CHENEY MISLEADS IRAQ/AL-QAEDA CONNECTION
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| Mon, 09-13-2004 - 10:31pm |
Displaying a brazen disregard for the facts, Vice President Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati Thursday that Iraq had "provided safe harbor and sanctuary...for Al Qaeda." There is no evidence to support Cheney's claim. The 9/11 Commission - which spent months exhaustively studying the issue - concluded there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
After the release of the report, Cheney claimed there was "overwhelming" evidence of a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq and that he had "probably" seen evidence that was not shared with the commission. After investigating the matter, the 9/11 Commission found "it had access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks." The commission also reaffirmed its position that it had not discovered a "collaboration-cooperation between al-Qaeda and Iraq."
Sources: 1. "Cheney Says Iraq Harbored Al Qaeda," Los Angeles Times, 9/10/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2254501&l=54791.
2. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed," Washington Post, 6/17/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2254501&l=54792.
3. "Cheney blasts media on al Qaeda-Iraq link," CNN, 6/18/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2254501&l=54793.
4. "9/11 Panel Upholds Iraq-al-Qaida Finding," ABC News, 7/7/004, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2254501&l=54794.

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The commission memebers themselves chided the press for misrepresenting the report. The report stated there was no evidence of collaboration on a major attack on the US. It in no way concluded that Iraq had no ties to Al Quaeda, in fact quite the opposite. It's this kind of politicizing of the report that Americans are seeing right through, and why they are supporting the president on this issue.
18 June 2004
Commission Confirms Iraq/Al-Qaeda Link, Hadley Says, June 18, 2004
(Article by Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley)
(This column by Stephen J. Hadley, who is deputy national security adviser to President Bush, was published in USA Today June 18 and is in the public domain. No republication restrictions.)
Commission Confirms Links
By Stephen J. Hadley
A 9/11 commission staff report is being cited to argue that the administration was wrong about there being suspicious ties and contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In fact, just the opposite is true. The staff report documents such links.
The staff report concludes that:
-- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan."
-- "A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Laden in 1994."
-- "Contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan."
Chairman Thomas Kean has confirmed: "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there."
Following news stories, Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said he did not understand the media flap over this issue and that the commission does not disagree with the administration's assertion that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government.
President Bush and members of his administration have said all along that there were contacts and that those contacts raised troubling questions.
For instance, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the leader of a terrorist group that is responsible for a number of deadly attacks throughout Iraq. He and his men trained and fought with al-Qaeda for years. Zarqawi's network helped establish and operate an explosives and poisons facility in northeast Iraq. Zarqawi and nearly two-dozen al-Qaeda associates were in Baghdad before the fall of Saddam's regime. In 2002, one al-Qaeda associate bragged that the situation in Iraq was "good" and that Baghdad could be transited quickly.
It may be that all of the contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda never resulted in joint terrorist attacks. But considering all that we knew, no responsible leader could take for granted that such a collaboration would never happen.
Saddam had threatened American interests for more than a decade, harbored and assisted other terrorists, and possessed and used weapons of mass destruction. Al-Qaeda had declared war on America, and bin Laden had called the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to attack Americans a "religious duty."
The president did not order the liberation of Iraq in retaliation for 9/11. He sent American troops to Iraq to remove a grave and gathering threat to America's security. Because he acted, Iraq is free, and America and the world are safer.
(Stephen J. Hadley is deputy national security adviser to President Bush.)
(end byliner)
First of all this was written by an advisore to the president, this is not an unbiased report.
Second:"Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan."
It's a report of factual information contained in the 9/11 commission's report. If you want to dispute any of the facts contained, go right ahead, but just claiming that it's "biased" does nothing to refute the connections the commission found between Iraq and Al Quaeda.
Explored possible cooperation means nothing. They explored it but it did not happen. That was the conclusion.>
No, it doesn't mean nothing, it means exactly what the president has said all along that it means-that we could not take the chance that Saddam, with his millions and WMD capabilities and his defiance of his cease fire agreement and UN resolutions, WOULD decide to collaborate with al quaeda, given that there is plenty of evidence that the idea had been explored. Means a lot to me-I suppose if Bush had waited until they actually DID collaborate on an attack on American civilians, that would have suited you better?
Edited 9/14/2004 11:12 am ET ET by liveanew
Ted Kennedy's Lesson for Kerry<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />September 14, 2004; Page A27
At an event in New York some months ago, I went over to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and told him precisely how I felt about him: Sorry.
