Burnt Orange Report

Al-qaeda & Iraq: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/152lndzv.asp

Syria and WMD: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-iraqarms30dec30,1,7925533.story?coll=la-home-headlines & http://www.nationalreview.com/geraghty/geraghty200401120834.asp

...also the UN, the french, pretty much the entire world thought Saddam had WMD's, yet they did not want to enforce a decade of UN resolutions. He had 10 years of diplomacy to shape up, he used it deceive and to retain his capacity to build WMD's and to corrupt the oil for food program so the French and Russians could make some money -- thus also providing the reason why the French and Russians didn't want to go to war. Bottom line is Saddam wasn't cooperating with the world's demands on him, we and a few allies were the only ones with the courage to call him on it. The conclusion of nearly all the world's intelligence agencies was that a threat existed in Iraq in terms of WMD. In the face of the nature of terrorism (see 9/11 or read the Jersualem Post) it was not prudent to sit idly by.

900 dead US soldiers is quite lamentable, but that's about .1% of all our soldiers so from a military history perspective this is still turning out to be one of the most successful campaigns in history. Hell more french people died last summer from the mix of heat & a shoddy health care system than US soldiers in Iraq. Witness Cleric al-Sadr, today, disbanding his militia and calling off the revolt. Things are progressing, which is what we all hope for. After all the key to defeating terrorism is the enshrinement of freedom, democracy and openness the world over.

Now I agree with this:

"Such a three-part emphasis on human rights, terrorist ties and WMD programs
would have been solidly in line with the president's own explicit policy. A
three-legged stool is more stable than a one-legged one, but for some reason
the administration decided not to make all three parts of its case in
justifying the decision to go to war. As a result, its very heavy emphasis
on WMD to the exclusion of the other two bases of its strategy has left the
administration vulnerable to the failure to find WMD stockpiles. Whoever
caused that decision to be made may have succeeded in papering over some
bureaucratic feuding, but reaped a political whirlwind."

Given how the Bush admin doesn't like to admit mistakes I don't see them communicating what I just wrote previously, but still, the war was justified. A man who hates america and has ties with terrorists, however loose, and the capability to use oil money to build horrible weapons is a threat that must be taken out.

...and had Clinton taken us to war against Iraq under all these false pretenses which were later proven false, Delay, et al would have been convening impeachment hearings against him for lying. Oh, and impeachment hearings were started when Nixon lied about that little break-in that really didn't cost the taxpayers anything or shed any American blood. But then again, as Mr. Cheney likes to tell us, "9/11 changed everything".

Unfortunately, the administration's propaganda campaign has been very successful at linking Saddam and al-Qaeda in the minds of many voters.
This 9/11 Commission revelation will help undo some of the damage, but much more has to be done.
Perhaps Michael Moore can use this news story in the build up to the release of Fahrenheit 9/11.

I scoff at Scof's classic neocon justification for an unnecessary war.

grnwayrob: you don't know that, that's just speculation based on some badly drawn stereotypes you've already decided not to like.

timz: the world is safer, as the links below show, and the iraqi people aren't being tortured anymore.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6705

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/17/911.commission.intl/index.html

More FACTS for y'all to consider, in the desire for intellectual honesty.

And TimZ, where is your evidence that the "administration's propaganda campaign has been very successful at linking Saddam and al-Qaeda"? And if so, as the links I provided show, what's wrong with making the factual statement that Saddam and al-Qaeda had ties, that at the very least he did not try to capture al-Qaeda folks and allowed them to operate and travel through his country?

Get your head out Tim Z, and stop feeling so smug over a single paragraph in a fifty page report.

Ignoring the connection: Why?

Andrew McCarthy is the former chief assistant United States Attorney who successfully prosecuted the blind sheik and eleven other defendants for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Before we turn the page on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, in addition to Stephen Hayes's The Connection, please consider McCarthy's "Iraq & al Qaeda" on NRO this morning.

McCarthy quotes the 9/11 Commission report paragraph ("Statement No. 15") that has created this morning's banner headlines:

Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.
McCarthy comments:
Just taken on its own terms, this paragraph is both internally inconsistent and ambiguously worded. First, it cannot be true both that the Sudanese arranged contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and that no "ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq." If the first proposition is so, then the "[t]wo senior Bin Laden associates" who are the sources of the second are either lying or misinformed.

