Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - more proof of the reality of the "war on terror"

host · 09-09-2006, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

Thanks for posting that same 3 year old article Ch'i. That shows that 3 years ago 66% of people believed it.

Seaver, did you intend your post to be an uncanny, but coincidental clone of the refrain that is reported in the bottom of the following news report...you can go to the bottom of the linked reporting to read it.....

IMO, it seems that

Quote:

.......White House Press Secretary Tony Snow dismissed the report as "nothing new"......

...is a "piss poor" defense against strong evidence that the US administration knowingly deceived the people of the US and of US allied countries, to engage in a program of "aggressive war", against a sovereign, foreign nation. Justice Robert Jackson, former chief allied prosecutor at Nuremberg, must be rolling over in his grave, if he is aware of what has transpired here......

Quote:

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-379418c.html
Saddam off 9/11 hook

No ties to Qaeda - Senate

BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or with Al Qaeda despite pre-war claims by President Bush of close links between the terror group and the then-Iraqi dictator, a Senate panel said yesterday.

Nevertheless, two recent polls showed that 43%-46% of Americans continue to believe Saddam was involved in 9/11.

Bush and Vice President Cheney frequently cited Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the war as evidence of a Saddam connection. Cheney several times cited what he called Saddam's "long-established ties to Al Qaeda."

But the Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Saddam never collaborated with Osama Bin Laden or al-Zarqawi.

The report said Saddam "attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture Zarqawi." Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. air strike in June.

As a secular Muslim, Saddam "was distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime," the report said.

A separate section of the 400-page report said the Bush administration also used bogus claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi to boost support for the war......

roachboy, the method that I'm going to utilize on this thread, served us well in our effort to drive the "Saddam did have WMD stockpiles, but the US inspectors didn't find them because......" posts, first, down to a minimum, and then off this forum entirely.

I intend to take the key points of your OP article, one by one, and present a trove of news reporting and "evidence" from the administration's own archives on the internet, that will make a defense of what the administration did to influence grassroots support for the "necessity" of it's invasion and occupation of Iraq, about as convincing as the "Saddam had WMD.....we just didn't find them", mantra......

Quote:

From the OP article:
.......A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq...........

Quote:

Threats and Responses: The Qaeda Connection
Section: A
Publication title: New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jun 18, 2004. pg. A.1
DAVID E. SANGER and ROBIN TONERl, David E. Sanger reported from New York for this article, and Robin Toner from Detroit.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney said yesterday that they remain convinced that Saddam Hussein's government had a long history of ties to Al Qaeda, a day after the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported that its review of classified intelligence found no evidence of a ''collaborative relationship'' that linked Iraq to the terrorist organization.

Mr. Bush, responding to a reporter's question about the report after a White House cabinet meeting yesterday morning, said: ''The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda'' is ''because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.''

He said: ''This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda, in the Sudan. There's numerous contacts between the two.''

He repeated that Mr. Hussein was ''a threat'' and ''a sworn enemy to the United States of America.''

Last night Mr. Cheney, who was the administration's most forceful advocate of the Qaeda-Hussein links, was more pointed, repeating in detail his case for those ties and saying that The New York Times's coverage yesterday of the commission's findings ''was outrageous.''

''They do a lot of outrageous things,'' Mr. Cheney, appearing on ''Capital Report'' on CNBC, said of The Times, referring specifically to a four-column front page headline that read ''Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.'' Mr. Cheney added, ''The press wants to run out and say there's a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said.''

He said that newspapers, including The Times, had confused the question of whether there was evidence of Iraqi participation in Sept. 11 with the issue of whether a relationship existed between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein's government.

Speaking of the commission, he said, ''They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways.'' He said ''the evidence is overwhelming.'' He described the ties and cited numerous links back to the 1990's, including contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.

Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, also jumped into the debate yesterday, saying: ''It is clear that President Bush owes the American people a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose that it now turns out is not supported by the facts. That is the finding of this commission. The war against Al Qaeda is not the war in Iraq, when it began.''

Staff Report 15, released by the commission Wednesday, detailed how a senior Iraqi intelligence officer ''reportedly made three visits to Sudan'' and met with Mr. bin Laden in 1994. At that meeting, the report concluded, Mr. bin Laden sought permission to establish training camps in Iraq and help in obtaining weapons, ''but Iraq apparently never responded.''

