Posted on 06/21/2004 2:26:05 PM PDT by rdb3
[more Chronicles Extra!]
June 18, 2004
9-11 COMMISSION: NO IRAQ LINK TO AL-QAIDA
by Srdja Trifkovic
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (“9-11 Commission”) has found “no credible evidence” of a meaningful link between Iraq and al-Qaida. Its findings contradict claims by the Bush administration that such a connection justified the war against Iraq. In a preliminary report released on June 16, the commission further said that Osama bin Laden had long opposed the Iraqi leader’s secular regime and that his subsequent attempts to obtain help from Saddam were rebuffed by the Iraqi dictator.
The 9-11 Commission is an imperfect body. As has been pointed out in these pages recently, it is guilty of not asking many questions that are essential to understanding the nature of the threat facing us. The bipartisan ten-member panel never examined the basic tenets and historical record of Islam that could help explain the problem of “terrorism.” It never probed the rationale for an insane immigration policy that allows the Muslim fifth column to establish itself in the U.S. and all over the Western world. It accepted the U.S. strategy of global dominance as a given fact of life.
While its failure to focus on these and other strategic issues is lamentable, the Commission’s experts appear to have been thorough and professional in dealing with those specific aspects of 9-11 that they were instructed to examine. The report’s conclusion that there is no credible evidence “that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” reflects the consensus of the intelligence community. Those findings were strongly supported by CIA and FBI officials who had been under intense political pressure before the war to establish such link. A CIA counterterrorism analyst told the Commission that his agency was in “full agreement” with the report which did “an excellent job” in presenting information about relations between Iraq and al-Qaeda prior to September 11. The FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism John Pistole supported this assessment.
The Commission’s report is embarrassing for President Bush and his administration. It came only two days after Vice President Dick Cheney made the latest in a series of assertions that a link between Saddam and Osama did exist. Speaking in Florida on June 14 he said that the two had “long-established ties” “He was a patron of terrorism,” Cheney said of Hussein during a speech before The James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Orlando. The following day, while meeting the Afghan president in the White House, President Bush explicitly backed up Cheney’s assertions. These statements reflect the Administration’s renewed insistence that the war against Iraq was inseparable from its “war on terrorism,” and its conspicuous omission of previous assertions that Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” justified military action.
Both justifications are not based on facts, and it is noteworthy that both lies originally emanated from the same source. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in Washington in 1997, began advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as soon as it came into being, citing WMDs as the reason. In its open January 26, 1998 letter to President Clinton it said that, given the magnitude of the Iraqi threat, “The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use, or threaten to use, weapons of mass destruction.” The letter was said to have been drafted by Paul Wolfowitz, who was among its 18 signaturies; others included Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, and William Kristol. Testifying to the House National Security Committee eight months later (September 17, 1998) Wolfowitz declared that Saddam Hussein “now finds himself free to reconstitute his prohibited weapons capabilities without fear of intrusive inspections.” He suggested “a serious policy in Iraq” that would “free Iraq’s neighbors from Saddam’s murderous threats.”
Terrorist attacks of 9-11 provided these people and their allies with a new theme, and within days they launched rumors that Iraq may have been involved in providing travel documents for one or more of the hijackers. They also revived old assertions of Iraq’s attempts to develop germ warfare weapons, trying to link them to the anthrax scare. They claimed that Iraqi diplomats and al-Qa’eda operatives had met in Prague some years previously. Within the Administartion Paul Wolfowitz, in his powerful position of Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, argued that the attacks offered an opportunity to settle the score with Saddam once and for all. Two days after 9-11 William Saffire demanded war on Iraq in the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal had two major editorials and one op-ed piece advocating invasion of Iraq in the space of three days.
On September 20, 2001, PNAC sent a letter to President Bush stating that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” The letter, signed by Bill Kristol and two-dozen leading neocons—including Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, and Norman Podhoretz—argued that “failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Each of the letter’s signatories went on to repeat the allegation of Saddam’s terrorist connection in literally hundreds of op-eds, interviews, and speeches. Examples abound. In a fact-free editorial (“The Iraq-al Qaeda Connection”) William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, declared that “the coming war to remove Saddam is part of the overall war on terrorism.” () “What risk do we run if Saddam remains in power and continues to build his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons?” asked Richard Perle, and asserted, point blank, “We know that he harbours terrorists, about which more evidence will emerge in due course. Will he share his most lethal weapons with them, knowing his perfidy would be unprovable?” [emphasis added] Norman Podhoretz declared that the U.S. waged “a war to liberate 25 million people and rout Islamic extremists, terrorists and those who thirst for the mass murder of Americans.”
