The Liberals’ Creed
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| Thu, 05-27-2004 - 9:47pm |
We believe in the United Nations, and Kofi Annan, the maker of international legitimacy.
We believe that the UN inspections worked.
We believe that SCUD missiles fired at U.S. troops minutes after the war began don’t change anything;
We believe that 3 liters of sarin gas used against U.S. troops doesn’t change anything;
We believe that finding evidence of mustard gas doesn’t change anything.
We believe that the war in Iraq conducted by a Republican president was unjustified because it lacked UN approval;
We believe that the "military action" in Kosovo conducted by a Democratic president was justified without UN approval.
We believe that the Iraq war was unilateral.
We believe that the participation of Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Ukraine does not change the fact that the war was unilateral;
We believe that multilateralism can only be achieved with the participation of France and Germany;
We believe in multilateralism.
We believe that this war was motivated by greed and oil;
We believe that when France, Germany, and Russia opposed the war, they were motivated by principle, and not by sweetheart oil deals or Oil-For-Food kickbacks;
We believe that US oil prices are too high, and that the administration failed in its responsibility to do something about it.
We believe that the U.S. may only legitimately use force for humanitarian ends in one place if it does so in all places where aid might be needed;
We believe that the U.S. may not quell threats in places where the cost is relatively low unless it is willing to use force in places like North Korea, where the cost in lives would likely be very high;
We believe that a humanitarian action is only truly humanitarian if there are no strategic interests to muddle the altruism.
We believe that President Bush lied.
We believe that Prime Minister Blair lied.
We believe that when Hillary Clinton and Dick Gephardt voted for the war based on the same intelligence relied upon by Bush and Blair, they made reasonable decisions based on the intelligence available at the time.
We believe that the administration did not make the case for war;
We believe that the administration offered many different reasons but could not offer a coherent message explaining the need to go to war;
We believe that the administration made perfectly clear that the only reason we were going to war was because of the threat from WMDs.
We believe that there were no WMDs.
We believe that finding sarin gas is 14th page news;
We believe that if the sarin gas is old, then it really isn’t a WMD we were looking for;
We believe that it wasn’t really sarin gas;
We believe that sarin gas isn’t necessarily a WMD.
We believe that there was no terrorist connection to, or threat from, Iraq.
We believe that members of Abu Nidal in Iraq would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that Saddam’s terrorist training camp at Salman Pak—complete with a Boeing 707 plane used for hijacking drills—did not exist or posed no real threat;
We believe that it was merely a coincidence that the pharmaceutical factory bombed by President Clinton in Sudan was using al Qaeda funds and a uniquely Iraqi formula to produce VX gas;
We believe that we are responsible for bringing terror on ourselves.
We believe that the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is widespread and is probably the tip of the iceberg;
We believe that Abu Ghraib proves that the America’s occupation is no different than Saddam’s tyranny;
We believe that any attempt to suggest that there is a moral difference between a regime which systematically killed 300,000 people and tortured countless others and a regime which punished the acts of Abu Ghraib is illegitimate.
We believe that soldiers deliberately target women and children;
We believe that the soldiers abuse and kill Iraqis because they are racists;
We support our troops.
We believe that no one should question our statement that we "support our troops;"
We believe that the best thing that could happen for this country would be for Bush to lose in November;
We believe that the best way for Bush to lose in November is for the Iraq effort to go poorly, even if that means that more Iraqis and troops will die;
We believe that most of the troops are minorities and the poor;
We believe that when the word "heroes" is used to describe our troops, it should always be enclosed in scare quotes.
We believe in quagmire.
We believe that when fringe Iraqi groups attack hard targets and are soundly defeated with relatively low Coalition casualties, that this is inescapable evidence of crisis;
We believe that Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam.
We believe that Vietnam is the lens through which all wars should be viewed.
We believe that soldiers in Vietnam were baby killers;
We believe that John Kerry is a hero for his service in Vietnam.
We believe that because John Kerry is a hero, he necessarily has the national security expertise necessary to be commander-in-chief.
We believe that any attempt to question his national security expertise based on his voting record, including his decision to vote against a supplemental bill used to buy the soldiers body armor, is an unfair attack on the patriotism of a hero, who by virtue of this honorific has the expertise to be commander-in-chief.
We believe in the trinity: NPR, CNN, and the New York Times. We believe in Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, John Kerry, and all the DNC, and we look for President Clinton yet to come. Amen.
by: Robert Alt

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I wasn't aware that it was. I saw it as you presenting your POV and supplying sources and me sharing my POV and supplying sources as well.
