[Vision2020] Pat Kraut, Saddam, and Osama

Sat Dec 3 21:17:19 PST 2005

Would that be why he is on C-Span this week? Sorry he doesn't meet with your approval. All he writes here is that the papers being translated and thier titles which is fairly safe I think. I didn't get much of his personal view in the article but then maybe you did.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nick Gier 
  To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 3:01 PM
  Subject: [Vision2020] Pat Kraut, Saddam, and Osama

  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

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