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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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