Free Republic

the Phase II report says: “The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is leading the exploitation effort of documents (DocEx) uncovered in Iraq, told Committee staff that 120 million plus pages of documents that were recovered in Iraq have received an initial review for intelligence information. As of January 2006, 34 million pages have been translated and summarized to some extent and are available to analysts in an Intelligence Community database.” pg 62/400 And while that might mislead people into thinking that the assessments made are full and complete, it isn’t until later in the report that a little caveat is...

Many of the quasi-conclusions are based largely on claims of innocence from Saddam Hussein, “a top official in Saddam’s government, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Kattab al-Tikriti,” Tariq Aziz and Faruq Hijazi. These are 4/7 of the primary players in any involvement or potential involvement between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. The other 3 primary players are Mohammed al-Douri (He is Saddam’s VP/muscle man/Thug-In-Charge who remains at large. He is also suspected of being the primary source for most of a large portion of the insurgency and most reports place him as directing operations from inside Syria). The last 2 primary players...

As soldiers and Marines by the hundreds of thousands return home from Iraq they are telling their stories. They are telling family and friends of what they saw and of who they fought. They are writing books that tell of their experiences. Amazon.com is full of them. They have fought and lived through a dramatic and on-going historical event. To them it is real-not politics and so they tell the truth. They describe an invasion and an occupation where Islamic extremists and Iraqi thugs are the enemy. They tell tales of a fight against terrorists; people who rammed cars filled...

How many times have we heard members of the media say, “We know now that there were no ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda”? Typically, people make this claim based on any combination of four sources: President Bush’s 9/17/03 statement, Sec. Powell’s 1/8/04 statement, the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report of 7/22/04 or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) report on Pre-war Iraq intelligence reports: 7/7/04. Yet, in each of these cases, the very quotations that opponents of the war in Iraq point towards as definitive claims of “no ties” are only half quotes. When they refer to President Bush’s...

FINALLY! We’ve all waited 4 years to see a good report on what happened to Saddam’s WMD, and yesterday the last investigative report was released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The only problem is…I searched the entire 400 pages of this “Phase II report” (or rather both reports that make up the Phase II report), and I couldn’t find those two words: “Bush lied.” I can’t even find, “Bush mislead” in the 400 pages. What I did find was 400 pages of evidence showing that the intelligence community used small amounts of weak intelligence from a decrepit litany...