Links between Saddam & AlQaeda - Forgeries?

[RickSp]

More on the lies that justified a war.

Fabricated Links?
A CIA report casts new doubt on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

A secret draft CIA report raises new questions about a principal argument used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq: the claim that Saddam Hussein was "harboring" notorious terror leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi prior to the American invasion. The new report is only the latest chink in the armor of the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Last year, the September 11 Commission found there was no "collaborative" relationship between the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden; one high-level Al Qaeda commander—who had been cited by Powell as testifying to talks about chemical- and biological-warfare training—later recanted his claims. But the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case: in the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.) Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium.

[jose]

Now watch this drive

[rmnunez]

Fabricated by whom?

Is it believed the Iraqi informants approaching intelligence personnel with caches of documents were secretely working for Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and the other alleged evildoers?

[Dieval]

Quote by: link It also recognizes that there are still unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge about the relationship."

Another showcase of incomplete information taken as gospel by the Anti-Bush league..

[RickSp]

Quote by: Dieval Another showcase of incomplete information taken as gospel by the Anti-Bush league..

Another example of blind obedience to the party line by the Bushbots. There will always be unanswered questions. Duh. But the truth remains that after three years and more than 2000 dead Americans soldiers there is still no substantial evidence of any ties between Saddam and AlQaeda.

[Sonart]

Quote by: Deival Another showcase of incomplete information taken as gospel by the Anti-Bush league..

Incomplete information? I never knew there was information. Despite the fact that I have seen repeated massive laundry lists of "connections", a close review always revealed that all these "connections" amounted to one of three things...

a) memos from someone telling someone else that, gosh, wouldn't it be a good idea if Iraq hooked up with al-Qaeda. No where is it ever confirmed that any such hookups actually took place.

b) lip service references of one to the other, again with no actual acts of cooperation. For instance, referrence to one Osama bin Laden being #16 on a list of Syrian intelligence assets, but no reference anywhere to actual intelligence gained from this "Syrian" source.

c) someone related to al-Qaeda, like Zarqawi, passing through Iraq.

After we've owned Iraq for 2½ years, with half the former Iraqi regime in our custody, and the other half working for us, no where is there any reference whatsoever to exchanges of material, personal, funds, training, data, intelligence, weapons, supplies and anything that could remotely be considered tangible cooperation.

.

[Livemike]

Quote by: rmnunez Fabricated by whom? Is it believed the Iraqi informants approaching intelligence personnel with caches of documents were secretely working for Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and the other alleged evildoers?

What secretly? They were in the pay of the intelligence services for years and
got paid for delivering the documents (directly or indirectly). I mean it's not
exactly controversial that Challabi was in the pay of the Americans, they both
admitted to it.

[bishop]

while i'm no fan of the democrats, i really hope they win back one of the houses during the midterms.. i want a full expose of the run-up to the war and i want to see the real truth behind all the bullshit we were fed about wmd's in iraq, and al qaeda connections with iraq.. people need to be held responsible for this enormous mistake bush made, even if that doesn't include jail time for those responsible.

[Mark A Shrider]

NRO: Your new book is on connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Isn't that all a neocon myth? Isn't bin Laden on record dissing Saddam? Secular Saddam, meanwhile, was no Islamic fundamentalist or extremist? Did anti-American hatred trump all?

Stephen F. Hayes: If the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is a neocon myth, those neocons are even more resourceful than the conspiracy theorists suggest and they sure have got a lot of unlikely people making their arguments. Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, has described the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as a relationship of "mutual exploitation." Joe Lieberman said, "There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda." George Tenet, too, has spoken of those contacts and goes further, claiming Iraqi "training" of al Qaeda terrorists on WMDs and provision of "safe haven" for al Qaeda in Baghdad. Richard Clarke once said the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had provided a chemical-weapons precursor to an al Qaeda-linked pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Even Hillary Clinton cited the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as one reason she voted for the Iraq War.

Saddam was, for a time, an avowed secularist. He began to use Islamist language during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and stepped it up during the first Gulf War. By the mid-1990s, when his son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected (and was later killed when he foolishly returned to Iraq), Saddam was interrupting Baath-party meetings for prayers.

Bin Laden has dissed Saddam several times. And I would certainly never argue that they were buddies. It was an on-again, off-again relationship based, as Bayh says, on mutual exploitation and a common enemy.

NRO: Who is Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?

Hayes: Shakir is one of the most intriguing and puzzling potential links between Iraq and al Qaeda. He was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where U.S. intelligence officials believe the planning for the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and September 11 took place. Shakir was working, ostensibly, for Malaysian Airlines as a VIP greeter. He told associates that he got the job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy and the same contact determined his schedule. Shakir escorted one of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al Mihdhar) to the meeting and left his airport "job" days after the meeting broke up. Making things even more interesting, Defense Department investigators recently found Shakir's name — with a slight spelling discrepancy — on three separate lists of Saddam Fedayeen officers. He was captured twice after September 11 — once in Qatar, once in Jordan — and let go. The Iraqi government reportedly showed a keen interest in his release. What was he doing at the meeting? How did he know the hijackers? And what, exactly, was his relationship to the Iraqi regime? He may have been a bit player, but it sure would be nice to know more. I hope the 9/11 Commission includes a discussion of Shakir in its final report.

