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Banned
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irateplatypus and Mojo_PeiPei, this is not the first time that I offer the following on these threads to rebut your statements. Understand that both the 9/11 Commission and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's trusted aid of 16 years, as well as numerous news reports from sources in the U.S. and the UK, state that although it has never been established that Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad, or that Saddam or his designates ever were aware of his presence in Baghdad, or elswhere in Iraq, much less had "ties" to Al Qaida.
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9831216/site/newsweek/
Fabricated Links?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Oct. 26, 2005 - A secret draft CIA report raises new questions about a principal argument used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq: the claim that Saddam Hussein was "harboring" notorious terror leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi prior to the American invasion...............
........No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence, according to two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
An intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that the current draft says that "most evidence suggests Saddam Hussein did not provide Zarqawi safe haven before the war. It also recognizes that there are still unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge about the relationship.".........
...........The new report is only the latest chink in the armor of the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Last year, the September 11 Commission found there was no "collaborative" relationship between the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden; one high-level Al Qaeda commander—who had been cited by Powell as testifying to talks about chemical- and biological-warfare training—later recanted his claims. But the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case........
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Yet, the Bush admin. told the world, in Powell's Feb. 2003 presentation to the UN, and in speeches by Bush, Cheney and others in the admin., that signifigant ties between Zarqawi, Al Qaida, and Saddam and his government existed, as if they were proven fact. After the invasion, intelligence "finds" by coalition forces and WMD inspectors were never presented to strenghthen the pre-invasion, Bush admin. claims that Zarqawi, Al Qaida, and Saddam's government had cooperated signifigantly.....<b>as in any f*cking way that could make an aggressive war, somehow legal.......</b>
Two months ago, the Bush admin. was caught doing just that:
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=105487
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.....
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Read the last quote box on this post.....see what the 9/11 Commission determined happened with the "testimony" of "two senior Bin Laden officials".
irateplatypus posted about ties between Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Saddam's government, but offered no references or documentation of fact, beyond a general "resume" of the man at a Wiki link. <b>irateplatypus offered his own opinion about the "signifigance" of 500 old artillery shells that I already countered, in my last post, with quotes of the opinions of three U.S. weapons inspectors who all headed long, thorough, and well documented weapons inspections programs in Iraq, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.</b>
All three U.S. inspection team leaders, including David Kay's cited comments on these specific "weapons", just the other day, reached conclusions, both Kay and Duelfer in official reports, that directly contradict the opinion of irateplatypus.
Quote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...807286,00.html
White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'
Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday <b>October 9, 2002</b>
The Guardian
.....Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence..........
..........There is already considerable scepticism among US intelligence officials about Mr Bush's clams of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. In his speech on Monday, Mr Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year".
An intelligence source said the man the president was referring to was Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was arrested in Jordan in 2001 for his part in the "millennium plot" to bomb tourist sites there. He was subsequently released and eventually made his way to Iraq in search of treatment. However, intercepted telephone calls did not mention any cooperation with the Iraqi government.
There is also profound scepticism among US intelligence experts about the president's claim that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases".
Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who tracked al-Qaida's rise, said that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998: "But there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States." .......
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Quote:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...04/wirq04.xml/
Spies force retreat on 'al-Qa'eda link'
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent, and David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 04/02/2003) (Comment by "host", date= Feb. 4, 2003....)
Colin Powell, the United States secretary of state, yesterday appeared to pull back from claims that he would show the United Nations a link between al-Qa'eda and Iraq, amid anger among Washington's spies over the way intelligence was being distorted to prove the link existed.
.........He faces a tough task made far tougher by President George W Bush's promise in his State of the Union address last week that Mr Powell would prove a link between al-Qa'eda and Iraq that, intelligence officials say, does not exist.
The intelligence shows that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a leading member of al-Qa'eda, was treated in hospital in Baghdad last spring but provides absolutely no evidence of any contacts with Iraqi officials.
<h3>It also shows that some members of a small Kurdish Islamic fundamentalist group, Ansar al-Islam, which controls a small area inside northern Iraq, were trained by al-Qa'eda. But this also shows no credible evidence of contacts with the Iraqi regime.
