On 9/11, a Telling Seven-Minute Silence

[dissention]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...-alqaeda_x.htm

Bush overstated Iraq links to al-Qaeda, former intelligence officials say

WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Bush works to quiet a controversy over his discredited claim of Iraqi uranium shopping in Africa, another of his prewar assertions is coming under fire: the alleged link between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda.
Before the war, Bush and members of his cabinet said Saddam was harboring top al-Qaeda operatives and suggested Iraq could slip the terrorist network chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.

Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Saddam and al-Qaeda and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best.

"There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week.

Intelligence agencies agreed on the "lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaeda" and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September.

Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

"The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous," the former official said.

A United Nations terrorism committee says it has no evidence — other than Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertions in his Feb. 5 U.N. speech — of any ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

And U.S. officials say American forces searching in Iraq have found no significant evidence tying Saddam's regime with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

"One of the things that concerns me is the continued reference to the war in Iraq as part of the war on terrorism. There's not much evidence to support that linkage," said Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a presidential candidate.

In the weeks and months before the war, Bush and administration officials repeatedly said Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups which could provide a pathway for weapons of mass destruction to find their way to terrorists. U.S. forces have not found any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq so far.

"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda," Bush said in his January State of the Union speech.

"Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own," Bush said.

At the time, many terrorism experts criticized the claim. They noted that Saddam's secular regime was just the kind of Arab government bin Laden's Islamic extremists want to replace. Critics also pointed out the lack of hard evidence of links between Saddam and bin Laden.

The administration's case apparently was persuasive. In a poll conducted last month by Knowledge Networks, 52% of those questioned said they thought the United States found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaeda — although no such evidence has been found.

"You see the polls — lots of Americans believe that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda despite the lack of intelligence evidence on that score," said Gregory Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council under President Clinton.

The administration's key evidence of a link was an operative named Abu Musab Zarqawi, who got medical care in Baghdad in May 2002 after being wounded in Afghanistan. In his Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations, Powell called Zarqawi "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants."

Current and former intelligence officials now say Zarqawi's links to al-Qaeda are more tenuous — the CIA now says Zarqawi considers himself independent of al-Qaeda, for example. And while Zarqawi spent time in Iraq, it's unclear whether Saddam's regime simply allowed him to be there or actively tried to work with him.

"There was scant evidence there had been any other contacts between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden," Graham said in an interview Friday.

U.S. officials say a handful of suspected al-Qaeda members have been captured in Iraq, but most are probably low-level operatives. The biggest catch was a man described as a midlevel terrorist operative who worked for Zarqawi, who was nabbed in April near Baghdad.

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said last week it's still unclear how much support Zarqawi and his followers got from Saddam.

"That he (Saddam) was promoting al-Qaeda is absurd," Cannistraro said. "That there was a tolerance for a Zarqawi network in Iraq seems clear."

High-level captives from both al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime also have denied any links between the two, U.S. officials say. They say al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubayda denied their network worked with the former Iraqi government.

Farouk Hijazi, a former Iraqi intelligence operative who U.S. officials allege met with al-Qaeda operatives and perhaps bin Laden himself in the 1990s, also has denied any Iraq-al-Qaeda ties, officials say.

[strandinthewind]

This last article supports my position, not your position. It specifically notes there were episodic links and that is what the media chose to ignore when it posted those headlines.

[dissention]

http://www.truthout.com/docs_03/092103J.shtml

Was There an Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection?
By Tom Regan
Christian Science Monitor

Friday 19 September 2003

Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times writes that almost all these "allegations," such as the connection between bin Laden lieutenant Abu Musab Zarqawi and Iraq, are typical of the way the Bush administration has dealt with Iraq and Al Qaeda from the beginning; "Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar."