NRO: What is the Feith memo and how important is it?

Hayes: The Feith Memo is a report that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee last fall, in response to a request by that panel to see information the Pentagon gathered on Iraq-al Qaeda connections. Analysts in the DoD policy shop pored over old intelligence, gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies, and unearthed some interesting nuggets — some of them from raw intelligence reports and others from finished intelligence products. CIA Director George Tenet was asked about the Feith Memo at a Senate hearing in March and distanced his agency from the Pentagon analysis. He submitted another version of the document to the committee with some "corrections" to the Pentagon submission. My understanding is that there were but a few such adjustments and that they were relatively minor (although my book challenges two of the most interesting reports in the memo). Some of the stuff — telephone intercepts, foreign-government reporting, detainee debriefings, etc. — is pretty straightforward and most of the report tracks with what Tenet has said publicly; it just provides more detail. That said, there were two items that seemed to require more explanation and, when weighed against available evidence, seem questionable.

NRO: Mike Isikoff from Newsweek and others have tried to discredit some of your reporting on these connections. Do you concede any of their points?

Hayes: Well, Isikoff is a very good investigative reporter and I have long respected his work. We simply disagree on much of this. Intelligence reporting is quite subjective, of course, and lends itself to various interpretations. My problem with so much of the media reporting on this issue is that most journalists have chosen not to investigate the connection, and seem too eager to dismiss them. Why? This wasn't the case in the late 1990s, when Iraq-al Qaeda connections were more widely reported in the establishment press.

After I first wrote about the Feith Memo, the Pentagon put out a statement designed to distance itself from any alleged leak of classified intelligence. It was a classic non-denial denial — virtually devoid of content. It was something any veteran Washington reporter would dismiss without a second thought. But reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, typically quite cynical about anything that comes from the Pentagon's public- affairs shop, suddenly found it a remarkably credible source.

[Mark A Shrider]

NRO: It's been suggested by Isikoff and others that some of the evidence turns up nowadays is forged, that you can't take it on its face value. To what extent is the evidence you present corroborated by other evidence, other documented meetings, etc?

Hayes: I think they're right on that point — and it's almost never a good idea to take these things at face value. There was a report that surfaced in December 2003 that suggested that Mohammed Atta had been in Baghdad during the summer of 2001. And, a little too conveniently, the very same document claimed that the U.S. was seeking uranium from Niger. There's little question that the three-page report was forged. (An interesting side note: That document came not from Ahmed Chalabi, but from CIA favorite Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi interim prime minister. Allawi has long argued that there was a significant relationship between Saddam's Mukhabarat and al Qaeda.)

Much of the evidence in the book comes from open sources — media reporting, court documents, interviews, etc. With respect to the information from the Feith Memo, many of the bullet points corroborate one another or previous intelligence on the relationship. For instance, the U.S. intelligence community has long believed that bin Laden met with the deputy director of Iraqi intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, in the mid-1990s. When we captured Hijazi, we asked him about the meeting. Bin Laden, he reported, asked for anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq.

NRO: Did Mohammed Atta meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague — multiple times?

Hayes: I wish we knew. Atta was in Prague under very strange circumstances in May 2000. What's unclear is whether he returned, as initially reported, in April 2001. If he did, it wasn't under his own name. But news reports claiming that the meeting couldn't have taken place because U.S. intelligence has documentation placing him in the U.S. are not accurate. One of the things I report in the book is that both George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice say privately that they believe the April 2001 meeting took place.

NRO: What is the strongest evidence that Iraq was a collaborator in the Sept. 11 attacks?

Hayes: Probably the Shakir story, which is far from conclusive. But it seems to me that the presence of a suspected Saddam Fedayeen officer at a key 9/11-planning meeting can't be dismissed. There have been additional recent developments in the Atta story reported by Edward Jay Epstein. If those turn out to be true, they would be significant. I'm trying, but as yet have been unable to prove or disprove them.

NRO: What's the deal with Richard Clarke? Why is he so adamant to defend Iraq vis-à-vis al Qaeda?

Hayes: I put that question to a top Bush-administration official not long ago. This person said: "If Iraq was involved with al Qaeda, whether they were involved with 9/11 or not, the whole counterterrorism policy of the 1990s was a failure." And we all know who was responsible for the counterterrorism policy of the 1990s. One thing that perplexes me about Clarke was his expressed certainty that there was an Iraqi hand in al Qaeda chemical weapons production in the Sudan in the late-1990s. (Top Clinton advisers — several of them now working for John Kerry — continue to believe that today.) And Clarke's current views (no connection) certainly put him at odds with CIA Director George Tenet.

