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Banned
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The dead US troops and Iraqis have no voice...ace. They cannot speak of what has been done to them...There are no more posts about WMD in this forum, even any "perhaps", there were WMD, posts.
Now, this will stop, too:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by IBD Editorail
2002
October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam's government.......
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PERHAPS.....Not !
....due to multiple, official determinations to the contrary, and the fact that the president himself has stopped making this link, since 8/21/06.
ace, it's not at all as you make it out to be..it was a co-ordinated, well planned propaganda "OP".."to fix the facts around the policy":
Quote:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02282003.html
February 28, 2003
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Who's the hack? I nominate The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg. He's the new Remington... Back in 1898, William Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war fever between the US and Spain. He dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to send back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational to draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Remington duly did so. .....
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..the policy to invade and occupy Iraq, and remove Saddam and his government. They knew they did not have justification that rose to a level that would be acceptable to the American people.... a level, Worth Dying For, as the troops were expected to risk, in the falsely justified, "unnecessary war"!
Quote:
http://mccain.senate.gov/public/inde..._id=&Issue_id=
MCCAIN SENDS CLEAR MESSAGE OF SUPPORT FOR IRAQ RESOLUTION
October 11, 2002
U.S. Senator John McCain today made the following statement on the floor of the Senate regarding the Iraq resolution:
.."These debates will be important. I believe the President's position will prevail. Congress cannot foresee the course of this conflict and should not unnecessarily constrain the options open to the President to defeat the threat we have identified in Saddam Hussein. Once Congress acts on a resolution, only the President will have to make the choices, with American forces likely deployed in the region to carry out his orders, that will end the threat Saddam Hussein's weapons and his ambitions pose to the world. Congress should give the President the authority he believes he needs to protect American national security against an often irrational dictator who has demonstrated a history of aggression outside his borders and a willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
"This is not just another Arab despot, not one of many tyrants who repress their people from within the confines of their countries. As New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently traveled across northern Iraq, recently wrote in Slate:
'There are, of course, many repugnant dictators in the world; a dozen or so in the Middle East alone. But Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger. To review: there is no dictator in power anywhere in the world who has, so far in his career, invaded two neighboring countries; fired ballistic missiles at the civilians of two other neighboring countries; tried to have assassinated an ex-president of the United States; harbored al Qaeda fugitives...; attacked civilians with chemical weapons; attacked the soldiers of an enemy with chemical weapons; conducted biological weapons experiments on human subjects; committed genocide; and... [weaponized] aflotoxin, a tool of mass murder and nothing else. I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close... to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.'...
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...and just who is this Jeffrey Goldberg who John McCain was quoting in his promotion of Bush as "the decider"?
Give it all a "serious", read, ace....because hundreds of thousands have died as result of this, including 4080 American troops, and you still cling to this justification for invading and occupying Iraq, even now:
Quote:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001776.html
October 03, 2007
Jeffrey Goldberg, Five Years Ago Today:
Quote:
http://www.slate.com/id/2071670/entry/2071900/
Should the U.S. Invade Iraq? Week 2
from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: Slate writers
Aflatoxin
Posted Thursday, Oct. 3, 2002, at 3:47 PM ET
There is not sufficient space…for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected)…
The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.
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..Still, as gruesome as this is (and as gruesome as Goldberg's pre-war reporting was),:
Quote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003...da.afghanistan
The missing link?Mohammed Mansour Shahab claimed to be the key link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In the latest of his regular online dispatches, The Observer's Chief Reporter interviews him - and finds that you can't always believe what you are told.
Jason Burke Observer.co.uk, Sunday February 9 2003
...For the first six months of his imprisonment he had kept the rest to himself. Then, in October 2001, he told a fellow prisoner who told the guards who told the deputy chief of investigations. When, in the early spring, a reporter from The New Yorker was in Sulamaniya Shahab told him too. The resulting story was published in March with the headline 'The Threat of Saddam' and announced that 'the Kurds may have evidence of [Saddam's] ties to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.' There were a number of possible links raised by the article but the main tie between al'Qaeda and Saddam was Shahab.
There were obvious reasons why hawks in Washington are keen to find such links. The joint FBI and CIA investigation into a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague reported last year by Czech intelligence had proved that Atta was almost certainly in the US at the time of the alleged meeting. The lack of evidence to inculpate Saddam was presenting a problem. It still is. The New Yorker's story thus caused some excitement and its author was interviewed by CNN.