After US President George Bush admitted that his administration had seen "no evidence" of a connection between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, new questions have arisen about the administration?s claims of a pre-war connection between Mr. Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Agence-France Presse reports that earlier this month, the counter-espionage service of US ally Spain told a Spanish parliamentary committee there is no link between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The head of the National Intelligence Centre, Jorge Dezcaller, added that Al Qaeda had even accused Saddam of not respecting the principles of Islam, the media said. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a fervent supporter of the US-led war on Iraq, on several occasions claimed there were links between the former Iraqi president and the network of Osama bin Laden, most notably in a speech to the Madrid parliament on February 5. Mr. Dezcaller said there was no evidence to support Aznar's claim but there was reason to believe Saddam's regime had actively supported militant Palestinian groups.

The Spanish report follows similar reports from British, French, and Russian intelligence that found no evidence of a link between the two. And a classified US national intelligence report leaked earlier this summer to The Washington Post also called into question the existence of any ties.

Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times writes that almost all these "allegations," such as the connection between bin Laden lieutenant Abu Musab Zarqawi and Iraq, are typical of the way the Bush administration has dealt with Iraq and Al Qaeda from the beginning; "Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar."

The Zarqawi connection has been a red herring since Colin Powell emphasized it in his prewar presentation to the United Nations Security Council, telling the world how Zarqawi was running a chemical weapons lab. Problem was, the site was not in Iraqi control but was in the US-patrolled no-fly zone, and when reporters visited it in the days immediately after Powell's speech they found nothing that indicated anything like a chemical weapons lab ... Nor has any evidence of connections between Ansar al Islam and Saddam's regime surfaced since the US invasion, as Wolfowitz conceded in congressional testimony last Tuesday [Sept. 9].

Some experts (like Vincent Cannistraro, the former director of counterterrorism operations and analysis at the CIA under President Ronald Reagan) believe the war with Iraq has created the conditions for more, not less terrorism. "There was no substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war," Mr. Cannistrato said "Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans."

Interestingly, the BBC reports that one reason Bush has managed to escape the backlash over intelligence reports that has given his friend, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair so much trouble, is that unlike Britain (where all the reports from different agencies are assembled into one report, each agency in the US issues their own prognosis. This means US administrations can "cherry pick" the reports they like, and ignore the ones they don't).

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

This last article supports my position, not your position. It specifically notes there were episodic links and that is what the media chose to ignore when it posted those headlines.

If you think those "links" are of any significance, I'm amazed that you have the courage to say so. Those "links" are not enough to make the sort of case this administration is making about al-Qaeda/Iraq.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

If you think those "links" are of any significance, I'm amazed that you have the courage to say so. Those "links" are not enough to make the sort of case this administration is making about al-Qaeda/Iraq.

But, I do not think the links are that significant, with the exception of the medical treatment of that guy and then allowing him to go free. I mean that is the same as if some country treated OBL and then set him free. All I am arguing is the headlines the media used were incorrect. There were some, as I mentioned before, slight links and one big one. So, the headlines are just wrong and misleading. Yet, the media is praised for that by the far left and then then they scream when the media does the same thing on a point they do not agree with.

Note: I am in no way saying the links justified the invasion of Iraq, which I think you are suggesting.

[dissention]

Also, don't let the title of this thread mislead you: Bush sat and read for longer than seven minutes after being told what was happening. Michael Moore simply shows seven minutes of footage in his film. In reality, he sat there reading for 17 minutes.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

Also, don't let the title of this thread mislead you: Bush sat and read for longer than seven minutes after being told what was happening. Michael Moore simply shows seven minutes of footage in his film. In reality, he sat there reading for 17 minutes.

and right or wrong, most of America apparently could give a rat's a$$

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

But, I do not think the links are that significant, with the exception of the medical treatment of that guy and then allowing him to go free. I mean that is the same as if some country treated OBL and then set him free. All I am arguing is the headlines the media used were incorrect. There were some, as I mentioned before, slight links and one big one. So, the headlines are just wrong and misleading. Yet, the media is praised for that by the far left and then then they scream when the media does the same thing on a point they do not agree with.

Note: I am in no way saying the links justified the invasion of Iraq, which I think you are suggesting.

