guy, who Bush vowed to catch but never did? -- he's probably grateful as well that they derailed so far from what started off as just a three-hour tour of Afghanistan to "smoke him out of his hole". AlQaeda in general would like to extend its thanks as well for the opportunity to train & strike at the deviant Shi'ites where they breathe and where they sleep. An opportunity which Saddam was not ever willing to extend to them.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iranian hardliners likewise feel grateful for the opportunity to finally have much more of a hand in Shi'ite affairs in their neighboring country --- such as the opportunity to better arm militias to wage proxy war against the Iraqi gov't.
Some pics of thankful ones are on the link below; they're older pics -- alot of these people had initially wanted to send postcards, a "Wish you were Here" kind of thing probably, to "W" but I don't think they ever were able to reach him; maybe they could just have them forwarded to his Methodist church where he's down on bended knee and holier-than-thou praying to Jesus every Sunday. Either way it's probably good to take a good long hard look at such things, to see the on-the-ground results of what you support.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_page1.htm | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 11:00:40 AM | By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
Published: December 17, 2006
Regardless of how the war ends, Iraq is not Vietnam. This is true not just militarily and politically but also in the reporting about the two conflicts. For many journalists who covered Vietnam and subsequently wrote books about the war, the experience could be understood only as a hallucinogenic nightmare, and they described it in gonzo prose to match. The reality of Iraq is much more frightening than a bad acid trip, but the writing about this continuing fiasco has been cleareyed and sober, and all the more powerful for it. Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” is a fine example.
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY
Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
This book tells the bureaucratic story of Iraq’s Year 1, the year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, when the United States was the legal occupying power and responsible for the country’s administration. The primary mechanism for that work was the Coalition Provisional Authority, headquartered in the Green Zone, a blast-barrier-encased compound created around Hussein’s Baghdad palace, on the west bank of the Tigris. Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief during this period, catalogs a lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude behind those walls that doomed Iraq to its bloody present every bit as much as insufficient military manpower did.
To begin with, the C.P.A.’s recruitment policy would have shamed Tammany Hall. Loyalty to George W. Bush and the Republican Party was apparently the prime criterion for getting work at the C.P.A. To determine their suitability for positions in Iraq, some prospective employees were asked their views on Roe v. Wade. Others were asked whom they voted for in 2000. Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and party activists were all solicited by the White House’s liaison at the Pentagon, James O’Beirne, to suggest possible staffers.
Before the war began, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. was assigned to oversee Iraq’s health care system. He had a résumé to die for: a physician with a master’s degree in public health, and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Berkeley. He also had two bronze stars for military service in the Navy, as well as field experience with the Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 gulf war. A week after the liberation, he was told he was being replaced because, Chandrasekaran writes, “a senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a ‘loyalist’ in the job.”
That loyalist was James K. Haveman Jr., who had been recommended by the former Michigan governor John Engler. Haveman’s résumé included running a Christian adoption agency that counseled young women against abortions. He spent much of his time in Iraq preparing to privatize the state-owned drug supply firm — perhaps not the most important priority since almost every hospital in the country had been thoroughly looted in the days after Hussein was overthrown.
On page after page, Chandrasekaran details other projects of the C.P.A.’s bright young Republican ideologues — like modernizing the Baghdad stock exchange, or quickly privatizing every service that had previously been provided by the state. Some of these ideas would have been laudable if they were being planned for a country with functioning power and water supplies, and that wasn’t tottering on the brink of anarchy.
But how could these young Americans have known what life was like for ordinary Iraqis since they never left the Green Zone? Instead, they turned the place into something like a college campus. After a hard day of dreaming up increasingly improbable projects, the kids did what kids do — headed for the bar and looked for a hookup. As for the Iraqis, they were conspicuous by their absence.
Presiding over this unreal world was the American viceroy, L. Paul Bremer III, who comes across in this book as a man who has read one C.E.O. memoir too many, a man who knew his mind and would not have his decisions changed by the inconvenient reality of Iraqi life just outside the blast barriers. All of this would be funny in a Joseph Heller kind of way if tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers weren’t to die because of the decisions made by the C.P.A., the Pentagon and the White House.
