[Vision2020] Washington Post: more anti-American bullshit

Sun Apr 8 06:08:56 PDT 2007

Golly, gee, ToeKnee -

You really are struggling with the English language, huh?

The article posted by Wayne Fox clearly disputes (with evidence) the claim
by Cheney and Bush that Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda.

Perhaps you should start questioning your unqualified support for the Bush
machine and your evident distaste for the US Constitution and the civil
liberties it affords.

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

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"*Why* a person does what he does is at least as important as the objective
behavior."

- Princess Sushitushi (September 10, 2006)

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From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of Tony
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 7:25 PM
To: Art Deco
Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Washington Post: more anti-American bullshit

Gee Wayne, thanks for your lengthy screed in support of that sociopathic
murderer, Saddam Hussein.  Wow, what next?  A piece advising us that we
really shouldn't have gone after Adolph Hitler?  I mean, golly, all he did
was gas woman and children by the millions.... What was Roosevelt thinking?
What could Bush have been thinking in stopping a man who threw his enemies
into plastic shredding machines, tortured innocents for sadistic sport,
raped woman to pass the time of day, impoverished the masses in order to
build lavish facilities for himself, and shared the goals of the nut-cake
Muslim faction?  I mean really Wayne, you are so right!  To HELL with human
rights and freedom!  Let's all just stay here and play our video games and
sip our latte's while horror reigns abroad, giggling over its bloody
victims.

You should hang your head in shame you spoiled bastard.

-TONY

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Art Deco <mailto:deco at moscow.com>  

To: Vision 2020 <mailto:vision2020 at moscow.com>  

Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 7:12 AM

Subject: [Vision2020] Washington Post: Hussein's Prewar Ties To
Al-QaedaDiscounted

Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted
Pentagon Report Says Contacts Were Limited

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 6, 2007; A01

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein
and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly
cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a
declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas
F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's
prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only
limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were
based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in
summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney,
appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that
al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under
the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about
Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged
history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq
would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M.
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/l000261/>  Levin
(D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written
statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector
general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary
of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence
assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between
al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.

The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had
asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002
that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and
"symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across
10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.

Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were
few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials
and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the
ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.

"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on
specific terrorist operations," that CIA report said, adding that
discussions on the issue were "necessarily speculative."

The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons
of mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other
channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA
report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two
organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than
cooperating operationally.

The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting
is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi
regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

But the contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office -- and leaked to the
conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war -- were publicly
praised by Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a
circumstance the Pentagon report cites in documenting the impact of what it
described as "inappropriate" work.

Feith has vigorously defended his work, accusing Gimble of "giving bad
advice based on incomplete fact-finding and poor logic," and charging that
the acting inspector general has been "cheered on by the chairmen of the
Senate intelligence and armed services committees." In January, Feith's
successor at the Pentagon, Eric S. Edelman, wrote a 52-page rebuttal to the
inspector general's report that disputed its analysis and its
recommendations for Pentagon reform.

Cheney's public statements before and after the war about the risks posed by
Iraq have closely tracked the briefing Feith's office presented to the vice
president's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. That includes the
briefing's depiction of an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between an Iraqi
intelligence official and one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers as one of
eight "Known Iraq-Al Qaida Contacts."

The defense report states that at the time, "the intelligence community
disagreed with the briefing's assessment that the alleged meeting
constituted a 'known contact' " -- a circumstance that the report said was
known to Feith's office. But his office had bluntly concluded in a July 2002
critique of a CIA report on Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that the CIA's
interpretation of the facts it cited "ought to be ignored."

The briefing to Libby was also presented with slight variations to
then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet
and then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. It was prepared
in part by someone whom the defense report described as a "junior Naval
Reservist" intelligence analyst detailed to Feith's office from the DIA. The
person is not named in the report, but Edelman wrote that she was requested
by Feith's office.

The briefing, a copy of which was declassified and released yesterday by
Levin, goes so far as to state that "Fragmentary reporting points to
possible Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11 but also in previous al Qaida
attacks." That idea was dismissed in 2004 by a presidential commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, noting that "no credible evidence"
existed to support it.

When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's
counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by
Feith's office -- titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst
prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and
taking issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's
rebuttal was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
but evidently not with others.

Edelman complained in his own account of the incident that a senior Joint
Chiefs analyst -- in responding to a suggestion by the DIA analyst that the
"Making the Case" account be widely circulated -- told its author that
"putting it out there would be playing into the hands of people" such as
then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and belittled the author
for trying to support "some agenda of people in the building."

But the inspector general's report, in a footnote, commented that it is
"noteworthy . . . that post-war debriefs of Sadaam Hussein, [former Iraqi
foreign minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi intelligence minister Mani
al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh]
al-Libi, as well as document exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the
Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in
all categories" alleged by Feith's office.

>From these sources, the report added, "the terms the Intelligence Community
used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida were validated,
[namely] 'no conclusive signs,' and 'direct cooperation . . . has not been
established.' "

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq
before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an
unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda
adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied
himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

Staff writer Dafna Linzer and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to
this report.

  _____  

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