OK, our intelligence is following up a tip by .... Michael Moore. We should have given Saudi Arabia and Pakistan ultimatums on September 12. Unfortunately we decided to invade Iraq... http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...7nov17,1,1308809.story?coll=la-home-headlines Saudi Cash Scrutinized by U.S. for Terror Ties By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Even as they nurture a partnership with Saudi Arabia to smash Al Qaeda, U.S. officials are quietly investigating whether funds disbursed by the Riyadh government have helped finance the spread of international terrorism. Counter-terrorism officials involved in the highly secretive effort, which has included the subpoenaing of Saudi government bank records here, said it is one of their most pressing and politically sensitive priorities: tracing as much as $4 billion a year that the Saudi government has spent worldwide, partly in an effort to gain support for its strict brand of conservative Islam, known as Wahhabism. The investigation involves efforts to determine not only where the money went, but also whether Saudi officials — knowingly or unwittingly — helped bankroll terror cells and their support network through official donations to radical Islamic leaders, mosques, schools, cultural centers and other projects, senior U.S. counter-terrorism officials said. The FBI and Treasury Department are also seeking to trace Saudi money spent on ambitious efforts to recruit Wahhabi followers, possibly including inmates in federal prisons and within the U.S. military, as well as tracking the financial aid given to tens of thousands of Saudi students here, including many attending flight school and other activities that one senior U.S. official termed "suspicious." So far, the investigation has found no evidence of intentional wrongdoing by Saudi officials, nearly all of whom are ranking members of the Saudi royal family. "Most of it appears to be for legitimate purposes," one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said of the funding. "But we are looking beyond that to the accounts that are questionable ... to determine where all the money went ... and can we link it to support of terrorism and terrorist activities." A senior Saudi official vehemently denied that the government has knowingly given money to help finance terrorism. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Riyadh was working closely with U.S. officials, particularly in trying to determine whether any of the government's money ended up in the wrong hands. The Saudi official confirmed that the subpoenas had been issued but said, "We would have given them voluntarily if they had asked." In the United States, FBI and Treasury Department agents are focusing on tracking what they say is as much as $300 million a year in Saudi funds disbursed through the Persian Gulf kingdom's embassy in Washington and regional consulates, as well as through Riyadh-sponsored charities. Overseas, the CIA and National Security Agency are pursuing far larger sums of money that the Saudi government has spent on thousands of Wahhabi projects in nations across the world. The overall investigation is supervised by a special counter-terrorism coordinating committee of the National Security Council, the officials said. In the past, U.S. officials have confirmed that they were investigating whether Al Qaeda's rise to global prominence was funded, in part, through contributions by wealthy Saudi businessmen, possibly funneled through charities and relief organizations. The current probe, however, marks the first time U.S. law enforcement officials are investigating the actions and expenditures of the Saudi government itself, several senior U.S. officials said. The senior officials said they were particularly concerned by a wealth of anecdotal evidence indicating that the decades-long Saudi effort to spread Wahhabism has underwritten some of the world's most militant Islamic religious and political figures, many of whom openly support terrorism. Most of the money was doled out here and overseas by "Islamic affairs" officials in Saudi embassies with much independence to promote Wahhabism, U.S. authorities believe. On at least two occasions that have been disclosed publicly, such Islamic affairs officials have been linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers and other terrorists. A congressional review found that at least one official in Los Angeles had a closed-door meeting with a Saudi national just hours before he met two of the hijackers. The Saudi national later gave the two money and logistical help while they were living in San Diego. In Germany, a Saudi Islamic affairs official left the country in March after German authorities suspected him of working with extremists now accused of plotting terrorist attacks against Western interests. German authorities found a business card of the Saudi official, Mohammad J. Fakihi, in the apartment of a since-convicted accomplice of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Wahhabism, on which the Saudi theocracy is based, is a puritanical form of Islam that its supporters say is nonviolent. But Wahhabism has also been invoked by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, his Al Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations as religious justification for all devout Muslims to force Western interests out of Islamic countries by violent means if necessary.U.S. officials believe it is likely that a significant amount of Saudi government money has ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and other terrorist operatives who are still at large and could be planning attacks. Some of those officials said they have come to believe that the sheer volume and repetition of Saudi contributions, even if made unwittingly, could constitute some form of "willful ignorance" that borders on official policy. "It is a problem we have discussed with the Saudis directly," said a second senior U.S. counter-terrorism official. "They have to realize that funding Wahhabi institutions has formed a base for Al Qaeda to operate. It allows them to recruit based on the ideology, to fund and to execute." Despite Saudi assistance in some aspects of the investigation, much of it is being conducted independently by the United States. Even if no direct link between Saudi money and terrorism is found, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to influential Wahhabi religious and political leaders who could be recruiting legions of future terrorists and anti-U.S. agitators, officials said. The most extreme outcome of the investigation, the officials said, would be a recommendation to the Bush administration that Saudi Arabia be the eighth nation blacklisted as an official state sponsor of terrorism, which would prohibit any U.S. agencies or businesses from doing business with it. That scenario, which has been floated by some members of Congress, is extremely unlikely, particularly given Saudi Arabia's recent efforts to cooperate more fully in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, investigators said. "I don't know that we'll ever be able to make that statement, but the bottom line is that money from them goes to a radical element, for radical purposes," the first senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said. Representatives of the FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and National Security Council all refused to comment on the investigation. The senior Saudi official said Riyadh has spent only $17 million on projects in the United States in recent years, and that it has given out far less money for Wahhabi causes throughout the world than U.S. officials believe. "We have nothing to hide," the official said. "If it turns out that some of these people [who received Saudi money] are evil, we would like to know that." He said any link between Saudi officials, and the Wahhabist faith in general, and terrorism is guilt by association. "It has become very simplistic to say that Saudi Arabia equals Wahhabism equals terrorism, but that is not the case," the official said. "Our religious doctrine is very conservative and orthodox. But is it violent? No.... We have crazy religious radicals who are nut cases, but they are not part of the religious establishment." The current investigation has been underway for some time but has intensified in recent months, U.S. authorities said, in part due to calls for such a probe by several lawmakers in the aftermath of a scathing report by a joint congressional intelligence committee. The committee, formed to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks, concluded that suspicious ties between Saudi Arabia and the attacks "obviously raise issues with serious national implications" about the United States' relationship with the world's largest oil producer. In its report, it urged the FBI and CIA to aggressively investigate those ties. Several U.S. lawmakers have called for an investigation into Saudi disbursements. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) said the Saudi government's support of Wahhabism "provides the recruiting grounds, support infrastructure and monetary lifeblood of today's international terrorists." Sen. Charles E. Schumer, (D-N.Y.), has called for the Saudis to fire their chief law enforcement and counter-terrorism official, Prince Nayif ibn Abdulaziz, contending that he has helped, not hindered, Al Qaeda and other terrorists — a charge Saudi officials have repeatedly denied. Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted that they have doled out huge sums of money without requiring information on who ultimately received the money and what it was used for, U.S. officials complain. "We've been adamant that we make them accountable, and they have danced around it," said the first counter-terrorism official.