In Chandrasekaran’s account, all the arrogance, stubbornness and desire for career advancement crystallized at the end of March 2004, when Bremer decided to shut down a newspaper published by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. With typical high-handedness, he made the decision without thinking through the possible consequences. He had no military backup plan if Sadr decided to fight and, predictably, Sadr’s Mahdi Army did fight back. Within a few days four American private security operatives were ambushed and killed in Falluja, their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Suddenly, a year after overthrowing Hussein, the United States was fighting Shiite insurgents on one front and Sunni insurgents on another. This is the one and only time that the American military appears in Chandrasekaran’s otherwise civilian story, but his description of the skirmish between a platoon from the Army’s First Cavalry Division and Mahdi Army fighters is absolutely brilliant. It is eyewitness history of the first order.
If there is one thing missing from this account it is the author himself. Reading a 300-page book is a bit like driving across country with a stranger you’ve met through a message board. By the time you reach the Mississippi you hope to know your traveling companion reasonably well. That’s not the case here. Chandrasekaran’s personal views are absent until almost the very end of the book.
I think I understand why. He is adhering to the professional code of journalism: reporting facts with scrupulous neutrality and objectivity. However, I sometimes think that the relentless political attacks on the professionalism of reporters in Iraq have forced them to take a very narrow view of what that neutrality and objectivity mean. Those of us who have covered the invasion and its aftermath have an obligation not only as journalists but as citizens. We have had a privileged view of these epoch-defining events (and we didn’t get our jobs by taking litmus tests on abortion). We have a duty to bear passionate, accurate, personal witness — to be something more than mere compilers of facts.
It would have been worthwhile if Chandrasekaran had given us a greater sense of what he thought about overthrowing Hussein and, more to the point, what he felt upon returning to Washington after having seen the bloody result of its policies. But that is a philosophical difference I have with the author. This is a clearly written, blessedly undidactic book. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq. [quote/]
Looks like a lotta business opportunities at the expense of the American taxpayer and Iraqi lives .......and the fat cat contractors in case you missed the point are in the Green Zone . | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 6:35:34 PM | You want reality?
Here is the Sadam Reality.
The 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, 8,000 of whom were rounded up by the regime in northern Iraq and executed in deserts at great distances from their homes.
The 1988 Anfal campaign, during which as many as 182,000 people disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of Iraq. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves.
Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Iraqi Air Force dropped sarin, VX and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people immediately and causing long-term medical problems, related deaths, and birth defects among the progeny of thousands more.
The 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi’a Muslims after the Shi’a uprising at the end of the Gulf war, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and Al-Hillah were killed.
The 1991 Kurdish massacre, which targeted civilians and soldiers who fought for autonomy in northern Iraq after the Gulf war. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 6:40:32 PM | | Without doubt Saddam was a bad man. Evil even. But he was not posing a threat to the U.S. The people of Iraq never wrote to the White House and said please, we must have troops over here. In fact, most of them hate us over there. And the fact remains, we were lied to. Who will we invade next because we don't like the way they're handling things? | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 6:51:10 PM | I bought the WMD bullcrap. I really did. How could such a corroborated story be so much of a smokescreen?
The fact is that Saddam was a buffer in the region. Iran had no chance of extending influence past there while he existed. He was an unwitting stablilizer in the region. We removed that and now the Earth shakes because of it. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 6:54:59 PM | just me but I guess no electricity is trival compared the the reign of Terror Sadam and his Regime force the Iraq people to live with.
I don't doubt for a min that Iraq is not a dangerous place or a truly hard way of life.. But if I had a choice to put the life of myself and my family in the Hands of Saddam Hussein or the United States miltary.. Its not a decision that I would have to ponder long.
Funny how people expect that this war should go perfectly.. 6 years in and Iraq should be a Utopia and no soldiers or Civilians lives lost. Tell me honestly with Sadams track record of terrorizing the people of iraq do you believe that less lives would have been lost just letting him kill his own people. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 7:00:22 PM |
Funny how people expect that this war should go perfectly
No, what I expect is that the elected officals of my country not deceive entire nations into a global war that is fighting....what. What exactly are we fighting?
Tell me honestly with Sadams track record of terrorizing the people of iraq do you believe that less lives would have been lost just letting him kill his own people
I know that about 4000 less American lives would have been lost........ | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 7:05:08 PM | To msg89, where'd he get the chemicals used in the Halabja attack?? Any idea? Those were "WMD", yes, and they were sold to him by the US Pentagon primarily for use against the Iranians he was at war with at the time -- not for use against his own people. This was after all back when he was one of the US's back-slapping hand-shaking good buddies being used as a pawn and a buffer to wage proxy war against Iran.
He stayed in the US's good graces of course until he overstepped his bounds, wrongly perceiving that his one-time benefactor here would not think it was quite that far out of bounds for him, and invaded Kuwait. That threatened the Saudis , and therefore our, oil business basically.