I was sorry that I had not listened to him about George W. Bush and even sorrier that I had not listened to him about the war in Iraq, which he had opposed. If it is not too late, I recommend that John Kerry do what I am now doing: Pay attention to Teddy Kennedy and what he has to say.
On Friday Kennedy delivered a Senate speech that's worth a gaggle of campaign consultants of the sort Kerry has been hiring in lieu of plumbing his own gut. Kennedy accused the Bush administration of "arrogant ideological incompetence."
On Friday Kennedy delivered a Senate speech that's worth a gaggle of campaign consultants of the sort Kerry has been hiring in lieu of plumbing his own gut. Kennedy accused the Bush administration of "arrogant ideological incompetence."
It's hard to be either more succinct or more on target. The little phrase sums up all that ails both Bush and his administration -- everything from a misguided crusade to liberate Iraq (and the Middle East) from despotism to the strut of the president himself. It fingers the reason why Bush and his boys went to war in Iraq, expecting what Kennedy called "a cakewalk." This was the triumph of ideology over common sense, a belief propounded by neoconservatives within and without the administration that beneath every Iraqi lurked the Music Man, and U.S. troops would be greeted by, at a minimum, 76 trombones. A predisposition to believe your own fantasies makes a very sweet sound indeed.
In his speech, Kennedy several times mentioned Bush's "mission accomplished" mentality, which "left our armed forces in Iraq underprepared, understaffed and underled for the mission that was only just beginning." Kennedy quotes Don Rumsfeld, who, with his characteristic bluntness, refused to say precisely how long the war might last. But it would not, he assured us, be more than "six months." As for Vice President Cheney, Kennedy has him on the record, too. American troops would "be greeted as liberators," Cheney said. This is the man Bush took on his ticket for his wisdom.
The virtue of Kennedy's speech is that it makes clear that all the missteps leading up to the war and all the blunders afterward were not mere mistakes but the product of an ideology that had seized the administration and rendered it inept. The Bushies operated on an expectation of how things should be and not, as governments should, on empirical knowledge seasoned by strong cynicism. They so much believed that things would be as they wanted them to be that they embarked on a latter-day Children's Crusade. Where, oh where, were the adults?
Liberals, too, can be blind practitioners of "arrogant ideological incompetence." The dreamy belief in the hidden virtues of all the poor or in the idea that money makes the difference between good and bad schools are examples of ideology smothering common sense. I suppose, too, you can throw in the Vietnam War, which started with arrogance, proceeded to incompetence, and managed to straddle both liberal and conservative ideologies. The Bush administration, though, proceeded in spite of the lessons of Vietnam, so certain was it of its course. For it -- and, yes, for those of us who supported it -- that was indeed arrogance.
Once I wrote a column disparaging Sen. Chuck Robb. Later he stood in the Senate and delivered a gutsy speech against gay-bashing and I gladly had to eat my words. Years later, I ridiculed Sen. Bob Graham for the diaries he kept. Now he has written a worthy book damning the Bush administration for its many intelligence blunders, and again I bow in regret. Finally, I long ago stopped paying hard attention to Ted Kennedy, but now I find him a typhoon of common sense and intelligent indignation. He has not lost the gift of outrage.
Kennedy did not vote to authorize George W. Bush's war. Kerry's problem is that, whatever else he intended, he did. Had he Kennedy's zest for boldness, he would have admitted a mistake and moved on. But he chose a supposedly safe and overly nuanced route that has left him tongue-tied. Kennedy, who was right from the start, is not similarly burdened, but his formulation of "arrogant ideological incompetence" can be used by Kerry anyway. In three words, it answers the question of why we are -- still and in coming years -- in Iraq. All the rest is commentary.
Sorry, that's just not consistent with the findings of David Kay or the 9/11 commission. And tell the families of thousands of dead Kurds that Saddam had no WMD capabilities. They may not have been buddies, but they had enemies and goals in common. In any case, if Saddam hated al quaeda so much, one wonders why Al Zarqawi chose to convalesce there.
Have you read the 9/11 commission report? They found a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and said that they just could not find and collaberation between the two on the 9/11 attacks.
Sorry, that's just not consistent with the findings of David Kay or the 9/11 commission
Ah, your interpretation of the same material I have read. I think I can and will make my own interpretation of those facts. I assure you they are not consistent with yours. And they also are consistent with Hans Blix.
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