The NY Post is just another jerkoff rag. Jerkoff, using the right hand, of course. It's like Rupert Murdoch's papers in Britain espousing the great and wonderful GWB on his visit to that country. Consider the source. If I saw this article in, say, Time or Newsweek, I'd at least pay attention. (U.S. News and World Report is right-wing.) I mean, come on; the CIA has more than a few "reporters" on the payroll. If this were a real story, it would have broke long ago, and without obfuscation. Everything is being carefully timed to get GWB back into office for four more years of damage. "The economy's doing great...except for those millions of people earning about half what they're worth and considering themselves lucky. Osama and Saddam are gay lovers, except that they are both seeking control of the Middle East, one through religious means, the other through secular means, and so why in hell would they possibly trust each other?" The only thing Osama and Saddam have in common is that they are bad guys who will help GWB (ugh) legitimately win an election.
Well now we have put Saddam and Osama in the the enemy of my enemy is my friend boat and there may be cooperation, just as the CIA predicted would happen *after* an American invasion...
From Washington Monthloy... _________ The Weakest Link Why the Bush administration insists against all evidence on an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. By Spencer Ackerman -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After weeks of plummeting public support for his handling of postwar Iraq, President Bush took the offensive last month. In a barrage of speeches, Bush and his senior aides argued fervently that the invasion was justified and the United States was making progress on the war's stated aims. But while it's true that the destruction of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is an unqualified benefit, the rest of the administration's predictions about the war's aftermath have not panned out. Any post-Saddam euphoria felt by the Iraqi people-who, Vice President Dick Cheney declared before the war, would greet U.S. troops "as liberators"--has given way to ambivalence, as a recent Gallup poll attests; meanwhile, American troops are fighting a protracted guerrilla war in central Iraq which claims, on average, the life of one soldier every day. The administration also promised that our allies would fall into line behind us once the war was over, that Iraqi oil would finance much of the country's reconstruction, and that neighboring despotic regimes would bend to our will. Instead, most of our traditional allies have refused to support our efforts with either troops or money; Iraqi oil production will almost certainly yield insufficient revenue to rebuild the country over the next few years; and Iran has apparently redoubled its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, while Syria and Saudi Arabia have allowed their own home-grown terrorists to flood into Iraq. Most importantly, however, the Bush administration's chief justification for the war--that Saddam placed American security in "grave and gathering danger"--has slowly come unraveled. Before the war, the president and members of his administration argued that Saddam had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an ongoing nuclear program, and that he might provide such weapons to terrorists, specifically al Qaeda, who could then attack an American city and "leave no fingerprints," as Bush put it in a televised address last October. The first part of that equation did not long survive the fall of Baghdad. As actual weapons of mass destruction proved elusive after months of occupation, administration officials began to speak of the existence of weapons "programs." And when, after three months of searching, the 1,200-member team led by David Kay issued an interim report, it indicated that the few remaining components of Saddam's pre-Gulf War I weapons programs weren't likely to have yielded actual weapons while international sanctions remained in place. In light of this evidence, the administration resorted to legalisms. Cheney argued in a speech in mid-October that Kay's report "confirms a material breach by the former Iraqi regime of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441." But by abandoning the language of thousands of liters of VX, sarin, anthrax, and plague, at least they were no longer denying the obvious. That can't be said, however, for the other half of the administration's doomsday scenario: Saddam's reputed partnership with al Qaeda. So intent were some in the White House to convince voters of such a connection that last September, Cheney raised the possibility that Saddam's regime had direct ties to the 9/11 hijackers on "Meet the Press." The speciousness of Cheney's statement was so apparent that the president himself found it necessary to note publicly that there was no evidence of such a link. But administration officials have continued to insist that there were clear connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. Even while distancing himself last September from Cheney's notion that Saddam had some role in the 9/11 attacks, for instance, Bush insisted that, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." But the evidence for an active link between Saddam and al Qaeda is just as flimsy as the evidence for a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Just as the administration has evidence not of actual WMDs or even programs to manufacture them, but merely possible fragments of WMD programs, neither they have evidence of ties to al Qaeda, but of intentions to have such ties. And the more we know, the more it seems clear that bin Laden was uninterested in any overture from the Iraqi dictator. While most components of the administration's evidentiary case have been debunked, however, the press continues to broadcast its assertions without commentary. As a result, according to a late July Newsweek poll, 72 percent of Americans believe that "Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was harboring al Qaeda terrorists and helping them to develop chemical weapons." Insisting that such a partnership existed has allowed Bush to present the Iraq war as another battle in the ongoing war on terrorism-the war for which a broad national consensus exists, even as the administration's promises about Iraq fail to materialize. Nevermind Saddam was not without involvement in regional terrorism, supporting Palestinian attacks against Israel for years. But nearly every country in the region has done the same, from such rogues as Syria and Iran to such nominal allies as Saudi Arabia. When it comes to international terrorism directed at the United States, however, there is mounting evidence of Saudi complicity, but virtually none on Saddam. Beginning in the fall of 2002, senior administration officials pointed to a terrorist named Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who runs a group called Ansar al Islam, as the human bridge between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. In his speech at the United Nations last February, Secretary of State Colin Powell charged that Iraq was "harbor[ing]" Zarqawi's group and that Zarqawi himself was "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants." But U.S. intelligence had already concluded last year that Zarqawi's ties to al Qaeda were informal at best. He "occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents," as The Washington Post reported, but Zarqawi was not a "very senior al Qaeda leader," as President Bush had described him in an October 2002 speech. And if Zarqawi's ties to al Qaeda were loose, his ties to Saddam were practically non-existent. Far from being "harbored" by Saddam, Ansar al Islam operated out of northeastern Iraq, an area under Kurdish control that was being protected from Saddam's incursions by U.S. warplanes. Indeed, some of its members fought against Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Powell asserted that Saddam dispatched an agent to Ansar to forge an alliance with the Kurdish terrorists. If true, the far more likely explanation, however, is that the dictator had placed an agent in the group not to aid them, as Powell implied to the Security Council, but to keep tabs on a potential threat to his own regime. If the evidence of a Zarqawi connection is thin, other administration claims are even thinner. Senior administration officials have, for example, continued to assert that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official while planning the World Trade Center attacks. The claim is based on an October 2001 report from Czech Republic officials that such a meeting had