Following the first Gulf war Bush, Sr, basically in so many words tells the Shi'ites go ahead and rise up, the US is prepared to back you if you overthrow Saddam. They take him at his word and they start to try and do so. No one comes to their aid. "The 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi'a Muslims after the Shi'a uprising at the end of the Gulf war, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and al-Hillah were killed" promptly ensues.
Yes it's obvious Hussein was an iron-fisted dictator and a cold-blooded killer, but given the vacuum & the huge mess which has occurred (as W's father once wisely predicted it would) following his being forcefully deposed by an outside power, IMO the US staying out of there in the first place looks by far like it would have been the preferable choice.
He had nothing to do with 9/11, he had no WMD (he'd used all the ones he'd gotten from here long ago). About all they had on him relating to terrorism at all was that he had allegedly sent checks to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers; that's Israel's problem. I couldn't care less that he sent checks to those peoples' families. They'd need the money after all, following the typical heavy-handed Israeli gov't response when they bulldozed the entire block the bomber's family lived on.
Hussein was , for all his ills, a useful buffer against Iranian religious hardliners, and he kept the jackboot on the necks of any budding Sunni religious militant groups in Iraq -- or if they were present at any time it certainly was underground and inactive...quite unlike how they quickly became following his demise.
Had the US not invaded (and this was also the first time the US launched an unprovoked overt invasion & occupation of another land btw), hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (whom Saddam likely would NOT have killed) would be alive and/or in one piece; 2 million + displaced Iraqis would still have their homes; Iran would not be dangerously meddling in Iraq's Shi'ite affairs; the US would have never spent ...what is it now..... trillions of dollars and counting; 4,000 + soldiers' lives would not have been wasted not to mention the probably good 15 - 20,000 of them who've been maimed or otherwise injured over there (so far) and they wouldn't have to worry about trying to exit safely and "with dignity" from what has surely turned out to be Iraqi quicksand.
There is absolutely nothing anyone could say that would or will ever convince me the US invasion of Iraq was a good thing. It was and is arguably one of the US gov't's worst strategic blunders in ages, and we're all going to be paying for it for ages , and people who have loved ones in the military may well pay for it in blood and tears as well. IMO , to defend it at this point is essentially an indefensible position, but to each his or her own. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 7:11:50 PM | OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.
According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.
The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."
The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front. Numerous sources have confirmed this. One defector reported that "al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-al Qaeda relationship. The defector said Iraq sought al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided al Qaeda with training and instructors."
One such confirmation came in a postwar interview with one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. As the memo details:
4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 7:26:49 PM | In describing the relations between the Army of Muhammad and the Iraqi regime, the authors of the Pentagon study come to this conclusion: "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda--as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."
As I said, this ought to be big news. And, in a way, it was. A headline in the New York Times, a cursory item in the Washington Post, and stories on NPR and ABC News reported that the study showed no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism," in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America's most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study's executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.
On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service first reported that the new Pentagon study was coming. "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." McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves
many of America's largest cities. The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence. Strobel quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the report" who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a "direct operational link" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration's prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism.
With the study not scheduled for release for two more days, this article shaped subsequent coverage, which was no doubt the leaker's purpose. Stories from other media outlets tracked McClatchy very closely but began to incorporate a highly misleading phrase taken from the executive summary: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." This is how the Washington Post wrote it up:
An examination of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records collected by U.S. forces since the March 2003 invasion has concluded that there is 'no smoking gun' supporting the Bush administration's prewar assertion of an 'operational relationship' between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, sources familiar with the study said."
Much of the confusion might have been avoided if the Bush administration had done anything to promote the study. An early version of the Pentagon study was provided to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley more than a year ago, before November 2006. In recent weeks, as the Pentagon handled the rollout of the study, Hadley was tasked with briefing President Bush and Vice President****Cheney. It's unclear whether he shared the study with President Bush, and NSC officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But sources close to Cheney say the vice president was blindsided.
After the erroneous report from McClatchy, two officials involved with the study became very concerned about the misreporting of its contents. One of them said in an interview that he found the media coverage of the study "disappointing." Another, James Lacey, expressed his concern in an email to Karen Finn in the Pentagon press office, who was handling the rollout of the study. On Tuesday, the day before it was scheduled for release, Lacey wrote: "1. The story has been leaked. 2. ABC News is doing a story based on the executive summary tonight. 3. The Washington Post is doing a story based on rumors they heard from ABC News. The document is being misrepresented. I recommend we put [it] out and on a website immediately."