....And this was the Saddam-al-Qaeda link. Clear evidence, the hawks said, that one of the most notorious men in Saddam's regime, with a proven history in chemical weapons, was sending secret fluid filled containers to Osama bin Laden. Not conclusive, admittedly, but good enough.
However Shahab is a liar. He may well be a smuggler, and probably a murderer too, but substantial chunks of his story simply are not true.
Firstly there are inconsistencies between what Shahab told the New Yorker and what he told me. He told Goldberg he had met bin Laden in a tent, not a cave, and said he himself delivered the liquid-filled fridge motors to the Taliban and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.
Then there are practical problems with what he had told me. A Soviet-made 82 mm mortar weights 60kg with its bipod and baseplate. Even a lightweight Iraqi 60mm weights nearly half of that. An RPG, unloaded, weighs 7kgs. Four hundred of the former and 300 of the latter would be a load of more than 20tonnes. Could six men load and unload that weight (twice) in five hours? Not according to a friend of mine who is a logistics specialist with an elite British infantry regiment. It also takes longer than six hours to drive from the Iranian border to Kandahar. Shahab's mistake is understandable though. He has never been to Kandahar. When I asked him to describe the city he said it was 'dirty' which is certainly true and entirely composed of mud houses, which certainly isn't true. I spent several weeks in Kandahar during 1998 and 1999 (i.e when Shahab said he was there) and unless there was a lot of very quick demolition and reconstruction work going on Shahab is either blind or lying.
Kandahar may not be Canary Wharf but it isn't just a pile of mud huts. Uthman's house in the city, Shahab told me, was made of mud too. Which indicates a remarkably ascetic lifestyle for a successful major league smuggler. Not least because much of rest of the local population live in relatively substantial concrete houses. There are (or were following the US bomnbing) several government buildings of three or more stories and a large mosque.
So why was he lying? Possibly because, as the deputy chief of investigations admitted, his sudden loquacity might well get him a few years off his sentence. And where did he get the material for the lies from? Well, televisions were introduced into the cells in August last year.
At the end of our interview I told Shahab that I didn't think he had ever been to Kandahar or met bin Laden. He didn't deny it. Instead he just asked a series of questions about who I was. Why was I in Afghanistan? Was I a spy? An American? Who? I showed him my British passport and press card.
He laughed. 'You are a difficult man,' he said.
In fact other prisoners held by the PUK say there are links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. They are just in the wrong place for Rumsfeld and his cronies.
In the last ten years Kurdistan has sprouted its own largely home grown radical Islamic movement. The most extreme group has managed to carve out a 100 square mile fiefdom for themselves in the hills between Halabja and the Iranian border. There the Ansar-ul-Islam, a group of 600 or so Kurdish Islamists bolstered by around 70 laregly Arab foreigners, have set up a miniaturised version of the Taliban's Afghanistan complete with bans on televisions, sanctions on 'immodest behaviour' by women and training camps for fighters and suicide bombers.
After speaking to Shahab I interviewed a series of Ansar-ul Islam activists. Many were speaking to the press for the first time. For the most part, they spoke coherently and cogently about their organisation. At least three had left ansar-ul Islam and given themselves up to the PUK because they were unhappy at the growing influence of 'foreigners' (i.e. Arabs) in the group. They said that several of the leaders of Ansar-ul-Islam, veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan for the most part, visited bin laden in Afghanistan last year and requested his assistance. They met with senior al-Qaeda men like Dr Ayman al'Zawahiri and received training in camps run by the group. After two of the three main extremists groups in Kurdistan had solicited his aid bin Laden became more proactive and sent an emissary, a Jordanian Arab, to the third group offering them funding and facilities. The offer was accepted.
They did not mention Abu Musab al'Zarqawi, the man who Colin Powell alleges is the link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Many had been captured before al'Zarqawi reached Iraq. That may be one explanation. Another is that al'Zarqawi is a minor player with no real links to al-Qaeda who few were concerned about or interested in.