occurred earlier that year. The Czech report prompted Cheney to declare, in December 2001, that "it's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service." But by mid-2002, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials who combed through thousands of documents concluded that Atta was almost certainly still in the United States in April 2001, when the meeting is supposed to have taken place. As a result-and reportedly despite Cheney's insistence-Powell's staff excised the claim from his U.N. presentation. Although senior Czech officials stand by the story, many Czech intelligence analysts no longer have confidence that the meeting took place. And for good reason: The allegation has only a single source-an Arab student who, in October 2001, recalled witnessing the meeting after pictures of Atta flooded the airwaves in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But despite the considered opinion of both American and Czech intelligence that the meeting never occurred, Cheney has continued to assert that the question remains unresolved, telling NBC's Tim Russert that "the Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it." The final piece of alleged evidence the administration presented before the war came in an October 2002 letter from C.I.A. Director George Tenet to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, stating that "we have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade." But this was at best a disingenuous phrasing, the result of an administration whose senior officials placed significant pressure on its intelligence analysts to reach politically desirable conclusions. The contacts were not, as Tenet's language suggested, ongoing for the past 10 years. Most had occurred during the mid-1990s, in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. At that time, Sudan's Islamism had sent so many spies and terrorists flooding into Khartoum that the city resembled a jihadist version of the bar scene from Star Wars. There, some of the world's most infamous terrorists, such as Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyah, frequently crossed paths with foreign intelligence agents, including, Tenet claimed, Iraq's. But even if Iraqi agents had had contact with al Qaeda operatives, notes one former intelligence official, "that's what all intelligence officers do. They try to get in touch with the bad guys, the enemies, and co-opt them in some way, with money or something else"-which is quite different from forging a working relationship. After all, for decades, C.I.A. agents tried to co-opt Soviet officials. That didn't mean Langley spies grew misty when they heard the strains of "The Internationale," nor did it make Kremlin officials long for "The Star Spangled Banner." Phantom menace After the fall of Iraq, Americans had a chance to test the administration's claims: Saddam's information ministry, with all its documented secrets, is now in the hands of the Army's Third Infantry Division. Here's what we have: three reports that, together, are not nothing, but almost nothing. The first was obtained shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April, by journalists for the London Telegraph and the Toronto Star, who, combing through the ministry's wreckage, claimed to have unearthed documents that describe planning for a 1998 contact between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden. The papers recommend "bring[ing] the envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden." But, rather significantly, the documents "do not mention if any meeting took place," as the Telegraph puts it. (The administration has conspicuously declined to bring up the Telegraph and Star reports in its own defense, and American news services as well have for the most part ignored them.) The second report came from Newsweek, which received an administration leak that, similarly, Iraqi official Farouk Hijazi spearheaded an overture to al Qaeda in 1998. Finally, that same year, according to administration officials interviewed by The Weekly Standard, Saddam paid $300,000 to Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who soon afterward became bin Laden's right hand man. None of these revelations is necessarily surprising in and of itself. Hijazi, for instance, has a powerful incentive to tell his U.S. captors what they want to hear. And by 1998, Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad was hemorrhaging money and besieged by Egypt's ruthless security services. Partly as a result, Zawahiri had folded his organization into the cash-flush al Qaeda, believing that such an arrangement was "the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization alive," as one of his fellow Jihad terrorists testified. It's hard to imagine the pauper Zawahiri turning away an open wallet. But assume that all three reports are true. What do they actually reveal? That around 1998, Saddam's agents tried to build a relationship with al Qaeda. This is, it's worth noting, consistent with the prewar report that Iraqi intelligence operatives had met with al Qaeda terrorists in Khartoum. But the new information is telling in two respects. First, as far as we know, there were no significant contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after 1998. Second, these Iraqi overtures do not appear to have been reciprocated. According to officials familiar with the debriefings of senior al Qaeda terrorists, especially 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his deputy Ramzi bin al-Shibh--who, unlike Hijazi, have no hope of gaining release from captivity-bin Laden was simply uninterested in cooperating with Saddam. In fact, not only is there no evidence of a partnership between Saddam and al Qaeda; there is ample evidence that al Qaeda was actively hostile to Iraqi outreach. Rohan Gunaratna, director of terrorism research at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies and arguably the world's foremost expert on al Qaeda, has interviewed al Qaeda members personally and maintains ties with various national intelligence services. After the U.S. rout of the Taliban, he examined several thousand documents coming out of Afghanistan, including al Qaeda's video collection. After viewing 251 videos, says Gunaratna, "we could not find any evidence of al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein or the Baghdad administration." Two videos that he watched in particular "speak of [Saddam] as a real monster and not a real Muslim," he adds. "I can't think in those videos Osama ever wanted any kind of association with Saddam Hussein." Just the facts? All in all, says an ex-intelligence official who personally viewed the Iraq portfolio during the buildup to the war, the administration "never had and still doesn't have any evidence of Iraqi government cooperation with al Qaeda. Zero." The White House, however, continues to insist they do. That the administration knows its evidence is shaky and is beginning to panic is suggested by its latest assertion: In recent weeks, the White House has taken to arguing that, at the least, Hussein did have some connection to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In recent interviews and congressional testimony, Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have noted that Abdel Rahman Yasin, the only one of the 1993 conspirators to escape capture, sought refuge in Iraq. "The one bomber still at-large from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was sheltered in Iraq for 10 years, and we've learned more about him. The ties were there," Wolfowitz told "Good Morning America," declining to specify what new information he had in mind. Days later, Cheney repeated the claim for Russert: "Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in '93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact." But the fact that Saddam gave Yasin shelter after the bombing-perhaps as part of his outreach to terrorists, perhaps to convince the region he remained defiant of the United States-does not tell us whether Saddam was involved in planning the bombing itself. And interrogations of Ramzi Yousef, an accomplice to Yasin now serving a life sentence in U.S. prison, have not produced evidence that Iraq was behind the first bombing, or that al Qaeda, a nascent force in 1993, was then in league with Baghdad. Absent information that the administration hasn't made public, the case for Saddam's involvement in the first World Trade Center bombings is even weaker than the case for his involvement in the second. It's easy to understand why the Bush administration would continue to cling to its assertion of a Saddam-al Qaeda partnership when virtually all the evidence so far suggests that no such partnership ever existed. For one, the White House hasn't really been forced to back off. While the press and public expected to see weapons of mass destruction on TV--and took notice when they didn't--that hasn't been the case with Saddam's alleged al Qaeda ties. But more importantly, the administration has a powerful political incentive for maintaining that the partnership existed: Public support for the war is largely based on linking Iraq to the overall war on terrorism, and the alleged connection between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war is pivotal to keeping this connection alive. But if there was no real link between Saddam and al Qaeda before the invasion, there is now. Thousands of Jihadists have swarmed into Iraq and are now working with former Baathists to kill American troops. In a neat bit of phrasing, Bush has declared that "Iraq is now the central front" of the war on terror. The significant word in that sentence, of course, is "now."
