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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=ngier@uidaho.edu href="mailto:ngier@uidaho.edu">Nick Gier</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=vision2020@moscow.com
href="mailto:vision2020@moscow.com">vision2020@moscow.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, December 03, 2005 3:01
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [Vision2020] Pat Kraut, Saddam,
and Osama</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>Greetings:<BR><BR>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 <I>The New Republic</I>, whose
editors supported war initially and a few of their writers still do. The
editors have now seen the errors of their ways.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Nick Gier<BR><BR>"Needle in a
Hayestack"<BR>by Jason Zengerle<BR>The New Republic Post date:
11.23.05<BR>Issue date: 11.28.05<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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."
<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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."
<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at TNR. <BR><X-SIGSEP>
<P></X-SIGSEP><FONT size=2>"The god you worship is the god you deserve."<BR>~~
Joseph Campbell<BR><BR>"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in
human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for
it."<BR> --Mohandas Gandhi<BR><BR>"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." --Ma</FONT><FONT size=1>x Planck<BR><BR></FONT>Nicholas F.
Gier<BR>Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of
Idaho<BR>1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<BR><A
href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm"
eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</A><BR>208-882-9212/FAX
885-8950<BR>President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<BR><A
href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm"
eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</A><BR><BR>
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