In light of the number of elementary things the commission staff tells us its investigation has been unable to clarify (for example, in the very next sentence after the Iraq paragraph, the staff explains that the question whether al Qaeda had any connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the 1995 plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky "remains a matter of substantial uncertainty"), it is fair to conclude that these two senior bin Laden associates may not be the most cooperative, reliable fellows in town regarding what bin Laden was actually up to. Moreover, we know from press reports and the administration's own statements about the many al Qaeda operatives it has captured since 9/11 that the government is talking to more than just two of bin Laden's top operatives. That begs the questions: Have we really only asked two of them about Iraq? If not, what did the other detainees say?

McCarthy also quotes from count 4 of the government's 1998 indictment of bin Laden (also noted by Hayes in his book):
Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.
McCarthy notes that the count 4 allegation is based primarily on accomplice testimony from the embassy bombing trial and has not been retracted. McCarthy quotes from the public testimony of CIA Director George Tenet that Hayes has identified in his compilation of the evidence making out the existence of a "connection." McCarthy asks:
Is the commission staff saying that the CIA director has provided faulty information to Congress? That doesn't appear to be what it is saying at all. This is clear — if anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" — from the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation sentence, which is worth parsing since it is already being gleefully misreported: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." (Italics mine.) That is, the staff is not saying al Qaeda and Iraq did cooperate — far from it. The staff seems to be saying: "they appear to have cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific terrorist attack, such as 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, or the embassy bombings."
McCarthy then proceeds to comment on the 9/11 Commission report's treatment of Mohammad Atta's possible May 2001 trip to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. We know that Atta was in Prague in late May and early June 2000 under suspicious circumstances. McCarthy wonders why the report ignores Atta's year 2000 trips to Prague:
According to the 9/11 Commission staff report, bin Laden originally pressed the operational supervisor of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), "that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000," even though bin Laden "recognized that Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training[.]" Well I'll be darned: mid-2000 is exactly when Atta made his two frenetic trips to Prague immediately before heading to the United States to begin that flight training.
An eyewitness and other evidence suggest that Atta met with al-Ani in May 2001; the report concludes otherwise based on the record of Atta's cell phone use in Florida on the relevant days. Atta's cell phone, however, could well have been used by his terrorist roommate.

Today's news also highlights the report finding that bin Laden originally wanted the 9/11 attacks to occur in mid-May, then in June or July. McCarthy concludes:

Well, what do you know: all those dates are only weeks after Atta may have had some reason to drop everything and secretly run to Prague for a meeting with al-Ani.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

McCarthy's column powerfully exposes the 9/11 Commission report that is in the news today as the tendentious brief of an advocate manipulating evidence to make a point rather than the considered judgment of an investigative body vested with profound national responsibility to discover the truth. It is far past time that someone ask the inevitable question: Why?

Tell Paul Johnson.

I now admit that al-Qaeda spent the entire Bill Clinton administration manufacturing the weapons of mass destruction which we are now finding in huge numbers all over Iraq. In summer of 2001, Saddam and his two sons flew to Prague to meet with Mohammad Atta, Ted Kennedy, and Susan Sontag to help with the planning of the 9/11 terror attacks.
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Seriously, you guys are scared shitless of this. The 9/11 Commission report that Saddam actually blew off al-Qaeda, will go together very well with the June 25th release of Fahrenheit 9/11 --- which will be shown even in Plano. haha
For the first time, you see Dubya's defeat as a distinct possibility.

The Iraq invasion was supposed to turn that country into a cradle of Middle East democracy and send ripples of stability through the region. Instead, Saudi Arabia is increasingly unstable, the Iranian parliamrnt has been taken over by hardliners, and the Israel-Palestine problem is as stubborn as ever.
At best , the puppet Iraqi government we are setting up will last about as long as the government of South Vietnam did after American combat troops left that country.
No wonder Colin Powell refuses to serve in a very hypothetical second Dubya administration.

BTW, beheadings are an everyday happening in Saudi Arabia. But Bush never complained about them because he doesn't want to offend his friends, the Saudi royal family.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2966790.stm
Also, in the six year period from 1995 to 2001, no governor authorized more executions than George Dubya Quagmire. The Great Prevaricator probably wishes he could have a job like that of the Saudi profiled in that BBC link.

Tim Z - please read my column in the Daily Texan today. I think you will find all the quotes from the Clinton Administration on relationships between Iraq and AQ most interesting.