Well well, lookie lookie, that whole weekly standard article is just a compendium of the dubious unverified (and frequently controverted) evidence that has been cited again and again, e (you know, the magical "liquid paper" documents found by the intrepid young reporter for the Sunday Torygraph in the ruins of the iraqi intel hq (that the CIA missed, guess they weren't as intrepid as the young reporter) from Salon.com
interesting that the WS appears to stand by their article, at least it hasn't been removed. I find it fascinating that more and more democrats appears to be adopting the OJ defense, as explained by James Taranto on opinionjournal:
Nobody said that such data didn't exist, just that it was (and is) another selective presentation and/or manipulation of raw unverified data, as the Department of Defense confirmed: What does Wesley Clark have to do with this memo? Oh yeah, nothing. Way to divert the focus.
raw data corroborated multiple times, according to the article. to me, the salient point in all this is that there is a lot of data, much of it new, obtained since the war, that indicates an al-queda/Saddam connection. rather than attempt to prove/disprove whether such data is believable, i find it much more responsible to akowledge it exists, and wonder where it's all going to lead. in contrast, standard democratic operating procedure seems to be to try and debunk as many claims of Saddam/al-queda connections, WMDs, or mass murders by Iraq. in short, Democrats appear to believe Saddam innocent, because to aknowledge otherwise would be to give G-dub an iota of credit, and hell wes clark would french kiss milosevic before they'd let that happen.
The point of my article is that that memo is not a lot of new data, just the same dubious rumors like those pathetic "liquid paper" documents , passed off over and and over again, slickly repackaged with a shiny new wrapper. There is also plenty of new data, gathered since the war from ex iraqi (and al qaeda officials) controverting the evidence in your article. But there was no reason to leak that along with this as it wouldn't have helped the cause Now, you (and the hack who wrote the journal are intentionally conflating Saddam's "innocence" as a whole with the lack of evidence of Iraq-Al Qaeda, and particularly Iraq 9-11 connection evidence. Questioning the administration = support for mass murder. Those are two entirely different things and it is very intellecutally dishonest for you and that hack to attempt to confuse them; I don't feel the need to address it any further as you know better. As far as being skeptical being standard democratic procedure, absolutely. Any democracy should be skeptical when its leaders so pathologically distort, mischaracterize, exaggerate, and bend the truth about matters of such great human cost to suit their own ends. Love it or leave it.
Avoiding A Critical Inquiry By John D. Rockefeller IV Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A25 No decision can be more sobering and important for our president and the country than the decision to send America's sons and daughters to war. Since Sept. 11, 2001, that decision has become even more difficult. Now the United States may have no choice but to be ready to strike preemptively if a threat from terrorists or rogue nations rises to a clear and present danger. But initiating war by preemptive attack unquestionably requires that an enemy have not only the desire but also the capability to carry out an attack against our citizens. In the case of Iraq the president unequivocally told the country that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction of such force and readiness that our nation was at risk. The president's case was based in part on U.S. and foreign intelligence and in part on the judgments of his administration. I and many others supported the Iraq war resolution largely because of those presentations. And while today there is no question that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and dangerous dictator, we must face the fact that both the intelligence agencies and the administration increasingly appear to have been wrong in their assessment of the threat Hussein posed to the United States. Now we must find out why. Today, and in the future, the resolve of the American people is fundamental to our success in the war on terrorism. If we are less than fully honest about how and why we went to war in Iraq, the risk is great that people will not support preemptive action when a more clear and present danger emerges in the future. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created in 1976 in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate expressly as a check on potential abuse of intelligence by the executive branch. When no weapons of mass destruction were found after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the committee correctly began an inquiry into the accuracy and quality of prewar intelligence. But the committee's Republican chairman has refused to look at the whole picture, excluding from the inquiry the subject of how intelligence was used, or potentially misused, and whether policymakers in any way shaped the intelligence they received. In what is beginning to look like a coordinated effort to shield the administration from scrutiny, Republicans claim that reviewing the ways intelligence was used is not part of the committee's responsibilities. In this they plainly misread the committee's history and organizing resolution, which explicitly calls for oversight of "the collection, analysis, production, dissemination, or use of information which relates to a foreign country . . . and which relates to the defense, foreign policy, national security or related policies of the United States." The chairman recently went so far as to say that "there is no doubt how the intelligence was used" prior to the war, and so there is "nothing to review" [Pat Roberts, op-ed, Nov. 13]. In fact, there is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is driving the intelligence rather than the other way around. This has added to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying facts. Many of our unanswered concerns remain classified, but even those that have been widely reported clearly merit the committee's oversight. Consider, for example: • The highly unusual role of Defense Department officials in preparing and collecting information outside the normal intelligence channels. • The unexplained and possibly unsupported shift in the 2000 and 2002 intelligence assessments regarding Iraq's nuclear programs. • The presentation of fraudulent information regarding Iraq's nuclear program in the president's State of the Union address -- and assertions by intelligence analysts that their judgments were discounted when they did not support the administration's pro-war policies. Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into these matters, my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate intelligence committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the investigation. The Senate intelligence committee must, in a fair and objective manner, pursue the inquiry into prewar intelligence to the end -- not to score political points on either side but because it's our job to identify mistakes or abuses. Failure to get to the truth about why we went to war jeopardizes the trust and resolve of the American people. The writer is a Democratic senator from West Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
so he admits that the decision to politicise the work of the committee was taken at his direction. didn't zell miller say "head's should roll" over this abuse of power, and that it was "borderline treasonous?"