It is the attempt by both the White House and the Pentagon to make a clear and definite link between al-Zarqawi, Ansar al-Islam and Saddam Hussein that has infuriated many within the United States intelligence community.</h3>
"The intelligence is practically non-existent," one exasperated American intelligence source said. Most of the intelligence being used to support the idea of a link between al-Qa'eda and Saddam Hussein comes from Kurdish groups who are the bitter enemies of Ansar al-Islam, he said..............
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Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3067876/
Distorted Intelligence?
Secret German records cast doubt on the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Plus, why Qatar is footing the legal bills for an ‘enemy combatant’
Web Exclusive
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 12:15 p.m. ET June 9, 2006
<b>June 25, 2003</b>
THE VOLUMINOUS GERMAN records, obtained by NEWSWEEK, seem to undercut highly touted administration claims that Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi, a hardened Jordanian terrorist who once received medical treatment in Baghdad, was a key player in Al Qaeda.
In fact, the secret German records—compiled during interrogations with a captured Zarqawi associate—suggest that the shadowy Zarqawi headed his own terrorist group, called Al Tawhid, with its own goals and may even have been a jealous rival of Al Qaeda.
The captured associate, Shadi Abdallah, who is now on trial in Germany, told his interrogators last year that Zarqawi’s Al Tawid organization was one of several Islamist groups that acted “in opposition” to bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. At one point, Abdallah described how Zarqawi even vetoed the idea of splitting charity funds collected in Germany between Al Tawhid and Al Qaeda.
While the internal machinations between Al Tawhid and Al Qaeda may seem obscure, they cut to the heart of one of the most politically sensitive issues in Washington at the moment: whether the Bush White House exaggerated and distorted U.S. intelligence to justify the war on Iraq.
Much of the debate revolves around claims that Saddam had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons—stockpiles that so far have not been found. But an equally fierce debate has been taking place behind the scenes about the handling of sketchy, and at times, contradictory evidence relating to Saddam’s supposed connections with Al Qaeda.
Zarqawi was at the center of those claims. In a Cincinnati speech delivered Oct. 7, on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing him to wage war on Iraq, President Bush asserted that “Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.” His chief example was that “one very senior Al Qaeda leader” had “received medical treatment in Baghdad”—an obvious reference to Zarqawi, who had his leg amputated there in 2002.
Zarqawi received even more prominence in secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council. In that address, Powell described Zarqawi as “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.” During his stay in Baghdad, Powell claimed that “nearly two dozen…al Qaeda affiliates” converged on the Iraqi capital and “established a base of operations there.”
But the German interrogations of Shadi Abdallah present a more complex and somewhat different picture of Zarqawi’s role in international terrorism.......
..........While a member of bin Laden’s entourage, Abdallah says he had numerous conversations with Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni resident in Hamburg who later played a key role in the September 11 hijacking conspiracy.
But after “only about two weeks” as a bin Laden bodyguard, Abdallah told German investigators, he became disenchanted with bin Laden’s hard-line ideology, which he found distasteful because of bin Laden’s insistence that the Koran allowed the killing of women children and old people.
Abdallah said he made his way from bin Laden’s hideout to Zarqawi’s Al Tawhid training camp near Herat. There, he was informed that Al Tawhid’s mission was explicitly to “fight the Jordanian regime and to overthrow the government of Jordan” as well as the “annihilation of Jews all over the world.”
...............At the time of Abdallah’s arrest by German authorities last spring, Zarqawi apparently was still running the group out of Iran; and the only Iraqi connection with Al Qaeda was access to phony Iraqi documents, Abdallah told authorities.
Several U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports that were used to craft Powell’s Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council told NEWSWEEK they were aware all along of the German information about Zarqawi. But the officials insist the CIA firmly stands behind what Powell said about Zarqawi’s purported links to Al Qaeda. Even the German evidence, they said, indicates that there were some associations and links between the two organizations.
Despite the inflammatory language of Powell’s U.N. presentation, Bush Administration officials also have acknowledged that their information about Zarqawi’s stay in Baghdad is sketchy at best. According to U.S. officials, Zarqawi entered Iraq around May of last year to have an amputation performed on his leg, which was injured while he was fleeing American forces in Afghanistan. According to some reports, one reason that he might have gone to Baghdad for the operation was that the Iranian government, in one of its sporadic crackdowns on Al Qaeda, had expelled him.