''There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,'' the report continued. ''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.''

The Times quoted that section of the report at length on Thursday, along with quotations from Mr. Bush's and Mr. Cheney's statements before and after the Iraq invasion on the questions of links and of evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. Those included Mr. Bush's Sept. 17, 2003, statement: ''No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11.''

Mr. Cheney expressed a slightly different view last night, saying, ''We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11.'' He went on to cite a Czech intelligence service report that Mohamed Atta, one of the lead hijackers, met a senior Iraqi intelligence official in April 2001. ''That's never been proven,'' he said. ''It's never been refuted.''

The commission report released on Wednesday concluded: ''We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,'' citing phone records and other evidence that Mr. Atta was in Florida at that time, not Prague.

Mr. Cheney returned to the subject of The Times's coverage later in his appearance on CNBC when an anchor, Gloria Borger, began saying, ''But the press is making a distinction between 9/11 and -- -- ''

''No, they're not,'' Mr. Cheney said. ''The New York Times does not. 'The Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Ties,''' he said, quoting the headline. ''That's what it says. That's the vaunted New York Times. Numerous -- I've watched a lot of the coverage on it and the fact of the matter is they don't make a distinction. They fuzz it up. Sometimes it's through ignorance. Sometimes its malicious. But you'll take a statement that's geared specifically to say there's no connection in relations to the 9/11 attack and then say, 'Well, obviously there's no case here.' And then jump over to challenge the president's credibility or my credibility.''

The article in The Times yesterday noted that the White House said Wednesday that it did not see the commission's report as a contradiction of past statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, and the article reported that the White House said the administration had always been careful not to suggest that it had proof of a tie between Mr. Hussein and Sept. 11. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, was quoted in the article reinforcing those points.

The Times's coverage of the Iraq-Al Qaeda issue was consistent with that of other large newspapers.
Comment inserted by "host": although this NY Times article provides points that support the excerpt above from this thread's OP article, the preceding paragraphs, highlighted in bold, do not seem reliable, in relation to the evidence of Cheney's public comments, posted in the following quote boxes......

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not alone in responding yesterday to the commission's findings. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, also charged that the media had distorted the findings of the commission about links between Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Hussein. He sad the report showed the two men were ''developing a relationship.''

''That relationship could have led to dire consequences for the United States,'' Mr. Hastert said, adding that the two men ''are cut from the same cloth.''

Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry had expected to focus on the economy yesterday, but the dispute over the 9/11 commission's report overshadowed that effort.

Speaking to reporters in Detroit, Mr. Kerry said that it was Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who were muddying distinctions. ''The president and the vice president on a number of occasions have asserted very directly to the American people that the war against Al Qaeda is the war in Iraq. And on any number of occasions, the president has made it clear that the front line of the war against Al Qaeda is in Iraq.'' ....

Quote:

From the OP article:
.....Intelligence reports in June, July and September 2002 all cast doubts on a reported meeting in Prague between Iraqi intelligence agents and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Yet, in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press," Cheney said the CIA considered the reports on the meeting credible, Levin said.......

The following are the record of Cheney's comments and evidence of the recanting....to Gloria Borger, on June 17, 2004.... of his own record of statements with regard to Atta's "meeting" in Prague, which are available on the whitehouse.gov website:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20011114.html
Interview of the Vice President
by CBS's 60 Minutes II
November 14, 2001

......Gloria Borger: Well, you know that Muhammad Atta the ringleader of the hijackers actually met with Iraqi intelligence.

Vice President Cheney: I know this. In Prague in April of this year as well as earlier. And that information has been made public. The Czechs made that public. Obviously that's an interesting piece of information.

Gloria Borger: Sounds like you have your suspicions?

Vice President Cheney: I can't operate on suspicions. The President and the rest of us who are involved in this effort have to make what we think are the right decisions for the United States and the national security arena and that's what we're doing. And it doesn't do a lot of good for us to speculate. We'd rather operate based on facts and make announcements when we've got announcements to make. .........

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20011209.html
December 9, 2001

The Vice President Appears on NBC's Meet the Press

.......RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. When you were last on this program, September 16, five days after the attack on our country, I asked you whether there was any evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack and you said no.