Finn declined, saying that members of Congress had not been told the study was coming. "Despite the leak, there are Congressional notifications and then an official public release. This should not be posted on the web until these actions are complete."
Still under the misimpression that the Pentagon study undermined the case for war, McClatchy's Warren Strobel saw this bureaucratic infighting as a conspiracy to suppress the study:
The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network. . . . The reversal highlighted the politically sensitive nature of its conclusions, which were first reported Monday by McClatchy.
In making their case for invading Iraq in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his top national security aides claimed that Saddam's regime had ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
But the study, based on more than 600,000 captured documents, including audio and video files, found that while Saddam sponsored terrorism, particularly against opponents of his regime and against Israel, there was no evidence of an al Qaida link.
An examination of the rest of the study makes the White House decision to ignore the Pentagon study even more curious. The first section explores "Terror as an Instrument of State Power" and describes documents detailing Fedayeen Saddam terrorist training camps in Iraq. Graduates of the terror training camps would be dispatched to sensitive sites to carry out their assassinations and bombings. In May 1999, the regime plotted an operation code named "Blessed July" in which the top graduates of the terrorist training courses would be sent to London, Iran, and Kurdistan to conduct assassinations and bombings.
A separate set of documents presents, according to the Pentagon study, "evidence of logistical preparation for terrorist operations in other nations, including those in the West." In one letter, a director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) responds to a request from Saddam for an inventory of weapons stockpiled in Iraqi embassies throughout the world. The terrorist tools include missile launchers and missiles, "American missile launchers," explosive materials, TNT, plastic explosive charges, Kalashnikov rifles, and "booby-trapped suitcases."
The July 2002 Iraqi memo describes how these weapons were distributed to the operatives in embassies.
Between the year 2000 and 2002 explosive materials were transported to embassies outside Iraq for special work, upon the approval of the Director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The responsibility for these materials is in the hands of heads of stations. Some of these materials were transported in the political mail carriers [Diplomatic Pouch]. Some of these materials were transported by car in booby-trapped briefcases.
Saddam also recruited non-Iraqi jihadists to serve as suicide bombers on behalf of the Iraqi regime. According to the study, captured documents "indicate that as early as January 1998, the scheduling of suicide volunteers was routine enough to warrant not only a national-level policy letter but a formal schedule--during summer vacation--built around maximizing availability of Arab citizens in Iraq on Saddam-funded scholarships."
The second section of the Pentagon study concerns "State Relationships with Terrorist Groups." An IIS document dated March 18, 1993, lists nine terrorist "organizations that our agency [IIS] cooperates with and have relations with various elements in many parts of the Arab world and who also have the expertise to carry out assignments" on behalf of the regime. Several well-known Palestinian terrorist organizations make the list, including Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council and Abu Abbas's Palestinian Liberation Front. Another group, the secret "Renewal and Jihad Organization" is described this way in the Iraqi memo:
It believes in armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests. They also believe our leader [Saddam Hussein], may God protect him, is the true leader in the war against the infidels. The organization's leaders live in Jordan when they visited Iraq two months ago they demonstrated a willingness to carry out operations against American interests at any time."
Other groups listed in the Iraqi memo include the "Islamic Scholars Group" and the "Pakistan Scholars Group. "
There are two terrorist organizations on the Iraqi Intelligence list that deserve special consideration: the Afghani Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad of Ayman al Zawahiri.
This IIS document provides this description of the Afghani Islamic Party:
It was founded in 1974 when its leader [Gulbuddin Hekmatyar] escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan. It is considered one of the extreme political religious movements against the West, and one of the strongest Sunni parties in Afghanistan. The organization relies on financial support from Iraq and we have had good relations with Hikmatyar since 1989.
In his book Holy War, Inc., Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who has long been skeptical of Iraq-al Qaeda connections, describes Hekmatyar as Osama bin Laden's "alter ego." Bergen writes: "Bin Laden and Hekmatyar worked closely together. During the early 1990s al-Qaeda's training camps in the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan were situated in an area controlled by Hekmatyar's party."
It's worth dwelling for a moment on that set of facts. An internal Iraqi Intelligence document reports that Iraqis have "good relations" with Hekmatyar and that his organization "relies on financial support from Iraq." At precisely the same time, Hekmatyar "worked closely" with Osama bin Laden and his Afghani Islamic Party hosted "al Qaeda's terrorist training camps" in eastern Afghanistan.