Senior U.S. officials acknowledged to NEWSWEEK within days of Powell’s speech that it was “unknown” whether Saddam’s government helped arrange Zarqawi’s hospital stay in Baghdad or whether Iraqi intelligence had any contacts with him while he was in Baghdad.
Since U.S. forces ousted Saddam two months ago, only one confirmed member of Zarqawi’s group has been captured by American troops in Iraq. Little if any other information has surfaced to illuminate Zarqawi’s Baghdad stay or the dealings between Saddam’s government and Zarqawi or other alleged Islamic terrorist operatives, including bin Laden. U.S. officials acknowledge that some top captured Al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, have told U.S. interrogators bin Laden vetoed a long-term relationship with Saddam because he did not want to be in the Iraqi leader’s debt. .......
...........The German government evidence appears to demonstrate how the Zarqawi story told by Powell to the Security Council was partial at best and misleading at worst, in the sense that it took Zarqawi’s tenuous relationship to Al Qaeda and his mysterious visit to Baghdad and lifted them out of context to imply evidence of a closer collaboration between Iraq and bin Laden than the facts demonstrated.
Missing entirely from Powell’s speech was the qualifying and even contradictory information in the German files. Also missing was any reference to Zarqawi’s sojourn in Iran, which knowledgeable officials concede might be as significant, if not more important, than any visit he paid to Baghdad.
One intelligence source says that as the Bush Administration cranked up the government to prepare for war, intelligence agencies were ordered to produce two critical papers that could be published to justify an attack on Saddam. One paper related to Weapons of Mass destruction, the other to Saddam’s links to terrorism. Classified versions of both papers were written and the paper on WMD was eventually published by the Bush Administration as an official dossier. But an unclassified version of the paper on Saddam’s links to terrorism was never published because intelligence agencies could not reach final agreement on what exactly it should say.....
Quote:
Note: If you are interested...the rest of this article is focused on this man,
al-Marri, and there is more info on what became of him, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarallah_al-Marri
Jarallah al-Marri is a citizen of Qatar currently held in the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.[1] Al Marri's detainee ID number is 334.
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Note that Powell's key assistant of 16 years, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, later called Powell's speech that day, as I documented earlier in this thread, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/08/19/powell.un/">"the lowest point in my life".</a>
Then, please consider how interwined the Powell/Bush administration assertions about Zarqawi were with their argument that he was the "key" proof of a close ties and cooperation between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. After Cheney's discredited assertions about Atta's Prague "meeting" with an Iraqi intelligenc official he denied what he was videotaped saying:
Quote:
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/...404_flash3.htm
CHENEY: CLEAR LINKS BETWEEN SADDAM, AL-QAEDA; CALLS NY TIMES ARTICLE 'OUTRAGEOUS'
Thu Jun 17 2004 19:00:33 ET
...BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohammad Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."
Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I never said that.
BORGER: OK.
Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that. ......
......BORGER: Let me ask you what your response is to the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said upon looking at this 9/11 report that this administration, quote, "misled America."
Vice Pres. CHENEY: In what respect? I haven't seen that.
BORGER: In terms of the relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq......
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Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3715396.stm
Tuesday, 5 October, 2004,
Rumsfeld questions Saddam-Bin Laden link
Rumsfeld's comments can be revealing
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cast doubt on whether there was ever a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
..........He also said that although most of al-Qaeda's senior leaders had sworn an oath to Osama Bin Laden, the man suspected to be the principal leader of the network in Iraq, Abu Musab <b>al-Zarqawi, had not.</b>
Mr Zarqawi's reported presence in Baghdad before the war has been cited in the past by the US administration as evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. ........