Since the US-led war in Afghanistan more than 100 fighters from al-Qaeda or associated groups have fled to the Ansar-ul-Islam enclave. This does not make it an al-'Qaeda group. The group may recently have been radicalised by bin Laden's influence and agents, but the roots of Ansar-ul-Islam lie far back in Cold War politics,in the failure of the West to fund reconstruction in Kurdistan or to deal with the Baghdad regime properly post 1991. Other elements also are critical: a massive influx of Saudi-backed Wahabi organisations which disbursed huge sums in Kurdistan in the early Nineties with the express intention of making converts and the internecine strife among the Kurds themselves among them. There are several more contributing factors, all of which are complicated and take some detailed explanation. Saddam may well have infiltrated the Ansar-ul-Islam with a view to monitoring the developments of the group (indeed it would be odd if he had not) but that appears to be about as far as his involvement with the group, and incidentally with al-Qaeda, goes. If you are a Pentagon hawk you are better off sticking to Mohammed Mansoor Shahab and his lies about chemicals, bin Laden and mud houses.
· Jason Burke is The Observer's Chief Reporter. His book on al-Qaeda and modern Islamic fundamentalism will be published by IB Tauris in the summer. You can read a selection of Jason's reporting on the terrorism crisis, including his regular online terrorism dispatch in Observer Worldview's best of Jason Burke page.
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......I don't recommend that anyone get angry at him [Jeffrey Goldberg] personally. He doesn't matter. What matters is the political economy of our media. Here, in an article from this past August, is a description of how that political economy functions: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080501576.html
David Bradley had been trying to lure Jeffrey Goldberg to the Atlantic for more than two years.
Bradley, the magazine's owner, wrote flattering letters. He courted Goldberg at a McDonald's on Wisconsin Avenue. He proffered a hefty signing bonus. And when the New Yorker's Washington correspondent finally seemed receptive to making the move, Bradley sent in the ponies.
"He's incredibly persistent and makes you feel like you're God's gift to journalism," says Goldberg, who had turned Bradley down once before. But that was before the horses showed up at his home to entertain his children. "The charm is incredibly disarming," says Goldberg, who joined the Atlantic last month...
Part of what Bradley is selling is a commitment to long-form journalism, at a time when there are few quality outlets for those who believe in the power of nonfiction narrative. But what Goldberg calls "smart-bomb flattery" doesn't hurt, and neither do salaries for top journalists ranging as high as $350,000.
"Smart-bomb flattery." Oh, tee hee hee. I find it particularly witty for Goldberg to speak of himself enjoying these metaphorical smart bombs at the same time that, thanks in part to him, Iraqis are enjoying the real kind.
In any case, the lesson is clear: as long you advocate war—any war, anywhere, anytime—and as long as you coat it with a certain brand of intellectual varnish, you literally cannot be wrong in the mainstream US media. Your views may diverge from reality so completely they are essentially psychotic, but as far the people who own the media are concerned, it's reality that's mistaken. Hey, do your kids like ponies?
EXTRA CREDIT: In his Slate post, Goldberg cites Richard Spertzel as an authority. Spertzel is an American former UNSCOM inspector and a truly appalling hack. Predictably enough, Spertzel was later hired by the CIA as part of its post-war WMD search team—and predictably enough, he came back to the US and wrote an editorial: http://www.defenddemocracy.org/resea...?doc_id=242996
for the Wall Street Journal brazenly lying about what they'd found and what the final CIA report said. (Brief description here, http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000213.html though it's actually even worse than that. Details on request.)
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonindependent.com...-an-loose-with
Fast and Loose With the Facts
How Two Leading Journalists Played the Public to Help Bush Sell His War
Spencer Ackerman
03/19/2008
The danger," said President George W. Bush on Sept. 25, 2002, is that Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world." He proceeded to build on a lie that finally died last week -- but only after nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis did as well. The war on terror, Bush said, you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.
Only if you're a liar. For the CIA knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Richard A. Clarke, the long-time counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Michael Scheuer, the CIA's original bin Laden analyst, knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Eventually, the 9/11 Commission would know that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda.
But by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, five years ago today, much of the public thought that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were tightly allied to strike the United States. And the public believed this because the Bush administration constantly intimated it in order to launch its long-desired war.
Donald H. Rumsfeld called the evidence linking Saddam and Al Qaeda bulletproof. (He would later say, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two" -- and then walk that statement back.) CIA Director George J. Tenet, carrying the administration's water by misrepresenting what his CIA knew, said there were ties going back a decade. (He meant that they were a decade old.) Vice President Dick Cheney went on "Meet The Press" again and again to say that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an agent of Iraqi intelligence. (In early 2002, the FBI and the CIA debunked this claim.)