We both agree that Cuba should be free of Castro. It's the hows and such that we don't agree on.
Edited 6/5/2004 5:56 pm ET ET by iminnie833
God forbid that some other method than that used on your own streets might actually be effective.
Now that irks me. Canada has a population much smaller than ours, and at times we tend to overwhelm them. But they are a very friendly people who know how to get along with others in this world. Anyplace else in this world, a separatist movement would be totally violent. Not so Canada.
We could learn a lot from them, and it starts by respecting their country and the people. The attitude you displayed gives all Americans a bad name. I'm glad she is posting on this board, her opinions are valued and should be heard.
Here's some links for you.--
"There is zero evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. No paper trail. No bank accounts. No training camps. No telephone logs. Yes, the al-Qaida network is still alive and still planning acts of terror — from inside Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. But it apparently never was inside Iraq."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32837
"Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Hussein's links with Al Qaeda, and key parts of the Bush administration's case have either proven false or seem increasingly doubtful.
Senior U.S. officials now say that there never was any evidence that Hussein's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terror network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings.
Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded those meetings produced an operational relationship between the two, U.S. officials said. And that verdict was reached before the war began. It was contained in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence which was updated in January 2003, on the eve of the war.
"We could find no provable connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda," a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.
The administration's allegations that Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction have been the subject of much greater public and political controversy.
They were based on the Iraqi leader's long history of duplicity regarding weapons of mass destruction, which appeared to be confirmed by spy satellite photographs, defectors and electronic eavesdropping.
But evidence of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda was always sketchy, based largely on testimony of Iraqi defectors and prisoners, supplemented with reports from foreign agents and eavesdropping.
Much of the evidence that's now available indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda had no close ties, despite repeated contacts between the two; that the terrorists whom administration officials claimed were links between the two had no direct links to either Hussein or bin Laden; and that a key meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the leaders of the 9/11 terrorist attacks probably never happened.
A review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties to terrorism and what's now known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a preemptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to help make their case. On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture, according to the review made by the Free Press Washington bureau.
The Bush administration has defended its prewar descriptions of Hussein and is calling Iraq "the central front in the war on terrorism," as the president told U.S. troops two weeks ago.
But before the war and since, Bush and his aides made rhetorical links that now appear to have been leaps:
Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there was "overwhelming evidence" of a relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda. Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Cheney didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn Yasin over to the FBI in 1998, in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in the 1993 attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.
Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him safe haven in Iraq.
Bin Laden said he'd consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the Al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Hussein's offer because "if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours."
The administration tied Hussein to a terrorism network run by Palestinian Abu Musab al Zarqawi. That network may be behind the latest violence in Iraq that killed at least 143 people on Tuesday.
But U.S. officials say the evidence that Zarqawi had close operational ties to Al Qaeda also appears increasingly doubtful.
Asked for Cheney's views on Iraq and terrorism, vice presidential spokesman Kevin Kellems referred reporters to the vice president's TV interviews Tuesday.
Cheney, in an interview with CNN, said Zarqawi ran an "Al Qaeda-affiliated" group. He cited an intercepted letter Zarqawi wrote to Al Qaeda leaders. But U.S. officials say that the letter contained a plea for help that Al Qaeda rebuffed. The structure of the letter, experts said, suggested Zarqawi considered himself an independent operator and not a part of bin Laden's organization.
Iraqi defectors alleged that Hussein's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists. The allegation made it into a September 2002 report the White House issued.
The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.
The allegation that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer is now contradicted by FBI evidence that Atta was taking flight training in Florida at the time. The Iraqi, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, is now in U.S. custody and told interrogators that he never met Atta.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee last month there is no evidence to support the allegation.
Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell made much of occasional contacts between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda, dating back to the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in the Sudan. But intelligence indicates that nothing ever came of the contacts.
A postwar poll last July by PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 7 in 10 Americans thought the Bush administration had implied that Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks."
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/intel3_20040303.htm
"A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI documents.
The new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, was trumpeted by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story that broke hours before the dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein. TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM, ran the headline on the story written by Con Coughlin, a Telegraph correspondent and the author of the book "Saddam: The Secret Life."
Coughlin's account was picked up by newspapers around the world and was cited the next day by New York Times columnist William Safire. But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert tell NEWSWEEK that the document is most likely a forgery—part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime.