The IIS document also reveals that Saddam was funding another close ally of bin Laden, the EIJ organization of Ayman al Zawahiri.
In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt. Our information on the group is as follows:
It was established in 1979.
Its goal is to apply the Islamic shari'a law and establish Islamic rule.
It is considered one of the most brutal Egyptian organizations. It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat.
We have previously met with the organization's representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime.
Zawahiri arrived in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, and "from the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden," according to Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower. The leaders of EIJ quickly became leaders of bin Laden's organizations. "He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions around bin Laden," Wright reported in the definitive profile of Zawahiri, published in the New Yorker in September 2002. "According to the Islamist attorney Montasser al-Zayat, 'Zawahiri completely controlled bin Laden. The largest share of bin Laden's financial support went to Zawahiri and the Jihad organization."
Later, Wright describes the founding of al Qaeda.
Toward the end of 1989, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at a mujahideen camp. A Sudanese fighter named Jamal al-Fadl was among the participants, and he later testified about the event in a New York courtroom during one of the trials connected with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in East Africa. According to Fadl, the meeting was attended by ten men--four or five of them Egyptians, including Zawahiri. Fadl told the court that the chairman of the meeting, an Iraqi known as Abu Ayoub, proposed the formation of a new organization that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. There was some dispute about the name, but ultimately the new organization came to be called Al Qaeda--the Base. The alliance was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual mujahideen and established groups, and was dominated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The ultimate boss, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the checkbook.
Once again, it's worth dwelling on these facts for a moment. In 1989, Ayman al Zawahiri attended the founding meeting of al Qaeda. He was literally present at the creation, and his EIJ "dominated" the new organization headed by Osama bin Laden.
In the early 1990s, Zawahiri and bin Laden moved their operations to Sudan. After a fundraising trip to the United States in the spring of 1993, Zawahiri returned to Sudan where, again according to Wright, he "began working more closely with bin Laden, and most of the Egyptian members of Islamic Jihad went on the Al Qaeda payroll." Although some members of EIJ were skeptical of bin Laden and his global aspirations, Zawahiri sought a de facto merger with al Qaeda. One of his top assistants would later say Zawahiri had told him that "joining with bin Laden [was] the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization alive."
Again, at precisely the same time Zawahiri was "joining with bin Laden," the spring of 1993, he was being funded by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As Zawahiri's jihadists trained in al Qaeda camps in Sudan, his representative to Iraq was planning "commando operations" against the Egyptian government with the IIS.
Another captured Iraqi document from early 1993 "reports on contact with a large number of terrorist groups in the region, including those that maintained an office or liaison in Iraq." In the same folder is a memo from Saddam Hussein to a member of his Revolutionary Council ordering the formation of "a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil, especially Somalia." A second memo to the director of the IIS, instructs him to revise the plan for "operations inside Somalia."
More recently, captured "annual reports" of the IIS reveal support for terrorist organizations in the months leading up the U.S. invasion in March 2003. According to the Pentagon study, "the IIS hosted thirteen conferences in 2002 for a number of Palestinian and other organizations, including delegations from the Islamic Jihad Movement and the Director General for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz." The same annual report "also notes that among the 699 passports, renewals and other official documentation that the IIS issued, many were issued to known members of terrorist organizations."
The Pentagon study goes on to describe captured documents that instruct the IIS to maintain contact with all manner of Arab movement and others that "reveal that later IIS activities went beyond just maintaining contact." Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi regime's General Military Intelligence Directorate "was training Sudanese fighters inside Iraq."
The second section of the Pentagon study also discusses captured documents related to the Islamic Resistance organization in Kurdistan from 1998 and 1999. The documents show that the Iraqi regime provided "financial and moral support" to members of the group, which would later become part of the al Qaeda affiliate in the region, Ansar al Islam.
The third section of the Pentagon study is called "Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases." One of the cases is that of the Army of Muhammad, the al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain. A series of memoranda order an Iraqi Intelligence operative in Bahrain to explore a relationship with its leaders. On July 9, 2001, the agent reports back: "Information available to us is that the group is under the wings of bin Laden. They receive their directions from Yemen. Their objectives are the same as bin Laden." Later, he lists the organization's objectives.
Jihad in the name of God
Striking the embassies and other Jewish and American interests anywhere in the world.
Attacking the American and British military bases in the Arab land.
Striking American embassies and interests unless the Americans pull out their forces from the Arab lands and discontinue their support for Israel.
