[Vision2020] Pat Kraut, Saddam, and Osama

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

I looked up Pat Kraut's source for the definitive link between Saddam and 
Osama, and sure enough it was Stephen Hayes, who is a complete Lone Ranger 
in defending this connection.  Even the Bush administration will not use 
Hayes in their defense. Hayes' lack of credibility is revealed in this 
article from The New Republic, whose editors supported war initially and a 
few of their writers still do.  The editors have now seen the errors of 
their ways.

I'm now preparing a response to Phil Nisbet's scatter gun critique of my 
original posting and it will be posted later today or tomorrow.

Nick Gier

"Needle in a Hayestack"
by Jason Zengerle
The New Republic Post date: 11.23.05
Issue date: 11.28.05

Earlier this month, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported 
what seemed to be big news. In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence 
Agency (DIA) had concluded that a captured Al Qaeda commander named Ibn Al 
Shaykh Al Libi was probably lying when he told debriefers that Saddam 
Hussein had provided chemical and biological weapons training to the 
terrorist group. Still, the newspapers reported that, even after this, the 
Bush administration used Libi's claims to sell the war. Colin Powell touted 
Libi's statements as evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link in his February 
2003 presentation to the United Nations; President Bush did the same in an 
October 2002 address to the nation.

And, yet, the news was greeted with a collective yawn. The Times buried its 
article on page A14, the Post on page A22. The Bush administration, 
meanwhile, declined to comment for either article; nor did Bush officials 
feel the need to address the stories in subsequent days. All of which 
proved that, nearly three years after the Bush administration claimed that 
Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda were a primary justification for the war in Iraq, 
no one--not even the administration itself--is now willing to seriously 
argue that the dictator and the terrorist group had a meaningful relationship.

Well, no one, that is, except for Stephen Hayes. Like a Japanese soldier 
hiding in a cave who never got the news that the emperor had surrendered, 
Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, continues to fight--stubbornly 
insisting that Saddam did, in fact, support Al Qaeda. And, sure enough, 
only hours after the Times and the Post published their stories, Hayes 
posted a response on the Standard's website. Although Hayes had once 
written that "al-Libi's reporting has been among the most reliable of the 
al Qaeda detainees," he didn't try to defend the terrorist's credibility; 
instead, he attacked the credibility of Michigan Senator Carl Levin, who 
gave newspapers the DIA memo. Why, Hayes asked, did Levin endorse the 
Senate report concluding that Powell's U.N. presentation was in line with 
the intelligence community's assessments if Levin knew that the DIA 
harbored doubts about Libi? The answer, as Levin told the Post, was that he 
hadn't seen the DIA memo when he signed off on the Senate report. "That's 
possible," Hayes allowed. "But given his history on the issue, it's also 
possible that Levin was simply waiting until he could be sure his claims 
would be most politically damaging to the administration." Alas, it's 
impossible that Levin would think that his claims would be most damaging to 
Bush now--as opposed to, say, 13 months ago, when Bush was running for 
reelection.

Granted, Hayes's notions of possibility have been warped since November 
2003, when he dove headfirst down the Saddam-Al Qaeda rabbit hole with the 
publication of his Standard cover story titled "case closed." Drawing on a 
leaked top-secret Pentagon memo, Hayes catalogued dozens of pieces of raw 
intelligence that he said demonstrated that the Saddam-Al Qaeda 
relationship "involved training in explosives and weapons of mass 
destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training 
camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al 
Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta." But Hayes's article demonstrated no 
such thing. For one, some of the intelligence reports--like the one 
detailing Libi's claims--turned out to be wrong. More important, the 
reports showed, at the most, low-level episodic contact between Iraq and Al 
Qaeda. Only someone who already believed there was an "operational 
relationship" (in other words, someone like Hayes) would interpret the 
reports as proof of one. Finally, Hayes, as a journalist with access only 
to what he himself conceded was a "'Cliff's notes' version of the 
relationship," was in no way qualified to draw such broad conclusions. As 
former National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin wrote for Slate, 
"Making a judgment about Iraq-al-Qaida ties on the basis of the sections 
presented by Hayes would be like accepting a high-school biology student's 
reading of a CAT scan."

Undeterred by such criticism, Hayes expanded the article into a book, and 
he has relentlessly hammered away at the topic in the Standard. But, as he 
has proved unable to change the consensus that there was no meaningful 
relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Hayes has begun diagnosing others 
with his own disease. Many news outlets, he has written, suffer from "an 
acute case of denial." Even the 9/11 Commission--which concluded that 
Saddam and Al Qaeda did not have a "collaborative operational 
relationship"--was guilty of settling on a "predetermined storyline" that 
led to the "deliberate exclusion" of evidence.

Indeed, Hayes apparently feels so embattled that he is now lashing out at 
those who originally got him into this mess: the Bush administration. The 
White House has not been "making full use of the information at its 
disposal," Hayes recently complained. "When the president mentions Abu 
Musab al Zarqawi, current head of al Qaeda in Iraq, he rarely points out 
that Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war." (Which is true, but also 
irrelevant, since Zarqawi was predominantly in Northern Iraq, which was not 
under Iraqi government control.) And then there are the difficulties Hayes 
has had convincing the Pentagon to give him copies of unclassified 
documents discovered in postwar Iraq, which he believes might support his 
argument on the Saddam-Al Qaeda relationship. It's a story he told at 
length in a recent Standard--"a story," he wrote, "about the failure to 
explain the Iraq war."

But, if Hayes is feeling abandoned, he can take some consolation in the 
fact that his quackery has been a good career move. In the world of cable 
news, where disagreement drives ratings, the consensus about the lack of a 
connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda was proving to be a real obstacle 
when it came to producing compelling debate segments about the war. But 
Hayes's continued insistence on such a connection has made him an 
increasingly popular talking head. Need someone to argue the inarguable? 
Call Stephen Hayes! As a "Hardball" producer recently wrote in the daily 
e-mail he sends out plugging that night's show: "We'll also talk to Stephen 
Hayes of The Weekly Standard who is more convinced of the case for war with 
Iraq than the Bush administration." Last of the true believers is surely a 
better epitaph than dupe.

Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at TNR.

"The god you worship is the god you deserve."
~~ Joseph Campbell

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20051203/d2687e7c/attachment.htm