"It's a lucrative business," says Hassan Mneimneh, codirector of an Iraqi exile research group reviewing millions of captured Iraqi government documents. "There's an active document trade taking place … You have fraudulent documents that are being fabricated and sold" for hundreds of dollars a piece.
Mneimneh said he hadn't seen the Telegraph document that purports to place Atta in Baghdad. But he, along with senior U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials, said the claims of an Atta trip to Iraq in the months before the September 11 attacks were highly implausible—and contradicted by a wealth of information that has been collected about Atta's movements during the period he was plotting the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Telegraph story was apparently written with a political purpose: to bolster Bush administration claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime. The paper described a "handwritten memo" that was supposedly sent to Saddam Hussein by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, chief of Iraqi intelligence at the time. It describes a three-day "work program" that Atta had undertaken in Baghdad under the tutelage of notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who lived in the Iraqi capital until his death under suspicious circumstances in August 2002.
"Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at Al-Dora under our direct supervision," the document states. "We arranged a work program for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him ... He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."
The document, which according to Coughlin was supplied by Iraq's interim government, doesn't say exactly when Atta was supposed to have actually flown to Baghdad. But the memo is dated July 1, 2001, and Coughlin himself places the trip as the summer of 2001.
The problem with this, say U.S. law enforcement officials, is that the FBI has compiled a highly detailed time line for Atta's movements throughout the spring and summer of 2001 based on a mountain of documentary evidence, including airline records, ATM withdrawals and hotel receipts. Those records show Atta crisscrossing the United States during this period—making only one overseas trip, an 11-day visit to Spain that didn't begin until six days after the date of the Iraqi memo.
One FBI document, labeled "Law Enforcement Sensitive," states that during the summer of 2001, Atta "conducted extensive travel" that included visits in Florida, Boston, New York, New Jersey and Las Vegas. Indeed, this and other FBI documents show that during the last few days in June—when the presumed Iraq trip would appear to have occurred—almost all of Atta's movements are accounted for: On June 27, 2001, Atta flew from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to Boston. On the morning of June 28, he traveled from Boston to San Francisco (flying first class) where he switched planes and landed in Las Vegas that afternoon at 2:41 p.m. That afternoon, he rented a Chevrolet Malibu from an Alamo rental-car office, set up an account at an Internet café called the Cyber Zone and checked into the EconoLodge motel on Las Vegas Boulevard, a cheap motel in a neighborhood of seedy strip joints that is located barely two blocks from the local FBI office.
The FBI records show Atta logged onto his Cyber Zone Internet account five times over the next two days and then checked out of the EconoLodge at 3:30 a.m. on the morning of July 1. He then returned his rental car and boarded a flight to Denver at 5:59 a.m., landing in Boston later that day. A week later, on July 7, Atta boarded a flight from Boston to Zurich—the first leg on his trip to Spain. He returned to the United States on July 19, 2001.
Much about Atta's movements is still unknown—and most likely will remain so. FBI officials believe, for example, that Atta flew to Las Vegas as part of a series of trips he took that summer to test security at U.S. airports in preparation for the September 11 attacks. But it is just a theory. The visit to Spain is believed to have been for a meeting with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the planners of the September 11 attacks, who also was in Spain during the same time.
While all of Atta's movements cannot be accounted for, enough is known to make it "highly unlikely" that the September 11 ringleader could have flown off to Baghdad for a three-day work program with Iraqi intelligence, a FBI official told NEWSWEEK. For similar reasons, the bureau has long since discounted claims by Czech intelligence—and widely promoted by some Iraq hawks in the Bush administration—that Atta had flown to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent around April 8, 2001.
FBI records show Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi checking out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach, Va., and writing a check for cash for $8,000 for a SunTrust account in that city on April 4, 2001. For the rest of that week, Atta's cell phone was used to make repeated calls to Florida. On April 11, Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Fla. While acknowledging that a few days are unaccounted for, the FBI has found no evidence that Atta departed the country overseas during this period, an official said.
Mneimneh, the Iraqi document expert, says that there are other reasons to discount the handwritten memo touted by the Telegraph. The document includes another sensational second item: how Iraqi intelligence, helped by a "small team from the Al Qaeda organization," arranged for a shipment from Niger to reach Iraq by way of Libya and Syria. Although the shipment is unspecified, the reference to Niger was immediately suggestive of Bush administration assertions earlier this year that Iraq sought to import yellowcake uranium from that African nation—claims that also have been widely discredited as being based on other forged documents that apparently came from the Niger Embassy in Rome.