But the public also believed it because the press amplified the lie. The major networks and papers uncritically recycled what these administration officials said. The elite media was no exception -- and played a major role in convincing less-expert journalists that the administration was on to something. Two writers in particular, though very different, stand out: Jeffrey Goldberg, then of The New Yorker and now of The Atlantic, and Stephen F. Hayes, of the neoconservative Weekly Standard.
Goldberg, in The New Yorker, wrote two pieces -- one in March 2002 and the other on the eve of the invasion -- backing the Saddam/Al Qaeda claim. Bush praised his work publicly, if inelegantly: "Evidently, there's a new article in the New York magazine or New Yorker magazine--some East Coast magazine--and it details about [Saddam's] barbaric behavior toward his own people." Asked about Goldberg by Tim Russert, Cheney called Goldberg's 2002 piece, which breathlessly recycled the second-hand claims of prisoners of the Kurds that Saddam and bin Laden were allied, "devastating".
Hayes, in the Standard, has made a career out of pretending Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league to attack the United States. He published a book -- tellingly wafer-thin and with large type in its hardcover edition -- called "The "The Connection".
One infamous piece even suggested that Saddam might have aided the 9/11 attack. Hayes can be relied on to provide a farrago of speciousness every time new information emerges refuting his deceptive thesis. Unsurprisingly, Cheney has repeatedly praised Hayes's work, telling Fox News, "I think Steve Hayes has done an effective job in his article of laying out a lot of those connections."
The Bush administration will leave office with the legacy of a disastrous and unnecessary war, which threatens to undermine the Republican Party for a second straight election. Bush and Cheney will probably leave office distrusted and loathed by a large majority of the electorate, and if they ever travel to Europe they might even face indictment as war criminals.
By contrast, Goldberg and Hayes have seen their careers flourish. Goldberg traded his New Yorker post for a lucrative spot at The Atlantic. Hayes wrote a lengthy hagiography of Cheney for major New York publisher, HarperCollins. Publicity for the book got him a special spot on "Meet The Press", befitting his status as a high-profile television pundit who is never treated as the conspiracy theorist he is.
Every single inquiry into the Saddam/Al Qaeda link has revealed it to be untrue. First, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission's definitive study found "no collaborative operational ties" between the two. (Hayes' response was to attack the commission, and then to claim that this was a legalistic way of saying that Saddam and Al Qaeda were actually in league.) Then, in 2006, the Senate intelligence committee rejected it. Then, in 2007, the Pentagon inspector general -- albeit in a more circuitous way -- rejected it. Now, in a report released last week, the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command rejects it.
The Joint Forces Command study combed through 600,000 pages of captured documents about Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism throughout the years. It documents, in great detail, precisely that. But the label "terrorism"; is a misleading category. The study refutes the idea that there was any "direct connection" between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Saddam's support for terrorism was largely limited to Palestinian, anti-Kurdish and anti-Gulf state terrorist groups. (See the JFC's Executive Summary here, another excerpt here and conclusions.)
About as close as anything could come to linking Saddam to Al Qaeda was a memo from one Saddam's intelligence services "written a decade before Operation Iraqi Freedom." It says: "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." That organization would eventually merge with Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, long after the apparent meeting in Sudan. It also says that for a time in the mid-1990s, Saddam and Al Qaeda had "indirect cooperation" by offering "training and motivation" to some of the same terror organizations in that country
Out of this thin gruel, Hayes attempted to make a meal in the Standard's pages this week. He lifted as many bullet points from the report as he could that, out of context, seemed to bolster his theory. He then went about attacking reporters who accurately wrote that the study found no direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Hayes tacitly promised his readers that history will ultimately vindicate him, writing that "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." And he expressed puzzlement that an administration with an obvious credibility problem had not "done anything to promote the study."
Hayes's boss, New York Times columnist Bill Kristol, criticized the administration's silence in an editorial, lamenting that "most Americans will assume there was no real Saddam-terror connection." The phraseology is telling. Not even Kristol, a supreme propagandist, could bring himself to write of a "real Saddam-Al Qaeda connection", preferring the sleight-of-hand approach to discussing Saddam's ties to undifferentiated "terror" groups.
