Exhaustive Review Finds No Link Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda
Do you still have a penchant for ignorance? - Jon
Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
Source: mcclatchydc.com
3/11/2008
WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn't due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.
President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.
The new study, entitled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents", was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a "painful" declassification review.
It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report's authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.
The issue of al Qaida in Iraq already has played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he'd keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there.
"I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq," McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, "There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade." (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn't emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)
The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush's decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.
While the documents reveal no Saddam-al Qaida links, they do show that Saddam and his underlings were willing to use terrorism against enemies of the regime and had ties to regional and global terrorist groups, the officials said.
However, the U.S. intelligence official, who's read the full report, played down the prospect of any major new revelations, saying, "I don't think there's any surprises there."
Saddam, whose regime was relentlessly secular, was wary of Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaida, although like many other Arab leaders, he gave some financial support to Palestinian groups that sponsored terrorism against Israel.
According to the State Department's annual report on global terrorism for 2002 — the last before the Iraq invasion — Saddam supported the militant Islamic group Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical, Syrian-based terrorist group.
Saddam also hosted Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, although the Abu Nidal Organization was more active when he lived in Libya and he was murdered in Baghdad in August 2002, possibly on Saddam's orders.
An earlier study based on the captured Iraqi documents, released by the Joint Forces Command in March 2006, found that a militia Saddam formed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Fedayeen Saddam, planned assassinations and bombings against his enemies. Those included Iraqi exiles and opponents in Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite communities.
Other documents indicate that the Fedayeen Saddam opened paramilitary training camps that, starting in 1998, hosted "Arab volunteers" from outside of Iraq. What happened to the non-Iraqi volunteers is unknown, however, according to the earlier study.
The new Pentagon study isn't the first to refute earlier administration contentions about Saddam and al Qaida.
A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam was "distrustful of al Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaida to provide material or operational support."
The Senate report, citing an FBI debriefing of a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi, said that Saddam turned down a request for assistance by bin Laden which he made at a 1995 meeting in Sudan with an Iraqi operative.
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Cheney reasserts al-Qaida-Saddam connection
Vice president’s words come as latest Pentagon report again dismisses link
Source: msnbc.com
updated 7:57 a.m. ET, Fri., April. 6, 2007
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on Thursday as the Defense Department released a report citing more evidence that the prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group.
Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida 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,” Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. “As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.”
However, a declassified Pentagon report released Thursday said that interrogations of the deposed Iraqi leader and two of his former aides as well as seized Iraqi documents confirmed that the terrorist organization and the Saddam government were not working together before the invasion.
The Sept. 11 Commission’s 2004 report also found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network during that period.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had requested that the Pentagon declassify the report prepared by acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble. In a statement Thursday, Levin said the declassified document showed why a Defense Department investigation had concluded that some Pentagon prewar intelligence work was inappropriate.
The report, which had been released in summary form in February, said that former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith had acted inappropriately but not illegally in reviewing prewar intelligence. Levin has claimed that Feith’s intelligence assessment was wrong and distorted but nevertheless formed part of the basis on which President Bush took the country to war.
Although Feith’s assessment in mid-2002 offered several examples of cooperation between Saddam’s government and al-Qaida, the report said, the CIA had concluded months earlier that no evidence supported the existence of significant or long-term relationships.
Old Reports
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122821,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5223932/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3812351.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1006792,00.html
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Sorry for the un-academic
Sorry for the un-academic remark, but...
duh.
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http://www.swatcash.com/dhs
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Douglas Feith's Blame Game
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/
March 11, 2008
Douglas Feith's Blame Game
by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Matt Duss
In a new memoir the Washington Post calls "a massive score-settling work," former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith defends himself from charges that his Pentagon office politicized pre-war Iraq intelligence. Feith blames former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell, the CIA, U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer, and almost everyone else but himself and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for mishandling the run-up to the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation. The Post obtained a 900-page manuscript of Feith's book, entitled, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. After the 9/11 attacks, Feith headed up the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was created "to find evidence...that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States." Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked under Feith in the OSP, characterized the program's purpose as "developing propaganda and pushing...an agenda on Iraq." Kwiatkowski also said that OSP had "developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon" to make the case that Saddam was an imminent threat.