Mneimneh says the wording of the document makes him highly suspicious: Iraqi intelligence officials were notoriously conservative and rarely—if ever—put incriminating information in writing. The reference to the Iraqi intelligence working with a "small team from the Al Qaeda organization" is "too explicit," he says.
Ironically, even the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, which has been vocal in claiming ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, was dismissive of the new Telegraph story. "The memo is clearly nonsense," an INC spokesman told NEWSWEEK.
Contacted by Newsweek, The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin acknowledged that he could not prove the authenticity of the document. He said that while he got the memo about Mohammed Atta and Baghdad from a "senior" member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was "genuine," he and his newspaper had "no way of verifying it. It's our job as journalists to air these things and see what happens," he said."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3741646/
"In January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney did a round of media interviews with NPR and others in which he reinforced his claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. To back these claims up, he cited documents already discredited as “inaccurate” by the Bush Administration.
SADDAM-AL QAEDA CONNECTION
CHENEY CLAIM: "There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there." - Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04
FACT: According to documents, "Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. The document provides another piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda terrorists."
FACT: "CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam."
FACT: "Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Powell said."
FACT: “Three former Bush Administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying Al Qaeda was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.”
FACT: Declassified documents “undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.” .
FACT: “The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.”
FACT: "U.S. allies have found no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.'We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' said Europe's top investigator. 'If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.’"
YASIM ALLEGATION
CHENEY CLAIM: “Abdul Rahman Yasim arrived back in Iraq and was put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary. So Saddam Hussein had an established track record of providing safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists.” – Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04
FACT: “Even if the new information holds up — and intelligence and law enforcement officials disagree on its conclusiveness — the links tying Yasin, Saddam and al-Qaeda are tentative.”
SUPPORTING EVIDENCE
CHENEY CLAIM: "You ought to go look at an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That's your best source of information” to justify the Saddam-Al Qaeda claim. – Vice President Cheney, 1/9/04
FACT: “Reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.” "
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0123-02.htm
"Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there was ''overwhelming evidence'' of a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda. Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Cheney didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn over Yasin to the FBI in 1998, in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in that attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.
Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him safe haven in Iraq.
They left out the rest of the story, however. Bin Laden said he would consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because ``if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.''
• The administration linked Hussein to a terrorism network run by Palestinian Abu Musab al Zarqawi. That network may be behind the latest violence in Iraq, which killed at least 143 people Tuesday.
But U.S. officials say the evidence that Zarqawi had close operational ties to al Qaeda appears increasingly doubtful.
Asked for Cheney's views on Iraq and terrorism, vice presidential spokesman Kevin Kellems referred Knight Ridder to the vice president's television interviews Tuesday.
Cheney, in an interview with CNN, said Zarqawi ran an ''al Qaeda-affiliated'' group. He cited an intercepted letter that Zarqawi is believed to have written to al Qaeda leaders, and a White House official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has described Zarqawi as an al Qaeda ``associate.''
But U.S. officials say the Zarqawi letter contained a plea for help that al Qaeda rebuffed.
• Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.
• Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell made much of occasional contacts between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda, dating to the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in the Sudan. But intelligence indicates that nothing ever came of the contacts."
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8091287.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
"There's only one problem with the ties the White House alleges between Saddam and al-Qaeda. According to most experts on Iraq , those ties barely exist, if they exist at all.
"While there are contacts, have been contacts, there is no co-operation. There is no substantial, noteworthy relationship," said Daniel Benjamin, former terrorism adviser to the U.S. National Security Council"
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/print/2002/11/01/bushiraq021101
"the administration's strongest sound-bite on Iraq is also its weakest argument for war. The idea that Saddam Hussein would trust Al Qaeda enough to give Al Qaeda operatives chemical or biological weapons -- and trust them to keep quiet about it -- is simply not plausible." "The idea that Hussein views a WMD strike via terrorist intermediaries as a viable strategy is rank speculation, contradicted by his past behavior. Hussein's hostility toward Israel predates his struggle with the United States. He's had longstanding ties with anti-Israeli terror groupsand he's had chemical weapons for over 20 years. Yet there has never been a nerve gas attack in Israel. Why? Because Israel has nuclear weapons and conventional superiority, and Hussein wants to live. If he's ever considered passing off chemical weapons to Palestinian terrorists, he decided that he wouldn't get away with it. He has even less reason to trust Al Qaeda with a potentially regime-ending secret."
http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-05-03.html
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.
http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/111903.aspx
"No "overwhelming evidence" of a connection. Little proof exists of any formal ties between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda. According to Benjamin, even a leaked Pentagon memo recently cited by the Weekly Standard, "does not recount the many details of an operational relationship, nor does it illustrate that a tie was ongoing, cooperative, and operation." Similar conclusions were reached in the U.S.-backed U.N. Security Council Monitoring Group on Sanctions against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associates, and suggested in the Administration's own 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.