You supported this abomination, so does it matter?

I'm still unconvinced that the Zarqawi link is a big one, but believe what you will. The headlines were not misleading (for once) because all of the "links," when put together, still add up to a whole lot of nothing. No proof that they were in cahoots together, nothing.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

and right or wrong, most of America apparently could give a rat's a$$

They will on June 25, 2004. At a theater near you.

(And maybe all this F9/11 publicity is opening peoples eyes, because Dumbya has gone down in the polls and Kerry's gone up three points.)

[dissention]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A01


In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.

A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report.

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said.

"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."

Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements.

Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.

The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the United States posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to go to war.

The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also investigating the issue.

Bush has defended his handling of intelligence before the war, calling his critics "revisionist historians."

"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons, and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. He vowed to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."

Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a 28-page "white paper" on Iraq distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4.

In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein.

These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech.

While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said.

The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.

As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed.

"We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives.

The CIA briefed congressional committees about the National Intelligence Estimate but did not deliver the classified version until the evening of Oct. 1, just before a Senate intelligence committee hearing the next day, congressional sources said. At that closed-door session, several senators raised questions about qualifying statements made in the report, which was circulated only among senior national security officials.

On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the intelligence report as a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda links. The members wanted a public document to which they could refer during floor debates on the Iraq war resolution.

The white paper did contain passages that hinted at the intelligence community's lack of certitude about Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda ties, but it omitted some qualifiers contained in the classified version. It also did not include qualifiers made at the Oct. 2 hearing by an unidentified senior intelligence official who, during his testimony, challenged some of the administration's public statements on Iraq.

"Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy," said Bob Filippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war resolution.

When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public.

On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda.

Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was "low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses" weapons of mass destruction.

On Oct. 9, the CIA sent a letter to Graham and Levin informing them that no additional portions of the intelligence report would be made public.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

You supported this abomination, so does it matter?

I'm still unconvinced that the Zarqawi link is a big one, but believe what you will. The headlines were not misleading (for once) because all of the "links," when put together, still add up to a whole lot of nothing. No proof that they were in cahoots together, nothing.

Other than aiding and abetting them by helping one of their leaders But, I agree that other than that, there is nothing. But, that is pretty significant.

Explain the statement "You supported this abomination, so does it matter?" I dod not vote for W. I was and still am for the war in Iraq, but, like Kerry and Clinton, I think the way W went about it was wrong and fraudulent. So, I am unsure what you mean?

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Explain the statement "You supported this abomination, so does it matter?" I dod not vote for W. I was and still am for the war in Iraq, but, like Kerry and Clinton, I think the way W went about it was wrong and fraudulent. So, I am unsure what you mean?

How can you be unsure? I mean you supported this abomination, this war, this invasion, WHATEVER you want to call it.

It was unjust and will go down in the history books as the biggest blunder in American foreign policy.

And how anyone can despise the means by which we went to war but still support the war is incomprehensible to me.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

How can you be unsure? I mean you supported this abomination, this war, this invasion, WHATEVER you want to call it.

It was unjust and will go down in the history books as the biggest blunder in American foreign policy.

And how anyone can despise the means by which we went to war but still support the war is incomprehensible to me.

What I meant by that was I, like Kerry and Clinton, think SH was a threat to the world. I, like Kerry and Clinton, think we needed to remove him because after 9/11 we could no longer let people like him be in power. SH was, after all, a terrorist, just not a member of Al-Q. In the end, I do not think Iraq was or is an easy call to make. Am I happy SH is gone - yes. Did the end justify the means, no. And for that, I think W will not be reelected.

[strandinthewind]

and then there is the Putin statment that Sh wanted to attack the U.S. mainland and/or U.S. facilities elsewhere. If that is credible, which remains to be seen, it is hard not to agree that he had to be removed

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I, like Kerry and Clinton, think we needed to remove him because after 9/11 we could no longer let people like him be in power.

Tell that to the dozen other police states on this globe.