The mendacity of such systematic misrepresentations of the Iraqi issue to the American people helped push the nation into the virtual-reality world of non-debates. The contentious issue was how to wage war, not whether and why. The claim of Saddam’s link with terrorism was adopted by the Bush administration as a key justification for war. Donald Rumsfeld thus warned on November 14, 2002, that “Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qa’ida.” The discredited former CIA Director george Tenet, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, went much further when he claimed that “Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qaeda.” He added that “there is no doubt there have been contacts and linkages to the al-Qaeda organization” [emphasis added]. The theme was picked up by Mr. Bush himself. “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam,” the President said in his 2003 State of the Union address. Once the war was over, on 1 May 2003, Mr. Bush declared that “the liberation of Iraq removed . . . an ally of al-Qa’ida.”
The lie gained credence through repetition: in September of last year more than two-thirds of Americans expressed a belief last year that Saddam was personally involved in the attacks. Mr. Cheney approvingly commented that it was “not surprising people make that connection.” Last fall he spoke of a “credible but unconfirmed” intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9-11 hijackers, had met at least once in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attacks. (The 9-11 Commission now says that meeting never happened.) A few months earlier, on 22 January 2004, Cheney declared that there was “overwhelming evidence . . . of a connection between al-Qa’ida and Iraq.”
How will the advocates of war deal with the latest blow to their credibility? Some will claim that the war was meant to remove a potential terrorist threat from Saddam. As one Joel Mowbray says in FrontPageMag (June 17), “Quite simply, war was waged in Iraq to prevent another 9/11.” He also makes the remarkable claim that the Administration never claimed there was a link between Saddam and al-Qa’eda. Others, the majority, will do with the terrorist link precisely what they have already done with the non-existant WMDs: pretend that the issue did not exist.
We may expect the war party to focus exclusively on “human rights” and “democracy” as the real reason for the Iraqi war. They will take their cue from the neocon capo di tutti capi Wolfowitz, whose testimony before the Armed Services Committee on April 20 did not mention any “weapons of mass destruction” but focused entirely on the brutality of Saddam’s dictatorship. They have known all along that Iraq was not connected to al-Qaeda or to the 9-11 attacks and it had no WMDs. They wanted their war because their primary objective has never been to enhance this country’s geopolitical position. A small foreign country’s interests were mendaciously but effectively presented by the neoconservative clique within the American decision-making structure, and by the mainstream media elite, as those of the United States.
There had other reasons for the war, of course, in addition to the “passionate attachment,” chiefly to satisfy the hubristic longings of various PNAC types for global dominance. These people are far greater threat to the constitutional order, identity, and way of life of the United States than Iraq under Saddam had ever been. They are plotting new missions as we speak. If they are allowed to go on like this, America’s misused power will generate countervailing power sooner than we think—after the world has become a poorer, nastier, and far less populous place.
Think that maybe the author wishes to have a mulligan granted to him after publishing this? Maybe? ;-)
$710.96... The price of freedom.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
The writer seems well qualified for a position with the NY Times. He can lie with the best of them.
Jeez, dude, I just ate lunch.
These PaleoConfederates are also pawning that Richard Clarke doorstop on their website. I'm a little surprised they don't link up with MoveOn.org or one of the other "Peace oriented" organizations.
How many times is this lie gonna be reported. How can so many people get this story so wrong. It's not even that complicated, just a couple of short paragraphs with simple words.
I subscribed to Chronicles for a few years in the early 1990s. I stopped when I started getting subscription offers for the Spotlight newspaper and other anti-Semitic Holocaust-denier tripe.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
They are smoking crack to hallucinate that Americans are somehow going to believe that Ansar al-Islam operating inside Iraq's Northern frontier, Abu Nidal cared for in a Baghdad hospital, and Zarqawi in Fallujah don't represent "links" between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
"of a meaningful link between Iraq and al-Qaida"
What's "meaningful?"
Always the editorial qualification...
Iraqi agent Ramsi Yusef was *convicted* of bombing the World Trade Centers back in 1993. How quickly the holocaust deniers "forget" inconvenient facts such as direct links between terrorists, terrorist attacks, al qaeda, and Iraq.
It is puzzling. And that this was published *today* (after it's become overwhelmingly clear that there was/is a link between Iraq and AQ) is just puzzling.
Yeah, perhaps no "collaboration" to bring about 911 (although I still wonder where Salmon Pak fits in), but it's undeniable that there was truly a "link" between the two.
You can always spot a lying CRAT when they go on and on and on with bulls--t.
This story flip-flops almost as often as Kerry.
I don't think that Chronicles/Rockford Institute is associated with the Institute for Historical Review (IHR)/ Noontide Press (publishers of Spotlight and a lot of Holocaust denier literature). However, Chronicles definitely sold their sub list to IHR. Also, as I recall I also got subscription offers for (Jared Taylor's) American Rennaisance magazine, so Chronicles definitely sold their lists to some unsavory groups.
Three-word response:
Ahmed Hikmar Shakir.
It appears that this writer, like most paleos, looks at the mountain of smoke billowing from the building and concludes there is no fire.
Those groups are about as savory as the Nation of Islam.
$710.96.. The price of freedom.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.