At the risk of belaboring the point, it should be obvious that if Saddam Hussein was as important to Al Qaeda as Hayes has erroneously and deliberately written for years, then Al Qaeda should be reeling years after the destruction of his regime. Instead, according to a mid-2007 warning from the National Counterterrorism Center, Al Qaeda is "Better Positioned to Strike the West." Never once has Hayes, in all the thousands of words he has written on the "connection", reckoned with this basic strategic problem. In essence, he asks every U.S. soldier and Marine in Iraq to be the last man to die for a debater's point.
Goldberg's approach has been rather different. He has simply kept quiet about what he did. In his March 2002 piece, he credulously recycled the claims of "Kurdish intelligence officials" that a Kurdish terror group called Ansar al-Islam was "shielding Al Qaeda members, and... doing so with the approval of Saddam's agents." (In a parody of a concession to reality, he caveated the claim by saying "they have no proof that Ansar al-Islam was ever involved in international terrorism or that Saddam's agents" were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.") Never once did he indicate to his readers -- The New Yorker has a circulation of more than a million -- that the Kurds, sworn enemies of Saddam Hussein, had an obvious motive to peddle lies to American reporters.
A subsequent piece baselessly asserted that "the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam's regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi." Needless to say, not a single investigation into Iraq or Al Qaeda has ever substantiated what Goldberg wrote.
Goldberg further pimped the assertions of "senior officials" that "an Al Qaeda operative--a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi -- was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training."(It's possible that this piece of information came from Abu Sheikh al-Libi, who was tortured into telling the Bush administration about Saddam giving Al Qaeda chemical and biological weapons training, before subsequently recanting.) And he again wrote of "another possible connection early last year," gleaned -- once again -- from "Kurdish intelligence officials."
Goldberg, perhaps chastened, largely stopped writing about the war after the occupation proved to be a disaster. Unlike Hayes, if he still believes that Saddam and Al Qaeda were indeed in league, he has not publicly said so. His beat at The New Yorker changed from the Iraq war to domestic politics. Yet even then, he could not resist the urge to lionize the architects of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. In 2005, he authored a puffy profile of former Pentagon official Douglas J. Feith. ("His glasses magnify his eyes, making him appear owlish, and his mouth is set in an expression of bemusement that can slip into impatient condescension when he hears something that he thinks is foolish, which is often.")
All the while, he has neglected to correct the record. The closest Goldberg has come to acknowledging what he did in 2002 and 2003 was in an interview with New York magazine to promote a book he published in 2006. When the reporter, Boris Kachka, gently asked about his earlier reporting, Goldberg snapped, "Is that part of the interview? Okay, fine, if you really want to go into it, the specific allegations I raised have never been definitively addressed by the 9/11 Commission."
Yet Goldberg enjoys a sterling reputation. The Atlantic's wealthy owner, David Bradley, reportedly sent Goldberg's children ponies in order to convince the reporter to leave The New Yorker for the prestigious magazine. "He's incredibly persistent and makes you feel like you're God's gift to journalism", Goldberg said of Bradley. The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz approvingly referred to Bradley's pursuit of "top talent".
But it seems as though, despite Goldberg's ability to escape accountability for his journalistic malpractice, he can't help smirking to attentive readers. The cover story of the January/February edition of The Atlantic featured Goldberg's meditations on the post-Iraq Middle East. It featured, of all things, a discursion into "a decrepit prison in Iraqi Kurdistan" where "a senior interrogator with the Kurdish intelligence service" tortured an Arab prisoner. Goldberg mentioned not a word of what his last dalliance with Kurdish intelligence yielded. To anyone who read his 2002 and 2003 pieces, it appeared that The Atlantic writer was returning to the scene of the crime.
Nearly 4,000 Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and counting, will not have the same opportunity.
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Quote:
http://washingtonindependent.com/view/goldbergs-non-mea
In my piece yesterday about the journalists who hawked the Saddam-Al Qaeda lie, I wrote that the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg "has simply kept quiet about what he did". Right as the piece was churning its way to the internet, however, Goldberg broke his silence in a piece for Slate. Unfortunately, from his perspective, it probably would have been better for him to have kept his mouth shut.
In the section that actually deals with what Goldberg "reported" before the war -- Kurdish intelligence officials introduced him to prisoners who they said were the connections between Saddam's intelligence apparatus and Al Qaeda -- he writes:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jeff Goldberg
I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism. The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis. |
So there you go: Goldberg was right all along! In truth, however, he's trusting that you won't actually read the report. Because what he wrote is simply not supported by what's in the Joint Forces Command study.