POLITICIZING INTELLIGENCE: In February 2007, the Pentagon's Inspector General concluded that the OSP under Feith had "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship...that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers" and that Feith's intelligence briefings to the President presented "conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence." Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) stated that the report was "a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DoD policy office" that demonstrated "that intelligence relating to the Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq." When asked about the activities of the Office of Special Plans, CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden stated before Congress in May 2006 that he was "not comfortable" with Feith's approach to intelligence analysis. "I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war," Hayden said. "No, sir, I wasn't comfortable." The Senate Intelligence Committee will also soon release a new report criticizing Bush administration officials "for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq." Many of these statements were made based upon analyses produced by Feith's office at the Pentagon, which posited a working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda and claimed that Saddam was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.
A PREDETERMINED INVASION: Feith's account of the lead-up to the Iraq invasion also offers more evidence that President Bush was resolved to invade Iraq, regardless of international opinion and irrespective of whether inspectors found evidence of an Iraqi weapons program. Feith writes that Bush declared "war is inevitable" in a National Security Council meeting in December 2002, even as he continued to insist in public that no decision had been made. On December 31, 2002, Bush said to reporters, "I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully. ... I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq," and "I hope this can be done peacefully." On Jan. 2, 2003, Bush told reporters that he was "hopeful we won't have to go war." On March 6, 2003, Bush said in a press conference that no decision had been made to use force against Iraq, even though two weeks earlier, he told then-Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar that the U.S. would "be in Baghdad at the end of March."
THE INCOMPETENCE DODGE: Responding to charges that his office "politicized" intelligence, Feith reportedly claims in his book that it was the CIA that was politicizing intelligence by discounting evidence of ties between Saddam and al Qaeda. In other words, Feith claims that the CIA was delinquent in ignoring evidence of a relationship that did not, in fact, exist. Feith's charges of failure against those initially responsible for the occupation of Iraq will likely be seized upon by those seeking to cast the war, as Feith does, as a good idea ruined by poor implementation -- a line of argument which has been termed "the incompetence dodge" because it attempts to present the Iraq disaster as a failure of implementation, not of conception. While he has harsh criticisms for many people, the Washington Post notes that Feith treats Rumsfeld "with almost complete admiration."
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/
North Texans for 911 Truth (new site)
http://tellstruth.webs.com/index.htm
This is a BRIDGE to 9/11
Yes, "duh", I agree. However it is an opportunity to build upon. This very story is posted on my paper's online message board, so I simply compiled a short list:
1) No Link Between Saddam and Al Qaeda
2) No Iraqi hijackers
3) No WMDs in Iraq
4) No Imminent threat to US
5) Yellow-cake documents were fake
6) No Proof connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
7) No White paper showing responsibility
8) No Charges against Osama for 9/11
9) No Evidence Linking hijackers to Bin Laden
10) No Arab names on flight manifests
11) Pancake theory is a lie
This is all basic to us, but the point is to use this story as an opportunity to extend the chain of lies back into 9/11 from a well-tolerated starting point.
Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored?
Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored?
March 12, 2008 1:58 PM
ABC News' Jonathan Karl Reports: The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.
The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.
It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.
Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."
Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."
ABC News obtained the comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism on Tuesday. Read the report's executive summary HERE.
The study, which was due to be released Wednesday, found no "smoking gun" or any evidence of a direct connection between Saddam's Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist organization.
The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.
Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.
The study does, however, show that Saddam Hussein did much to support terrorism in the Middle East and used terrorism "as a routine tool of state power." Saddam's government, for example, had a program for the "development, construction, certification and training for car bombs and suicide vests in 1999 and 2000." The U.S. military is still dealing with the fall-out from this particular program.
The report says Saddam's bureaucrats carefully recorded the regime's connections to Palestinian terrorists groups and its financial support for the families of suicide bombers.
The primary target, however, of Saddam's terror activities was not the United States, and not Israel. "The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq." Saddam's primary aim was self preservation and the elimination of potential internal threats to his power.
Bush administration officials have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror group in their justification for waging war against Iraq.
"What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network," former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations February 5, 2003.
On June 18, 2004 the Washington Post quoted President George W. Bush as saying: "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," Bush said.
"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," The Washington Post quoted Bush as saying. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."
"We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's Meet The Press March 16, 2003.
"But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda, the cost to the United States of what happened on 9/11 with billions and billions of dollars and 3,000 lives. And the cost will be much greater in a future attack if the terrorists have access to the kinds of capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed," Cheney said.
''There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq,'' former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a interview with Infinity CBS Radio, Nov. 14, 2002.
North Texans for 911 Truth (new site)
http://tellstruth.webs.com/index.htm