West Coast Connection Forum
Lifestyle => Train of Thought => Topic started by: Don Rizzle on September 09, 2006, 04:01:12 AM
-
US Senate Intelligence report finds no Saddam-Al Qaeda link
(AP)
9 September 2006
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein rejected overtures from Al Qaeda and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime, a reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a Senate panel has found.
The administration’s version was based in part on intelligence that White House officials knew was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified documents released by the panel.
The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward” Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab Al Zarqawi or his associates.
As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should “imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein” with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and “who had relations with Zarqawi.”
Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration’s case for war despite his own agents’ doubts about the intelligence it was based on.
“Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to ’say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,”’ Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.
Tenet also told the committee that complying had been “the wrong thing to do,” according to Levin.
“Well, it was much more than that,” Levin said. “It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director’s duty not to act as a shill for any administration or its policy.”
Leaders of both parties accused each other of seeking political gain on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Republicans said the document contained little new information about prewar intelligence or postwar findings on Iraq’s weapons and connection to terrorist groups.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Republican, accused Democrats of trying to “use the committee ... insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
“That is simply not true,” Roberts added, “and I believe the American people are smart enough to recognize election-year politicking when they see it.” Congressional elections are in November.
The report speaks for itself, Democrats said.
The administration “exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe — contrary to the intelligence assessments at the time — that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Still, Democrats were reluctant to say how the administration officials involved should be called to account.
Asked whether the wrongdoing amounted to criminal conduct, Levin and Rockefeller declined to answer. Rockefeller said later he did not believe Bush should be impeached over the matter.
According to the report, postwar findings indicate that Saddam “was distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime.” It quotes an FBI report from June 2004 in which former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said in an interview that “Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden.”
Saddam himself is quoted in an FBI summary as acknowledging that the Iraqi government had met with bin Laden but denying that he had colluded with the Al Qaeda leader. Claiming that Iraq opposed only US policies, Saddam said that “if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the US, he would have allied with North Korea or China,” the report quotes the FBI document.
The Democrats said that on Oct. 7, 2002, the day Bush gave a speech speaking of that link, the CIA had sent a declassified letter to the committee saying it would be an “extreme step” for Saddam to assist Islamist terrorists in attacking the United States.
Levin and Rockefeller said Tenet in July acknowledged to the committee that subsequently issuing a statement that there was no inconsistency between the president’s speech and the CIA viewpoint had been a mistake.
They also charged Bush with continuing to cite faulty intelligence in his argument for war as recently as last month.
The report said that Al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader killed by a US airstrike last June, was in Baghdad from May 2002 until late November 2002. But “postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture Al Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.”
In June 2004, Bush also defended Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion that Saddam had “long-established ties” with Al Qaeda. “Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda,” the president said.
The report concludes that postwar findings do not support a 2002 intelligence community report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, possessed biological weapons or ever developed mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.
A second part of the report finds that false information from the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam group led by then-exile Ahmed Chalabi, was used to support key intelligence community assessments on Iraq.
-
43% of Americans Still Believe Saddam Hussein Was Personally Involved in 9/11 (69 comments )
READ MORE: 9/11, Iraq, 2006, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush
Wow. What a stunning number. According to a poll conducted for CNN, 43% of Americans to this day believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.
I cannot repeat or emphasize that enough. 43% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11!
According to the same poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation on behalf of CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/iraq.poll/index.html), 58% of Americans said they are opposed to the Iraq War.
Imagine what that number would be if 100% of Americans knew Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- as the President himself admitted recently. Would there be anyone left in the country - outside of Republican Congressmen and Joe Lieberman - who would still be in favor the war?
This is a colossal failure on the part of the press. It is the job of the press to get information to the public. They have failed miserably. Five long years after September 11th, 43% of the country still believes Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11.
Obviously, the mainstream media did a woeful job of communicating the truth to these people. This should be an everlasting mark of shame on the press. And it is not in the past - it is in the present. These people still believe Saddam did it. When is the press ever going to let them in on the truth?
Writing about it in Page A18 or mentioning it in the thirteenth paragraph of the lead story or doing a single two minute television story is not enough. There have been no cover stories, no major exposes, no docudramas on ABC about how this administration misled a significant portion of this country into believing Saddam Hussein ordered 9/11-- and that it is 100% not true.
It is also a gargantuan failure on the part of the Democratic Party. For God's sake, you're supposed to be the opposition party. What kind of opposition have you put up if you haven't even dispelled the biggest lie about the Iraq War -- that Iraq was responsible for 9/11? Imagine what could happen in the 2006 election, if the whole country knew that Saddam was never involved in 9/11.
The Democrats should have kept the media's feet to the fire. They should have demanded more stories that definitively laid out the facts. And the media should have cared enough to do this without having to get prompted. Iraq was not at all involved with 9/11-- that was not an interesting enough fact to merit a cover story as we attacked Iraq?
Recently Zogby conducted a poll of US troops fighting in Iraq. And in this group, 85% believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11 (http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075). When in the world are we going to tell these poor kids the truth? Don't they deserve to know that they are fighting and dying for a lie?
Now that the myth that "everyone already knows" is punctured, what is the press going to do about it? My guess is absolutely zero. They will pretend that since they know and the people they hang out with know that everyone should know even if they never do a single cover story or TV broadcast on the issue. There is no excuse for this failure.
If you want to see me get very, very angry about this as we covered this story on-air, check out this short video clip. As we do the show, I get genuinely furious -- and you can tell here. But I really believe that if you aren't angry about how the press has let the country down in this case, you clearly aren't paying attention.
I keep waiting for them to wake up from their slumber. I keep waiting for them to tell the American people they have been lied to. I keep waiting for the country to go back to normal, where the press challenged the government and brought us the facts. We are obviously not at that point today. Because today 43% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.
-
43% of Americans Still Believe Saddam Hussein Was Personally Involved in 9/11
LMAO!
-
Must be people from the south. There are so many idiots here.
-
These are all games and are only there to quiet the bush critics. Bush will not be impeached. And there's nothing anyone can do about it.
-
you cant impeach the new world order dudes, i love how we get so fuckin amped like getting rid of bush is gonna make life so much sunnier
-
you cant impeach the new world order dudes, i love how we get so fuckin amped like getting rid of bush is gonna make life so much sunnier
it should get sunny lol...but yah..ur right.