The Weekly Standard responds to the DOD statement: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/396hflxy.asp
and now slate weighs in: http://slate.msn.com/id/2091381/ -- press box Case Open Why is the press avoiding the Weekly Standard's intelligence scoop? By Jack Shafer Posted Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2003, at 4:00 PM PT Everybody knows how the press loves to herd itself into a snarling pack to chase the story of the day. But less noticed is the press's propensity to half-close its lids, lick its paws, and contemplate its hairballs when confronted with events or revelations that contradict its prejudices. The press experienced such a tabby moment this week following the publication of Stephen F. Hayes' cover story in the most recent Weekly Standard about alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The Hayes piece, which went up on the Web Friday, quotes extensively from a classified Oct. 27, 2003, 16-page memo written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee, which is investigating the administration's prewar intelligence claims, asked Feith to annotate his July 10 testimony, and his now-leaked memo indexes in 50 numbered points what the various alphabet intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA) had collected about a Saddam-Osama connection. A classified memo by a top Pentagon official written at Senate committee request and containing information about scores of intelligence reports might spell news to you or me—whether you believe Saddam and Osama were collaborating or not. But except for exposure at other Murdoch media outlets (Fox News Channel, the Australian, the New York Post) and the conservative Washington Times, the story got no positive bounce. Time and Newsweek could have easily commented on some aspect of the story, which the Drudge Report promoted with a link on Saturday. But except for a dismissive one-paragraph mention in the Sunday Washington Post by Walter Pincus and a dismissive follow-up by Pincus in today's (Tuesday's) Post pegged to the news that the Justice Department will investigate the leak, the mainstream press has largely ignored Hayes' piece. What's keeping the pack from tearing Hayes' story to shreds, from building on it or at least exploiting the secret document from which Hayes quotes? One possible explanation is that the mainstream press is too invested in its consensus finding that Saddam and Osama never teamed up and its almost theological view that Saddam and Osama couldn't possibly have ever hooked up because of secular/sacred differences. Holders of such rigid views tend to reject any new information that may disturb their cognitive equilibrium. Another explanation is that the national security press corps gave it a bye because they found nothing sufficiently new in the memo—and nothing that hadn't been trotted out previously in other guises by the Bush administration. In other words, old news ain't today's news. Another possible explanation is that the press has come to discount any information from the administration camp as "rumint," a rumor-intelligence cocktail that should be avoided. (One willing victim of prewar rumint, the New York Times' Judith Miller, piped the allegations of Iraqi defectors into her paper for months and months before the war and suffered a nasty blow to her reputation as a conscientious reporter when her defectors turned out to be spewing crap.) The Department of Defense evinced more critical interest in the leaked memo than most of the press with a Saturday, Nov. 15, press release, confirming the memo's authenticity but claiming—without naming Hayes or the Weekly Standard—that it had been misinterpreted: "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions." The DoD objection is a bit of a red herring. Except for the Weekly Standard's grandiose title "Case Closed" (it should have been titled "Case Open"), the Hayes piece works assiduously (until its final paragraph, at least) not to oversell the memo. Hayes' ample quotations from the memo preserve much of the qualifying language that fudges any absolute case for the Saddam-Osama connection. This doesn't prevent Pincus from letting his sources rip the memo. One anonymous "former senior intelligence officer" quoted by Pincus sniffs that the memo is not an intelligence product but "data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true." Help me! Many a reporter has hitched a ride onto Page One with the leak of intelligence much rawer than the stuff in Feith's memo. You can bet the farm that if a mainstream publication had gotten the Feith memo first, it would have used it immediately—perhaps as a hook to re-examine the ongoing war between the Pentagon and CIA about how to interpret intelligence. Likewise, you'd be wise to bet your wife's farm that had a similar memo arguing no Saddam-Osama connection been leaked to the press, it would have generated 100 times the news interest as the Hayes story. I write this not as a believer in the Saddam-Osama love child or as a non-believer. My mind remains open to argument and to data both raw and refined. Hayes' piece piques my curiosity, and it should pique yours. If it's true that Saddam and Osama's people danced together—if just for an evening or two—that undermines the liberal critique that Bush rashly folded Iraq into his "war on terror." And if it's true, isn't that a story? Or, conversely, if Feith's shards of information direct us to the conclusion that his people stacked the intel to justify a bogus war, isn't that a story, too? Where is the snooping, prying, nosy press that I've heard so much about? Finally, the memo isn't Feith's best sales pitch for the Saddam-Osama connection, nor does Hayes present it as such. As the DoD press release explains, the memo is Feith's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's request for a catalog of intelligence reports that supports his July 10 testimony, a catalog that will help the committee locate the original reports from the various intelligence agencies. Given the leaky nature of the intelligence committee—with the Democrats and Republicans aggressively venting sensitive information to the press for political advantage—I'd be disappointed if we don't see some of the meaty original reports in the coming months. For open minds, the case does remain open.