Disrupting oil exports [to] the Americans from Arab countries and threatening tankers carrying oil to them.
A separate memo reveals that the Army of Muhammad has requested assistance from Iraq. The study authors summarize the response by writing, "the local IIS station has been told to deal with them in accordance with priorities previously established. The IIS agent goes on to inform the Director that 'this organization is an offshoot of bin Laden, but that their objectives are similar but with different names that can be a way of camouflaging the organization.'"
We never learn what those "previous priorities" were and thus what, if anything, came of these talks. But it is instructive that the operative in Bahrain understood the importance of disguising relations with al Qaeda and that the director of IIS, knowing that the group was affiliated with bin Laden and sought to attack Americans, seemed more interested in continuing the relationship than in ending it.
The fourth and final section of the Pentagon study is called "The Business of Terror." The authors write: "An example of indirect cooperation is the movement led by Osama bin Laden. During the 1990s, both Saddam and bin Laden wanted the West, particularly the United States, out of Muslim lands (or in the view of Saddam, the "Arab nation"). . . . In pursuit of their own separate but surprisingly 'parallel' visions, Saddam and bin Laden often found a common enemy in the United States."
They further note that Saddam's security organizations and bin Laden's network
were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much of the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historical narrative that promised a return to a glorious past. That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean they saw themselves in that light. Nevertheless, these similarities created more than just the appearance of cooperation. Common interests, even without common cause, increased the aggregate terror threat.
As much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20, or 50 years. The authors themselves acknowledge the limits of their work.
In fact, there are several captured Iraqi documents that have been authenticated by the U.S. government that were not included in the study but add to the picture it sketches. One document, authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and first reported on 60 Minutes, is dated March 28, 1992. It describes Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset "in good contact" with the IIS station in Syria.
Another Iraqi document, this one from the mid-1990s, was first reported in the New York Times on June 25, 2004. Authenticated by a Pentagon and intelligence working group, the document was titled "Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals." The working group concluded that it "corroborates and expands on previous reporting" on contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. It revealed that a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of the IIS in 1994 and reported that bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan. Bin Laden, according to the Iraqi document, was then "approached by our side" after "presidential approval" for the liaison was given. The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995. The document further states that bin Laden "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative"--a comment that suggests the possibility had been discussed.
Bin Laden requested that Iraq's state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this. The al Qaeda leader also proposed "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. There is no Iraqi response provided in the documents. When bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis sought "other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location." The IIS memo directs that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."
In another instance, the new Pentagon study makes reference to captured documents detailing the Iraqi relationship with Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law. But the Pentagon study does not mention the most significant element of those documents, first reported in these pages. In a memo from Ambassador Salah Samarmad to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, we learn that the Iraqi regime had been funding and equipping Abu Sayyaf, which had been responsible for a series of high-profile kidnappings. The Iraqi operative informs Baghdad that such support had been suspended. "The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them." That support would resume soon enough, and shortly before the war a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat named Hisham Hussein would be expelled from the Philippines after his cell phone number appeared on an Abu Sayyaf cell phone used to detonate a bomb.
What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.
Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.
What good is the truth if nobody knows it?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 8:04:56 PM | Do we honestly want a President... let that word sink in.... President of the USA... now, let the words...'Commander-in-Chief' of the United States of America... (think about those terms) in office who refuses to salute the flag... who has been an active member of a church now known to be horribly racist against those who are not black... .
These might seem like trivial things to some, but, imho, it tells a lot. A LOT to think over.
A chilling scenario. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 8:09:21 PM | | It's actually a lie, Jedi Girl, have you checked out snopes.com for the saluting the flag info? I hope you do, and I hope you don't let your political prejudice against Obama keep you from reading it with an open mind. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 8:34:36 PM | In response to msgs 95 and 96, from Slate.com, "The Case of the Misunderstood Memo" http://www.slate.com/id/2092180
The Feith "annex" highlights the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence material.
By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2003, at 2:14 PM ET
When they published their "Case Closed" cover story three weeks ago on the relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida, the editors of the Weekly Standard aimed to set off a bomb. The article was centered on a sizable leak—a gusher, really—of classified intelligence, 50 raw reports that had been strung together in the Pentagon to demonstrate the "operational relationship" between Osama Bin Laden's organization and Iraq. The target was the consensus among journalists and experts that there were no substantive ties between Baghdad and al-Qaida. If the article achieved its goal, it would help shore up the rickety argument that Baathist Iraq had posed a real national security threat to the United States.