Since that time, a couple of articles have appeared which I want to get you to react to. The first: The Czech interior minister said today that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 terrorists attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out..

........RUSSERT: The plane on the ground in Iraq used to train non-Iraqi hijackers.

Do you still believe there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

CHENEY: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue...........

Curiously, on June 17, 2004, VP Cheney seems to have denied his own Nov. and Dec., 2001, publicly televised, videotaped, and officially archived statements:

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......

More evidence that the MSM press knew what Cheney said to make an intentionally contrived case for a Saddam-Qaeda connection, but feigned ignorance of the extent of the official deception:

Quote:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...itroom.01.html
THE SITUATION ROOM
Aired December 15, 2005 - 16:00 ET

...... BUCHANAN: That's a race for the vice president.

BLITZER: We'll see what happens on that front. Yesterday, Paul Begala was standing where you were. He pointed out correctly that the vice president, Dick Cheney, did allege that there was a meeting in Prague between the CIA, between Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11, and somebody from the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.

I suggested, "Well, I don't know if the vice president said it as hard and fast as you're saying, Paul Begala." But lo and behold, one Web site Media Matters for America, points out there is a direct quote from the vice president to Gloria Borger saying, "I know this. In Prague in April of this year as well as earlier," and that information has been made public. Paul Begala was right. I was wrong.

BRAZILE: Paul Begala is always right. Wolf, you're always right. You're always right.

BLITZER: So is Bay Buchanan. Thanks to both of you for joining us. ........

Evidence to back the June 17, 2004 Cheney recant to Gloria Borger, of his earlier, deceptive statements, in 2001, about Atta's "meeting" in Prague:

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10036925/
'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Nov. 11th
Updated: 10:08 a.m. ET Nov 14, 2005

......MATTHEWS: All this week we‘ve been examining the Bush administration‘s claims about Iraq that sold America on the war. We‘ve looked at claims that Saddam was a nuclear threat, that our troops would be greeted as liberators and that administration ally Ahmed Chalabi could be trusted.

All of those claims, of course, were false. Tonight, we offer you a closer look at another key White House argument. The alleged link between Iraq and 9/11. HARDBALL correspondent David Shuster reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID SHUSTER, HARDBALL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just days after the 9/11 attack, Vice President Cheney on “Meet the Press” said the response should be aimed at Osama bin Laden‘s al Qaeda terror organization, not Saddam Hussein‘s Iraq.

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Saddam Hussein is bottled up at this point, but clearly we continue to have fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.

TIM RUSSERT, NBC HOST: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?

CHENEY: No.

SHUSTER: But during that same time period, according to Bob Woodward‘s book, “Bush at War,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for military strikes on Iraq. And during cabinet meetings, Cheney quote, expressed deep concern about Saddam and would not rule out going after Iraq at some point.

That point started to come 11 months later, just before 9/11‘s first anniversary. The president and vice president had decided to redirect their war on terror to Baghdad.

So, with the help of the newly-formed White House Iraq group, which consisted of top officials and strategists, the selling of a war on Iraq began and the administration‘s rhetoric about Saddam changed.

Not only did White House hawks tell The New York Times for a front-page Sunday exclusive that Saddam was building a nuclear weapon, and not only did five administration officials that day go on the Sunday television shows to repeat the charge...

CHENEY: That he is in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

SHUSTER: But the White House started claiming that Iraq and the group responsible for 9/11 were one in the same.

BUSH: The war on terror—you can‘t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

We‘ve learned that Iraq has trained members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.

He‘s a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda.

SHUSTER: In pushing the Saddam/Iraq/9/11 connection, both the president and the vice president made two crucial claims.

First, they alleged there had been a 1994 meeting in Sudan between Osama bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence official.

BUSH: We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

SHUSTER: After the Iraq war began, however, the 9/11 Commission was formed and reported that while Osama bin Laden may have requested Iraqi help, quote, Iraq apparently never responded.

The other crucial pre-war White House claim was that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met in a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech republic in April of 2001.

GLORIA BORGER, CNBC HOST: You have said in the past that it was quote, pretty well confirmed.

CHENEY: No, I never said that.

BORGER: OK, I think that is...

CHENEY: ... I never said that. That‘s absolutely not...