Josh Marshall answers... ____________ In an article today in Slate, Jack Shafer wonders why almost no media outlets outside the Murdoch media empire have picked up on Steve Hayes’ story in the Weekly Standard. That’s the story --- ‘Case Closed’ --- about the Feith Memo and the alleged Saddam-al Qaida connection. Among the possible explanations Shafer puts forward is the notion that the mainstream press is too invested in the idea that there were no connections at all between Saddam and al Qaida. But, to me, that explanation doesn’t even come close to passing muster. The big papers and cable networks have grabbed on to so many weak but sensationalistic Intel related stories about WMD and Iraq-al Qaida connections --- even since the revelations about the Niger-uranium story --- that I don’t find that remotely credible. A more probable answer --- which I set forth in greater depth today in my column in The Hill --- is that this information is not at all new. If you’ve been following the intel wars you know that the group that put together this dossier started working in Doug Feith’s office shortly after 9/11 and that they presented these findings --- absent a few details subsequently culled from detainee interviews --- at Langley in August 2002. The methods used by Feith’s Pentagon analysis shop were widely panned and the consensus within the intel community was that the findings didn’t pass the laugh test. It is almost certain that the dossier --- or rather the memo summarizing it --- was leaked now because Feith and his ideological soul-mates at the Pentagon are profoundly on the defensive because of the WMD debacle and poor planning for post-war Iraq. Indeed, even within his group, Feith’s stock is close to its nadir --- partly because of these sorts of mad-scientist shenanigans, but for other reasons too. The Senate intel investigation, of course, looms. And perhaps Sen. Roberts (R-Kans) won’t be able to force all the blame on the CIA. For all these reasons, they are trying to push back anywhere and everywhere they can. So that’s the main reason, I think, that people haven’t picked up the story. No liberal media conspiracy. Sorry. Rather, the people who are following the intel story know that this is raw intelligence which the people in a position to know, and with access to all the information, say is either unreliable or doesn’t amount to anything. Part of the difficulty in reporting it out, I suspect, is that the memo includes, say, allegation X. On background people at the CIA might tell a reporter that the report is unreliable. But, because it’s all classified, the reporter can’t get the actual details which are that the report that Saddam and bin Laden were brothers separated at birth actually came from Ahmed Chalabi’s aunt’s maid’s doorman who offered the scoop in exchange for getting bailed out of prison in Cairo where he’d gotten arrested for fencing gold crenellated TV sets smuggled in from Yemen. In any case, presumably a different sets of facts, but you get the idea. Also, having gotten burned so bad on the WMD mumbo-jumbo and earlier al Qaida Saddam stories, reporters are wary of these guys, especially since the hawkers of this stuff are just much better, much more effectively political than their opponents. Having said all this, let’s get it all out there. I agree with Andrew Sullivan when he says that it would be worthwhile to get out on the record which of the Feith-based claims are utterly without merit (most), which are shaky (some) and which may turn out to be true (a few). (While we're at it, let's also do some decent reporting into the administration's strenuous and comical warping of the intel process and some decent investigations into the now-well-covered-up Valerie Plame story. Note to Mike Allen: get your source on the phone again. What happened to him?) It seems clear that there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaida during the 1990s. Yet, in the shadowy world of intel and global nogoodnikism all sorts of people meet up now and then. Meetings, contacts in themselves don't necessarily amount to much. And all that we have been able to verify has been extremely limited --- nothing to merit the claims of active collaboration the Iraq hawks made. And when you consider that we now essentially own Iraq --- the regime leaders, most all the government records that survive, and so forth --- we shouldn’t need to go on hints and allegations. We should know something close to the whole story. And from what we know now, there's not much of a story. -- Josh Marshall __________ Here's the article he's referring to from The Hill... _________ The dubious link between Iraq and al Qaeda To great fanfare last week The Weekly Standard published “Case Closed,” an article that claimed to provide definitive proof of collaboration between Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. On “Fox News Sunday,” Fred Barnes, the Standard’s executive editor, was near apoplectic with praise. “There [were] repeated meetings that went on between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government. It’s clear that there was a strong connection.” “You cannot call that report ‘speculative,’” he challenged fellow panelist Juan Williams. “It is filled with details. It doesn’t speculate at all. … These are hard facts, and I’d like to see you refute any one of them.” So is Barnes, the Standard, and the article’s author Stephen F. Hayes right? Is it really Case Closed? Hardly. At best, it’s more like case restated. And the case is actually pretty weak. Allow me to explain. After Sept. 11, the neocons at the Pentagon were frustrated with the consensus assessment within the intelligence community that there were no substantial ties or cooperation between Saddam and al Qaeda. So they set up their own intelligence analysis shop under Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, that had access to all the raw intelligence streaming through the U.S. government’s various intelligence agencies — the CIA, the DIA, the works. When the whole manipulated intelligence story started to blow up this summer, Feith coyly told a gaggle of reporters at the Pentagon that his group had come up “some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda.” But the real analysts didn’t share his enthusiasm. In August 2002, on instructions from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the folks from Feith’s shop went out to Langley to brief the CIA on what they’d come up with. And the professional analysts at CIA (and subsequently those in other branches of the intelligence community) didn’t think their work passed the laugh-test. Feith’s shop’s findings turned out to a classic example of what Intel professionals call “cherry-picking” — culling through the sheaves of raw data to find the bits and pieces that confirm the desired conclusion while ignoring everything that tends to refute it and all the while turning a credulous eye to unreliable sources. “If anybody doubted that there was such a thing as intelligence with a [predetermined] purpose, this is a case study,” says retired CIA intelligence analyst Larry Johnson. “Just because someone says something and it gets ‘classified’ stamped on it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.” Now, let’s go back and ask: What’s the background of this memo on which the Standard piece is based? As the article reports, the memo, dated Oct. 27, was sent from Feith to Sens. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) The article further says it was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. In other words, the committee asked Feith to back up his outlandish claims about connections between Saddam and al Qaeda and he forwarded them a copy of his shop’s dossier — pretty much the same one the professional analysts in the intelligence community decided more than a year ago was barely worth the paper it was written on. Of course, Feith and company argue that it’s the analysts at the CIA and the DIA who don’t know what they’re talking about, that they too are just doing their own version of cherry-picking. But at this point we have a track record. Feith’s name has all but become synonymous with finding what you want to find through the looking glass of raw intelligence. He said he had hard evidence about Iraqi WMD too, and that evidence hasn’t exactly panned out, has it? Other material in the dossier either appears unsubstantiated or — like the claims regarding Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta — has already been discredited. Peter Bergen, the al Qaeda expert who interviewed bin Laden in March 1997 and presumably has a pretty good handle on the security precautions bin Laden was keeping at the time, doesn’t buy the idea that the terror chief would have shown up for a meet-and-greet in Baghdad less than a year later, as the Feith dossier alleges. “It’s just not plausible,” Bergen writes on his website, “that bin Laden would have slipped into Iraq unnoticed in January 1998. He was already a very wanted man and a widely recognized person.” I could run through all the allegations in the Feith memo, but the bottom line is that on this question, the case really is closed. Just not in the way the Standard article suggests. What we have here are some allegations that the analysts who had access to all the information either didn’t find credible or didn’t find meaningful. The leak of this dossier now is just an effort by the usual suspects at the Pentagon to push the already-discredited al Qaeda link because so much else that they’ve been involved with has gone so badly.