NRO: How much of what is in The Connection are al Qaeda-Iraq connections the Bush administration could/should be using publicly to connect the dots for people?

Hayes: I think they could be doing a lot more on this. On the one hand, I understand why the Bush administration is reluctant. After all, the CIA director says privately that he believes the Atta-Prague meeting probably took place but the conventional wisdom today dismisses that possibility. But I don't think the administration can get away with simply avoiding the discussion.

One thing the White House could do is insist that the intelligence community put together a team to explore the connections. The 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group has been looking for WMDs for more than a year; there is no equivalent on Iraq-al Qaeda connections.

NRO: Without revealing sources, how did you become so intimate with some of this evidence that you sat down to write a book on it? Did you make a lot of the connections while in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Mideast yourself or back here?

Hayes: I started doing general reporting on the build-up to the Iraq War and was surprised that this angle seemed to be getting so little attention from the media. Several reporters did out standing work on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in 2002 — Jeffrey Goldberg, of The New Yorker and David Rose of Vanity Fair, come immediately to mind. I took the foundation they laid and just kept asking questions — and with each one the story got more complicated and more interesting.

Most of my reporting took place in the States. I did do some reporting for the book in Iraq and I wish I would have been able to spend more time there.

[Mark A Shrider]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006...83155&v=glance

[RickSp]

I see he dredges up the long debunked Czech connection. Yawn. Repeating long dismissed raw intel cobbled together by the PNAC zealots doesn't add much, does it? Now that we have occuppied Iraq for almost three years, I am sure that we have full corroboration of all these allegeded contacts? No? Nothing? How odd.

But thank you for your recommendation. I am very fond of fiction, which is, no doubt, where this book should be shelved.

[bishop]

i think people cite democrat/clinton statements hoping that they're some vindicate themselves for bush's (and his group's) decision to go to war. despite everyone's statements, only the bush administration worked to sell this bogus war - and only one man (bush) decided to push the red button and go to war.

ramble on and on about what democrats said, it doesn't negate my statements about bush and his group's responsibility in this matter.

also interesting that this retarded piece of plagiarism makes no mention of the congressional investigation over iraqi wmd's (which debunked all of these pitiful attempts at vindication).

[RickSp]

New documentation that the Bush administration knew that reports of Iraq/Al Qaeda ties were fabricated yet continued to report them as fact. Bottom line: the Bush administration lied us into war.

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons. The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

[Sonart]

double post

[Sonart]

Quote by: Mark A Shrider blah...blah....blah... Amazon.com

Ohmigosh, not a BOOK!!! {GASP!} By golly, I guess I'm convinced now, by gosh!

Here ya go, Mark. Here's another book for you... absolute proof positive that George W. Bush plotted to destroy the World Trade Center on 9/11. Cuz if it's in a book, it has to be true, right!?

[Boetie]

If a lie results in human deaths Bush Jr supporters yawn. If a lie is about sex between two consenting adults Bush Jr supporters goes into the tearing of shirts and gnashing of teeth. The picture don't match.

If the compassion conservatives are giving handouts to the wealthiest of Americans but cutting food and medicine for the poor, elderly and needy. The picture don't match

Bushbots all insane all the time.

[RickSp]

More documentation of intentional deception by the Bush administration:

Levin Says Newly Declassified Information Indicates Bush Administration’s Use of Pre-War Intelligence Was Misleading

Specifically, newly declassified information from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from February 2002 shows that, at the same time the Administration was making its case for attacking Iraq, the DIA did not trust or believe the source of the Administration’s repeated assertions that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. Additional newly declassified information from the DIA also undermines the Administration’s broader claim that there were strong links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. No Chemical and Biological Weapons Training The Administration made repeated assertions that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. For example, President Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” In February 2003, the President said, “Iraq has provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.” Those assertions were based on the claims of a detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a long-time jihadist and senior military trainer for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. However, as revealed by this newly declassified information, the DIA did not believe al-Libi’s claims at the time the Administration was making its assertions. Specifically, the DIA concluded the following in February 2002, which has never previously been publicly disclosed: “This is the first report from Ibn al-Shaykh in which he claims Iraq assisted al-Qaida’s CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear] efforts. However, he lacks specific details on the Iraqis involved, the CBRN materials associated with the assistance, and the location where training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers (emphasis added). Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest The Administration’s claim that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training was part of its larger effort to assert a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. For example, President Bush said on September 25, 2002, “You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” The DIA, however, had concluded otherwise. The Administration omitted in its public statements the DIA’s pre-war conclusion about the likelihood of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In February 2002, the DIA stated the following, which has remained classified until now: “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.” “That DIA finding is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda,” Levin said. “Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war.”