The relevant section of the report is stretches from pages 30 to 34. There, it details a 1993 Iraqi Defense Ministry letter describing a campaign of attacks on civilians and non-governmental organizations in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
"Terrorist operations in the Kurdish areas were carried out with the direct knowledge of the highest levels of the Iraqi government"; the report states. "... According to correspondence between [the Defense Ministry] and [an Iraqi intelligence organization], seventy-nine regime-directed attacks were successful against 'saboteurs,' Kurdish factions, UN operations, and various international [non-governmental organizations] in the northern Iraq [sic] during a six-month period in 1993".
That is obviously a campaign of deliberate state violence. What it is obviously not is a collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Rather, it was a campaign conducted by Saddam's own operatives. Goldberg says Saddam was "a supporter of terrorism". What he's hoping you're too half-awake to realize is that there's a difference between generic "terror" groups and Al Qaeda. The report, as I wrote in my piece, does not say, at all, contra to Goldberg's misleading implication, that Saddam collaborated with Ayman Zawahiri. It says that around 1993, a memo from one of Saddam's apparatchiks noted, "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt". Years later, that organization would merge with Al Qaeda. Nowhere in the report does Joint Forces Command substantiate that Saddam and Zawahiri's group actually, you know, did anything together. To the contrary: it refers to a memorandum, "dated 8 February 1993, asking that movement to refrain from moving against the Egyptian government at that time."
Goldberg has misled The New Yorker's readers for years. Now he's misleading Slate's readers. And, when you think about it, why shouldn't he? After all, he rode his misrepresentations all the way to a great job at The Atlantic. All the incentives have aligned for him. Why stop now? It's not like 4,000 Americans have died or anything.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
Bush stated that he never said there was an operational relationship. I think he came to the conclusion there was a relationship based on circumstantial evidence. I accept the fact that there may have been occasions when he did not make it clear that his view was based on circumstantial evidence and other times when he did. ......
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Here are the relevant Bush and Cheney quotes, ace....can you single out the one(s) where either official "make it clear that his view was based on circumstantial evidence", or come up with a relevant quote that I might have missed?:
Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=130169
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130169&page=1
Bush Calls Off Attack on Poison Gas Lab
Calls Off Operation to Take Out Al Qaeda-Sponsored Poison Gas Lab
By John McWethy
W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 20 (2002)
President Bush called off a planned covert raid into northern Iraq late last week that was aimed at a small group of al Qaeda operatives who U.S. intelligence officials believed were experimenting with poison gas and deadly toxins, according to administration officials....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0021007-8.html
President Bush October 7, 2002
...We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0030205-1.html
For Immediate Release
February 5, 2003
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council
.. But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associated in collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida lieutenants.
Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago. Returning to Afghanistan in 2000, he oversaw a terrorist training camp. One of his specialities and one of the specialties of this camp is poisons. When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqaqi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq.
Colin Powell slide 39
Slide 39
POWELL: You see a picture of this camp. ....
... Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day.
During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These Al Qaida affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they've now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...030206-17.html
President Bush February 6, 2003
...Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.
We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. The network runs a poison and explosive training center in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad. The head of this network traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment and stayed for months. Nearly two dozen associates joined him there and have been operating in Baghdad for more than eight months.
The same terrorist network operating out of Iraq is responsible for the murder, the recent murder, of an American citizen, an American diplomat, Laurence Foley. The same network has plotted terrorism against France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, and Russia, and was caught producing poisons in London...
http://web.archive.org/web/200304012...?bid=3&pid=371
Capital Games By David Corn
Powell's One Good Reason To Bomb Iraq--UPDATED
02/06/2003 @ 12:12am
...But here's the first question that struck me after Powell's presentation:
why hasn't the United States bombed the so-called Zarqawi camp shown in the slide? The administration obviously knows where it is, and Powell spoke of it in the present tense.
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=8&gl=us
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The, Feb 7, 2003 by GREG MILLER
SHOWDOWN ON IRAQ
Why not hit terrorist camp?
Lawmakers question lack of military action
By GREG MILLER Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 7, 2003
Washington -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where al-Qaida affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.
"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.
"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said.
Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.
"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified.