Again I have to point out that if the Administration had credible intel that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were linked, they would have included Iraq on their list of 60 nations with ties to Al-Qaeda that came out prior to the build up to the war in Iraq. At that time Iraq was not on the list. The claim to ties between the two only appeared later when the administration wanted to go to war with Iraq. It was then and only then that these claims were made.
And now Newsweek weighs in... __________ Case Decidedly Not Closed Newsweek Web Exclusive A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an "operational relationship" between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago--and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government's "secret evidence of cooperation" between Saddam and bin Laden. Fred Barnes, the magazine's executive editor, touted the magazine's scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on "Fox News Sunday." (Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.) "These are hard facts, and I'd like to see you refute any one of them," he told a skeptical Juan Williams of National Public Radio. In fact, the tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-Al Qaeda complicity is far from closed. The Oct. 27, 2003, memo, prepared by Deputy Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith's office, was written in response to detailed questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee about the basis for intelligence pushed by Feith and other senior Pentagon officials during the run-up to the Iraq war. With a few, inconclusive exceptions, the memo doesn't actually contain much "new" intelligence at all. Instead, it mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst Christopher Carney) whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda "connection" in order to better justify a U.S. invasion. Within the U.S. intelligence establishment, the predominant view--then as now--is that the Feith-Carney case was murky at best. Culling through intelligence files, the Feith team indeed found multiple "reports" of alleged meetings between Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives dating back to the early 1990s when Osama first set up shop in Sudan. But many of these reports were old, uncorroborated and came from sources of unknown if not dubious credibility, U.S. intelligence officials say. (Not unlike, as it has turned out, much of the "reporting" on Iraq's ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.) Moreover, other reports--some of which came foreign intelligence services and Iraqi defectors--were selectively presented by the Feith team and are, as one U.S. official told NEWSWEEK, "contradicted by other things." Consider one of the seemingly more compelling reports cited in the memo: that Farouk Hijazi, the former chief of Iraqi intelligence and then ambassador to Turkey, flew to Afghanistan in late 1998 to meet with bin Laden. As Stephen Hayes, author of The Weekly Standard piece dutifully notes, accounts of this purported Saddam overture to Osama made its way into the mainstream press at the time--including NEWSWEEK. A Feb. 6, 1999, story in the British newspaper The Guardian contended the purpose of Hijazi's visit was to offer a presumably besieged bin Laden asylum in Iraq. But, as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not want to be "exploited" by a regime that he has consistently viewed as "secular" and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict Islamic state. There is, moreover, compelling reason to believe bin Laden clung to this view as late as this year when Bush administration officials were making no secret of their plans to invade Iraq and topple Saddam. In a Feb. 11, 2003, audiotape released by Al-Jazeera, a voice believed to be bin Laden called on Arabs to rise up and strike at the U.S. invaders--a declaration that contributed to a Bush administration decision to ratchet up the country's threat level at the time. But, less well publicized, bin Laden emphasized in the same tape his interest was in defending the Iraqi people, not an "infidel" like Saddam. "The socialists and their rulers [had] lost their legitimacy a long time ago and the socialists are infidels regardless of where they are, whether in Baghdad or in Aden," the bin Laden tape proclaimed. (The CIA later concluded the voice on the tape was "almost certainly" Osama.) Overlooked in The Weekly Standard hype, the Pentagon memo itself concedes that much of the more recent reporting about Iraqi-Al Qaeda ties is "conflicting." It quotes one Iraq intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, as saying that "the last contact" between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda was in July 1999 and that it was actually Saddam, not bin Laden, who cut off the contacts. While Hayes's story insists "the bulk of the reporting ... contradicts this claim," the actual examples cited in the memo to buttress this point are less than persuasive. The memo invokes the by-now hoary claim--first reported by Czech intelligence-that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001. But it concedes that the FBI and CIA "cannot confirm" that such a meeting actually took place. In fact, the Iraqi agent in question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, has been in U.S. custody for months and, according to U.S. intelligence sources, denies ever meeting Atta--a denial that officials tend to believe given that they have not unearthed a scintilla of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the alleged rendezvous. The memo also cites the claims of one senior Al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, who reported to his interrogators that he was "told by an Al Qaeda associate" (who is unidentified) that two Al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq in December 2000 for training in the use of chemical and biological weapons. (Both national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later relied on al-Libi's claims to make the same allegation.) But U.S. intelligence officials note that al-Libi's claims are hearsay (he professed no firsthand knowledge) and that his credibility, like that of many captured Al Qaeda detainees, is sometimes spotty. In any event, the Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level Al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees--including such notables as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abu Zubaydah, and Hijazi himself. All of them have reportedly dismissed the idea that Al Qaeda and Saddam had any working relationship. Can there be any doubt that if any of these captives had confirmed such a relationship that Bush administration officials would have found a way to get the word out? None of this means, of course, that all accounts of Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections should be completely dismissed. The memo, for example, makes brief reference to the intriguing case of Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national who, purportedly through the aid of an Iraq embassy employee, landed a job at the Kuala Lumpur airport and then served as greeter and driver for two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The two men flew to the city for a crucial Al Qaeda planning session in January 2000. FBI documents obtained by NEWSWEEK more than a year ago show that U.S. law enforcement had a great deal of interest in interrogating Shakir in the months following September 11. After being picked up, first by Qatari intelligence and later by Jordanians, he was twice released--without the FBI ever getting a crack at him. He then flew off to Iraq, where he has never been seen since. U.S. military and intelligence officials are still looking for him to this day, sources say, and for good reason. But all this is a far cry from solid evidence of ongoing cooperation between Saddam and Osama. The outing of the memo (a still classified document, as it happens) is likely now to become the subject of yet another Justice Department leak investigation. The CIA is expected to begin preparing a "crimes report" identifying the potential damage to national security (most likely pretty minimal). But there can be little doubt about the motive of the leaker: to shore up the Bush administration's prewar claims and defuse the intelligence committee investigation into allegations of the misuse of intelligence. Unfortunately, for the Pentagon and the Standard, the claims detailed in the memo will do little, if anything, to advance the case.