"Best source of information" is inaccurate. In an interview two weeks ago, Cheney said the Weekly Standard article was "your best source of information" for evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Yet, the article was discredited by the administration in November as "inaccurate." Furthermore, the Pentagon criticized the leak saying "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."
No new evidence uncovered by the war. As Secretary of State Colin Powell has said, coalition forces in Iraq have not discovered any "smoking gun concrete evidence" demonstrating ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. In fact, just last week, the New York Times reported more evidence to the contrary, with a recently uncovered document from Saddam Hussein to leaders of the Iraqi resistance cautioning against getting too close to Islamic jihadists and other foreign fighters coming into occupied Iraq.
Exaggerated claims of al-Qaeda safe-harboring. While jihadists lived in or traveled through Iraq, Benjamin points out there is no evidence of "cooperation on the form of transfers of weapons and other materiel, know-how, or funds; the provision of safe haven on a significant scale; or the use of Iraqi diplomatic facilities by al-Qaeda terrorists."
No Hussein involvement in the 1993 WTC attack. As Bergen points out, "the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the FBI, the US Attorney's office to the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the NSC, and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack." While the Abdul Rahman Yasin, a low-level conspirator, did flee New York to live with a family member in Baghdad, according to the FBI official that headed the WTC probe, "We looked at that rather extensively. There were no ties to the Iraqi government."
Saddam’s support for Palestinian Jihad not the issue. Cheney cites Abu Nidal and payments for suicide bombers in Israel as evidence of a connection, but that has nothing to do with al Qaeda. The issue is not whether there are "evil doers" in any country, but to what extent they pose an unacceptable risk to the United States. The administration has yet to make the case for pre-emptive and unilateral action.
Focus on the real threat. Dr. Record's report criticizes the White House for "conflating Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda" in order to "unnecessarily expand the war on terror against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat." This was done "at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the U.S. from a terrorist organization with which it was at war."
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=23816
Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection
1. By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A01
In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.
A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said.
"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."
Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements.
Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.
The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the United States posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to go to war.
The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also investigating the issue.
Bush has defended his handling of intelligence before the war, calling his critics "revisionist historians."
"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons, and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. He vowed to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."
Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a 28-page "white paper" on Iraq distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4.
In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein.
These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech.
While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said.
The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.
As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed.
"We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives.
The CIA briefed congressional committees about the National Intelligence Estimate but did not deliver the classified version until the evening of Oct. 1, just before a Senate intelligence committee hearing the next day, congressional sources said. At that closed-door session, several senators raised questions about qualifying statements made in the report, which was circulated only among senior national security officials.
On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the intelligence report as a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda links. The members wanted a public document to which they could refer during floor debates on the Iraq war resolution.
The white paper did contain passages that hinted at the intelligence community's lack of certitude about Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda ties, but it omitted some qualifiers contained in the classified version. It also did not include qualifiers made at the Oct. 2 hearing by an unidentified senior intelligence official who, during his testimony, challenged some of the administration's public statements on Iraq.
"Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy," said Bob Filippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war resolution.
When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public.
On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda.
Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was "low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses" weapons of mass destruction."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19822-2003Jun21?language=printer
In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.
A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said.
"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19822-2003Jun21?language=printer
“Is it not true that northern Iraq, where the administration claimed al-Qaeda were hiding out, is in the control of our "allies," the Kurds?”
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr091002.htm
“The second justification for invading Iraq was that Mr. Hussein posed a threat to the United States. This was not true. Hussein had only a small army, and virtually no navy or air force. He had no long-range weapons and no ability to strike the US 6,000 miles away. He was not working with bin Laden or al Qaeda terrorists. He was a despicable tyrant at home, but the liberation of Iraq from his clutches was given as a new justification only after the American public had absorbed overwhelming evidence that he posed no threat to us”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul168.html
“The charge that Saddam Hussein was connected to the al Qaeda was wrong. Saddam Hussein's violations the UN resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction remain unproven.”
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr072103.htm
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/10/1055010937064.html?from=storyrhs
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