Despite Jack Shafer's cri de coeur for some real reporting on the matter, the bomb sputtered. Some big publications took a passing look at material from the leaked annex to a letter from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—the document in which the 50 reports are summarized—but mostly for the sake of knocking it down, either explicitly or backhandedly. The piece has elicited one genuinely interesting column from the Washington Post's David Ignatius, who revealed that the United States and Britain had a highly placed informant in Iraqi intelligence "who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin Laden—and then decided against it."
For the most part, though, it seems the few beat reporters who cover the intelligence community called their sources and were told there was nothing new here—that the article was not, as author Stephen F. Hayes claimed, the fatal reproof to "critics of the Bush Administration [who] have complained that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror."
As subsequent editorials show, this has clearly infuriated the Weekly Standard crowd, who were also hoping to flush administration foxes from the hedges and force them finally to back up the allegations they have made about Saddam and Bin Laden. As someone who co-wrote a book, The Age of Sacred Terror, that argued there was no substantive relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq—a conclusion based on a review of relevant intelligence from when I worked on counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s—as well as a series of op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere saying the same thing, I guess I should be happy that the Hayes piece stirred the pot so little.
Instead, I'm as frustrated as the Standard-bearers.
Why? First, the Feith memo does not prove what it sets out to, and a fuller airing of the issues would bring clarity to a topic that desperately needs it. Second, and more important, the document lends substance to the frequently voiced criticism that some in the Bush administration have misused intelligence to advance their policy goals.
Hayes contends that Feith's document demonstrates that the relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq "involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda—perhaps even for Mohamed Atta." Yet in any serious intelligence review, much of the material presented would quickly be discarded. For example, one report claims Bin Laden visited Baghdad to meet with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in 1998, but this is extremely unlikely to be true given how many intelligence services were tracking both individuals' movements. Countless intelligence and press accounts of Bin Laden's travels have appeared over the years while the man himself remained only where he was safe: Afghanistan. Hence, another report that has him traveling to Qatar in 1996 is almost as unlikely.
There are also glaring mistakes in the analytic material, though whether the errors were originally Feith's or Hayes' is not clear. What is referred to as Bin Laden's "fatwa on the plight of Iraq" was in fact the famous "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," which spoke of the suffering of Iraqis but only as proof of a U.S.-led global campaign to destroy Islam. If anything, the sense of grievance over events, including the U.S. troop presence, on the Arabian peninsula is far greater. Moreover, some of the material presented in the article insinuates that Iraq staged the Khobar Towers bombing, when two administrations have laid the blame at Iran's door.
The Feith document does not recount many details of an operational relationship, nor does it illustrate a tie that was ongoing, cooperative, and operational. At best, it records expressions of various individuals' wish for a better relationship between the two sides—a desire that does not appear to have been consummated. Meetings between Iraqi officials and al-Qaida members began in the early 1990s, and there are reports that Iraq wanted to "establish links to al Qaeda." In 1993, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq." But in 1998, the Iraqis still "seek closer ties," and the sides are still "looking for a way to maintain contacts."
There was a lot of seeking and wanting going on, and perhaps there were even meetings. But the fact that meetings occurred has never been the issue—at least not among serious critics—nor has it been disputed that some jihadists lived in or traveled through Iraq. (There were more meetings with Iranian authorities, as well as more terrorists living in or transiting Iran, but that seems to interest neither Feith nor Hayes.) What is disputed is that the meetings went anywhere. It would not be surprising to find out that the two sides had a de facto cease-fire, as has been alleged. But we're still waiting to see real cooperation in the form of transfers of weapons and other materiel, know-how, or funds; the provision of safe haven on a significant scale; or the use of Iraqi diplomatic facilities by al-Qaida terrorists. The Feith memo mentions a few instances of possible Iraqi assistance to al-Qaida on bomb-building and weapons supply to affiliated groups, but nothing like the kind of evidence that, in Hayes' words, "is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources."
What does all this say about how Feith and his underlings use intelligence? Hayes says, correctly, that the Feith memo "just skims the surface of the reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda connections." The large sampling provided in his article, he believes, destroys critics' arguments "that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely 'exaggerated' for political purposes; that hawks 'cherry-picked' bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public."
What Hayes does not seem to recognize is that many of the treasures he imagines hidden in the existing CIA files may be dross or worse and, if presented, they would undermine the " 'Cliff's notes' version of the relationship" that he says is provided by the Feith memo. Of course there are more reports. When your intelligence service relays, as it should, everything short of sightings of Bin Laden on the moon, 50 reports of varying quality do not amount to much. The remaining material, many who are familiar with it believe, does not confirm the Hayes-Feith version but points in the other direction.