Flypaper indeed. Yet another neo-con created rationalization they hoped would justify the war debunked. How can Republicans continue to support this mendacious administration? _______________ Few Signs of Infiltration by Foreign Fighters in Iraq By JOEL BRINKLEY, NYTimes BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 18 — The commanding general of the United States Army division that patrols much of Iraq's western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that his men had encountered only a handful of foreign fighters trying to sneak into the country to attack American and allied forces. "I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces," said the officer, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. His view was echoed by Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which controls northern Iraq and parts of its borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran. During a briefing on Monday for a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, he said that since May, his men had captured perhaps 20 foreign fighters trying to slip into the country from those three countries. During a period in which border patrols have been intensified and new technology is being used, that number suggests only modest foreign incursions into Iraq, in contrast to estimates by the Bush administration. In Washington late last month, officials estimated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq at 1,000 to 3,000, and the White House has been suggesting that foreign fighters are continuing to enter the country and are behind many of the attacks, linking the war in Iraq to the global campaign against terror. In a news conference on Oct. 28, President Bush said: "We are mindful of the fact that some might want to come into Iraq to attack and to create conditions of fear and chaos. The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits." During a news briefing on Tuesday evening, General Swannack, who took over the region two months ago, said his men had captured 13 foreign guerrillas and killed 7 others. Ten days ago, Col. David A. Teeples, who is part of General Swannack's command, said only a small number of the foreigners were among the 500 to 600 people his forces had captured in attacks on coalition forces. American efforts to prevent attacks continued Tuesday, when American fighter jets bombed suspected guerrilla positions near Tikrit, in central Iraq. Commanders called in AC-130 gunships, A-10 attack planes and Apache helicopter gunships, as well as Air Force F-16 and F-15E fighter-bombers with 500-pound bombs, the military said, in the largest bombardment in the area since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1. In Baghdad on Tuesday night, the military said it had fired heavy artillery at a suspected insurgent position. In Washington, a military official disclosed that the Army's Fourth Infantry Division had destroyed a house that belonged to Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, one of Saddam Hussein's closest aides, who American officials believe is playing a significant role in the insurgency. It is not yet known whether General Ibrahim was inside when a satellite-guided missile destroyed his home, about 10 miles southwest of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's ancestral home, the official said. But the strike illustrated what military officials said was a new twist to their counterinsurgency campaign: attack bomb-making factories, weapons warehouses, guerrilla meeting places and insurgents' homes with no warning, using high-altitude bombing or long-range missile strikes. Officials indicated that it was clear the general's house was being used as a meeting place. "This approach gives us more tactical surprise," a military official said. "They're still using houses and neighborhoods, but we've been removing sanctuaries and keeping them off balance." Without speaking of those operations specifically, General Swannack said the stepped-up offensive "demonstrates our resolve, and we are not going to fight this one with one hand tied behind our backs." Echoing a historical quote from the British military, the general said the Army was going to "use a sledgehammer to smash a walnut." Military officials in Iraq also reported the arrest of eight Iraqis during searches in Mosul. Soldiers seized a five-gallon container of gunpowder, three grenades, five fuses, two cases of rifle ammunition and two rifles, the United States Army said. The military has made a rather public effort in recent days to tamp down speculation that they are fighting a guerrilla war against foreign terrorists. Late last week, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, said loyalists to Saddam Hussein — not foreign terrorists — posed the greatest danger to American troops and to stability in Iraq. General Swannack said Iraq's borders had been "porous" in the months before he took command of the region. The number of soldiers patrolling the borders has almost tripled, to 20,000, he said. General Petraeus, in the north, said his men had deployed new technology along the border that can locate anyone or anything trying to cross it. With that, he said, "if you don't see anything moving, then you know you have got control." A few days ago, General Swannack said, his men came across their largest group of foreigners trying to sneak across from Syria. "We identified six of them at the border," he said. "One pulled a knife, and he was killed. We secured the other five."
gratuitous bush-slam duly noted, but what does this have to do with this thread? are you saying the administration tried to justify the war on the grounds it would draw in foreign fighters? that's just silly...
But Treeman (through his army contacts,not the biased media) told us that it was actually a golden opportunity and that we were killing more Al Qaeda now in Iraq than ever before, that we had taken it too them on their own turf and were decimating them... ...he was wrong?
This was one of the talking points floating around a few weeks ago. Here's the original official version from Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez: "This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity. But this is exactly where we want to fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." Bush has made several statements about fighiting terrorism in Iraq and not here at home. Many Administrations officials made statements that echoed the notion and conservative pundits followed. In essence, the message was: "we're luring terrorists from across the globe to Iraq so we can fight them and take them out on our terms and so they can't come to America and do terrorist stuff." So yes, they were trying to justify (after the fact) based on this idea that terrorists would be coming to Iraq so they could be killed by American soldiers. At the same time, we were being told the press was not reporting the good stories and things were on the uptick in Iraq. So, we had good things happening while all these ne'er-do-wells were coming into the country. And yes it is silly. It's in this thread because it's another example of intelligence being manipulated to meet the aims of the administration and then subsequently being proved wrong. Also, I didn't want to start another thread.