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Quote:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ15Ak02.html
Oct 15, 2004
THE ROVING EYE
Zarqawi - Bush's man for all seasons
By Pepe Escobar
.......Cheney also insisted that Zarqawi could not have had his leg treated in a Baghdad hospital without Saddam's Mukhabarat (secret service) knowing it. But the leg story is a mess. US intelligence thought that Zarqawi had lost a leg in Afghanistan in 2002. But then, last May, they concluded that he still had both legs. The Bush administration's "evidence" of an al-Qaeda-Saddam link via Zarqawi may be an intercepted phone call by Zarqawi from a Baghdad hospital in 2002, while his leg was being attended to. But then "Zarqawi" shows up in a video with both legs in the 2004 beheading of hostage Nick Berg.
The truth is more straightforward. Zarqawi had no connection either with bin Laden or with Saddam. Secular Saddam hosting an Islamic radical, of all people, at a time when the American campaign against the "axis of evil" had reached a fever-pitch is a ludicrous proposition. A newspaper editor in the Sunni triangle says Zarqawi may have gone on an underground trip to Baghdad to have his leg operated on before scurrying back to Kurdistan. And <b>sources in Peshawar confirm to Asia Times Online that Zarqawi never took the all-significant bayat (oath of allegiance) and so never struck a formal alliance with bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.........</b>
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Quote:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report...t.pdf#page=487
http://demos.vivisimo.com/search?inp...iraq&x=40&y=12
75. Intelligence report, Iraq approach to Bin Ladin, Mar. 16, 1999. 76. CIA analytic report,“Ansar al-Islam:Al Qa’ida’s Ally in Northeastern Iraq,” CTC 2003-40011CX, Feb. 1, 2003. See also DIA analytic report,“Special Analysis: Iraq’s Inconclusive Ties to Al-Qaida,” July 31, 2002; CIA analytic report,“Old School Ties,” Mar. 10, 2003.We have seen other intelligence reports at the CIA about 1999 contacts.They are consistent with the conclusions we provide in the text, and their reliability is uncertain. Although there have been suggestions of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda regarding chemical weapons and explosives training, the most detailed information alleging such ties came from an al Qaeda operative who recanted much of his original information. Intelligence report, interrogation of al Qaeda operative, Feb. 14, 2004.Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any such ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. Intelligence reports, interrogations of KSM and Zubaydah, 2003....
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If you find the poll results that I included in my last post curious or troubling, or even as confirmation of you own strong but difficult to defend POV, there is an obvious explanation why so many of our troops and residents are of the misguided opinion that Saddam was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks
.........in my posts last month, at these links, I documented the news reporting of Bush admin. members attempts to link Al Qaida with Saddam's regime:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=61
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...8&postcount=63
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=64
Last week there was this documentary on http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/ :
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm..._cheney20.html
"Frontline" documentary makes case that Cheney used 9/11 to go to war
By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter
.......But apparently he didn't use the actual intelligence from the agencies.
The CIA and its then-director, George Tenet, knew immediately that al-Qaida in Afghanistan was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and said so. But author James Bamford says that while the Pentagon was still smoking, Rumsfeld said, "We've got to see, somehow, how we can bring Saddam Hussein into this."
"The Dark Side" claims that 9/11 provided Cheney and Rumsfeld with a pretext for achieving their longstanding ambition to go after the Iraqi dictator and to boost executive power that they'd seen diminish ever since their days as allies in Nixon's administration. As consummate political infighters, they resented and continually undermined Tenet — a sports-loving man's man who had become pally with George W. Bush.
The CIA repeatedly insisted that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaida, and Tenet explicitly warned that invading Iraq would "break the back" of our counterterrorism effort. Tenet even ordered the agency's records scoured 10 years back for links. CIA vet Michael Scheuer, who led that effort, says, "There was no connection between al-Qaida and Saddam."
But Cheney, the chief architect of the war on terror and the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, had made up his mind, according to "The Dark Side." CIA vets say Cheney and his now-indicted chief of staff, Scooter Libby, made unprecedented trips to CIA headquarters to pressure and "harangue" analysts who were compiling the National Intelligence Estimate. Analyst Paul Pillar, one of its primary authors, says he regrets his role in the hastily prepared, fatally flawed document, which was "clearly requested and published for policy-advocacy purposes ... to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public."......
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<b>Now....wouldn't it be appropriate to consider moving the posts of irateplatypus and Mojo_PeiPei to a forum where undocumented speculation is more the norm......than here?</b> |