Not surprisingly, none of the reports in the Feith memo mention the aversion that the Baathists and jihadists felt for one another. Similarly, there is no evidence of the contradictory nature of the intelligence. I would bet, for example, that there are plenty of reports putting Bin Laden in Afghanistan and perhaps a half a dozen other places in January 1998, at exactly the time he was supposed to be in Baghdad—and that would be only the most blatant kind of inconsistency. Attributing a report to a "contact with good access" does not mean the contact's account is true. Proving a report correct, or sufficiently corroborated to be considered plausible, requires a lot more work. Putting all the disparate pieces together and trying to construct a coherent picture—yes, connecting the dots—is harder still, requiring a mastery of all the material. Of course, raw intelligence has its value, especially if you are worried about an imminent attack, but there is a reason why the intelligence community spends so much time and energy putting out "finished product," the reports that evaluate a significant body of information to get the whole picture right. Those are the reports that policy-makers are supposed to rely on in crafting a strategy.
One thing intelligence analysts do as they evaluate a body of information is keep in mind the context. This is worth attempting in the case of the Feith memo, too, because while much of the material may be new to the public, most of it has been bouncing around the government since well before the invasion of Iraq. That means it has been scrubbed numerous times by analysts and senior officials eager to use it as they made the case for invading Iraq.
After these reviews, it is clear, very little has been found that was solid enough to present in public. Compare the Feith memo with Colin Powell's U.N. speech, which was preceded by the most thorough evaluation of the intelligence ever conducted by the Bush administration. Remarkably little on the ties between al-Qaida and Iraq made it into that speech.
Or compare the memo with the recent remarks of Vice President****Cheney, who has all but stopped listing possible al-Qaida-Iraq connections and has given up suggesting that Mohammed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official since saying it on Meet the Press in September. (After that appearance, the Washington Post noted that he was arguing a point the FBI and CIA didn't believe was true.) If top officials had any confidence in these wares, they would still be out hawking them. Why the Feith memo is being sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee is also therefore baffling.
It should be clear now why the Feith document needs a lot more attention: The memo is, Hayes' declarations to the contrary, cherry-picking—the selective use of intelligence. It lends credence to Seymour Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker about political appointees ignoring career analysts and dredging out whatever suits them. This is perilous business. Making a judgment about Iraq-al-Qaida ties on the basis of the sections presented by Hayes would be like accepting a high-school biology student's reading of a CAT scan.
The administration's use of intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction became a hot issue primarily because of the failure to find any such weapons in Iraq and Joe Wilson's revelations about the non-export of uranium from Niger to Iraq. Strangely, however, there has been little inquiry into the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship. The press has had a difficult time taking this issue any further since so few reporters have good sources in the intelligence community. In Congress, an effort to push further into the issue in the Senate Intelligence Committee has been stymied by the Republican majority's refusal to discuss how the political leadership used the intelligence it was provided with. That is a recipe for putting the blame for any Iraq-related blunders on the intelligence community, not those in the Pentagon or White House who may have misread or ignored the intelligence they were given.
Americans were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was significantly more dangerous than any of the other two dozen or so countries that currently possess them because Saddam might on any given day give such weapons to terrorists. The danger was urgent, we were told, because the Baghdad regime had a relationship with al-Qaida. Given the costs the nation has incurred in Iraq, a conscientious review of the issue would seem to be a good investment in democratic accountability. Since neoconservatives are certain they are right about the Saddam-Bin Laden relationship, maybe they'll join Senate Democrats in demanding a fuller airing. | |
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| let's get real for a second
Posted: 4/30/2008 8:37:30 PM | I did Simma. Checked several sources. It appears that Obama salutes sometimes..sometimes not. Doesn't recite the pledge of allegiance. Which is his right. It just seems strange to me that a person running for the highest office in the land would be more conscious of things which represent the lives lost while serving to gain and maintain the American freedoms.
Nothing though can sweep away his close association with Wright. Obama waited wayyy too late to attempt to disassociate himself. And, to even try is dumb, imho. He should have known his active participation with Wright... very active participation... would serve to hurt him eventually politically. That's just common sense. Thing is.. it's right that it should hurt him. Just as it would be right for McCain or H. Clinton to be hurt politically in things which are glaring as this situation with Wright is. | |
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