But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20030208.html
President Bush March 6, 2003
Discusses Iraq in National Press Conference
,,THE PRESIDENT: ,.Colin Powell, in an eloquent address to the United Nations, described some of the information we were at liberty of talking about. He mentioned a man named Al Zarqawi, who was in charge of the poison network. He's a man who was wounded in Afghanistan, received aid in Baghdad, ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, USAID employee, was harbored in Iraq. There is a poison plant in Northeast Iraq. To assume that Saddam Hussein knew none of this was going on is not to really understand the nature of the Iraqi society...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0040617-3.html
June 17, 2004
... THE PRESIDENT: The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. 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.
I always said that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He was a threat because he was a sworn enemy to the United States of America, just like al Qaeda. He was a threat because he had terrorist connections -- not only al Qaeda connections, but other connections to terrorist organizations; Abu Nidal was one. He was a threat because he provided safe-haven for a terrorist like Zarqawi, who is still killing innocent inside of Iraq.
No, he was a threat, and the world is better off and America is more secure without Saddam Hussein in power. ..
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0040618-1.html
June 18, 2004
President Bush Salutes Soldiers in Fort Lewis, Washington
Remarks by the President to the Military Personnel
Fort Lewis, Washington
..And we're beginning to see results of people stepping up to defend themselves. Iraqi police and Civil Defense Corps have captured several wanted terrorists, including Umar Boziani. He was a key lieutenant of this killer named Zarqawi who's ordering the suiciders inside of Iraq. By the way,
''he was the fellow who was in Baghdad at times prior to our arrival. He was operating out of Iraq. He was an Al Qaeda associate.
See, he was there before we came. He's there after we came. And we'll find him.''..
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0040923-8.html
September 23, 2004
President Bush and Prime Minister Allawi Press Conference
...PRESIDENT BUSH: Imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein were still in power. This is a man who harbored terrorists -- Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, Zarqawi...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060320-7.html
March 20, 2006
THE PRESIDENT:..We also did say that Zarqawi, the man who is now wreaking havoc and killing innocent life, was in Iraq. .....but I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060821.html
August 21, 2006.
...Q Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn't gone in. How do you square all of that?
THE PRESIDENT: I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. ...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060910.html
September 10, 2006
..Q Then why in the lead-up to the war was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's a different issue. Now, there's a question of whether or not al Qaeda -- whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11; separate and apart from that is the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet's testimony before the Senate intel committee in open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern, a relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al Qaeda....
..we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went into 9/11 -- then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02..
.Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, a poisons facility run by an Ansar al-Islam, an affiliate of al Qaeda..
Cheney Oct. 19, 2006 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...061019-10.html
Q Are you saying that you believe fighting in Iraq has prevented terrorist attacks on American soil? And if so, why, since there has not been a direct connection between al Qaeda and Iraq established?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the fact of the matter is there are connections. Mr. Zarqawi, who was the lead terrorist in Iraq for three years, fled there after we went into Afghanistan. He was there before we ever went into Iraq. The sectarian violence that we see now, in part, has been stimulated by the fact of al Qaeda attacks intended to try to create conflict between Shia and Sunni...
Cheney April 5, 2007 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0070405-3.html
Q It may not just be Iraq. Yesterday I read that Ike Skelton, who chairs -- I forget the name of the committee -- in the next defense appropriations bill for fiscal '08 is going to actually remove the phrase "global war on terror," because they don't think it's applicable. They want to refer to conflicts as individual skirmishes. But they're going to try to rid the defense appropriation bill -- and, thus, official government language -- of that term. Does that give you any indication of their motivation or what they think of the current plight in which the country finds itself?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure -- well, it's just flawed thinking. I like Ike Skelton; I worked closely with Ike when I was Secretary of Defense. He's Chairman of the Armed Services Committee now. Ike is a good man. He's just dead wrong about this, though. Think about -- just to give you one example, Rush, remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra Mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni. This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq. ..
Cheney June 3, 2007 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20070603.html
The Vice President:..The worst terrorist we had in Iraq was a guy named Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth; served time in a Jordanian prison as a terrorist, was let out on amnesty. Then he went to Afghanistan and ran one of those training camps back in the late '90s that trained terrorists. Then when we launched into Afghanistan after 9/11, he was wounded, and fled to Baghdad for medical treatment, and then set up shop in Iraq. So he operated in Jordan, he operated in Afghanistan, then he moved to Iraq..
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Last edited by host; 06-05-2008 at 02:39 AM..
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