More On The Worthless Senate Report

Spread the love

Loading

Thomas Joscelyn wrote yesterday in the The Daily Standard about the worthless Senate report released yesterday on the Al-Qaeda/Iraq connections:

But beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, there is little merit to this posturing because there is little serious analysis in the Senate report: Far from providing the definitive word on Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda, the report is almost worthless.

CONSIDER TWO BRIEF examples, chosen from many:

The committee’s staff made little effort to determine whether or not the testimony of former Iraqi regime officials was truthful. In fact, Saddam Hussein and several of his top operatives–all of whom have an obvious incentive to lie–are cited or quoted without caveats of any sort. In Saddam’s debriefing it was suggested that he may cooperate with al Qaeda because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” According to the report, “Saddam answered that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy. He claimed that Iraq only opposed U.S. policies. He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China.”

Anyone with even a partial recollection of the controversy surrounding Iraq in the 1990s will recall that Saddam made it a habit of cursing and threatening the United States. His annual January “Army Day” speeches were laced with threats and promises of retaliation against American assets. That is, when Saddam claimed that the United States was “not Iraq’s enemy,” he was quite obviously lying. But nowhere in the staff’s report is it noted that Saddam’s debriefing was substantially at odds with more than a decade of his rhetoric.

The testimony of another former senior Iraqi official is more starkly disturbing. One of Saddam’s senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi’s ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.

Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that “this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact.”

This is not true. Hijazi’s best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration’s Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, “The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them.”

Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just “boogie to Baghdad.”Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.

There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden–yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee’s report.

In fact the Senate report leaves out MANY important people, places, and dates. They don’t question the testimony of Iraqi officials and leave out the testimony of those who’s information was easily provable.

Ray Robison thoroughly fisks the report:

According to the report, Saddam didn’t consider the United States the enemy, only its policies. No seriously. That is what it said. Apparently the 12 years of bombing the US did to Iraq was nothing to him. This is complete and utter nonsense and is a strong indicator that members of this committee were desirous to include just anything that would portray President Bush in a bad light, even to the point of refurbishing Saddam’s image as a friend of the United States. Complete fantasy and it should be an embarrassment to this esteemed committee.

The report states that it is only comparing information contained in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to new information that sheds light on those specific findings. While it is certainly understandable that they would have to limit the scope for this report, it also means any new information that falls outside that scope wasn’t considered.

I think the most important revelation is that the committee has decided there was no relationship between al Zarqawi and Saddam. I actually agree with that to a point. I have said it over and over, but here it is again. Saddam would not allow Jihadists running around uninvited, but would welcome them if it was done properly. This distinction was, not surprisingly, completely missed by the report. It really is a simple concept. I mean think about it. You can invite a friend over to your house every day. But then come home and find he has broken in uninvited, and that is completely different.

And Zarqawi was not Saddam’s kind of terrorist. Saddam rose to power as a brute thug. And brute thugs recognize each other as the greatest threats. No, Saddam was much more likely to work with Ayman Al Zawahiri than al Zarqawi. Zawahiri is a doctor and more cultured. Saddam is at heart, a brute thug, but portrayed himself as educated, polished, and cultured. He would want to associate with the same type of people in public. Zarqawi just wasn’t his kind of professional terrorist who could be reasoned with. Now does that mean the Bush admin was lying? Of course not. It was a reasonable conclusion at the time.

But what really bugs me is the weight given to former regime officials who say Saddam was not interested in working with Islamic terrorists. And the report says he might work with secular terrorists like the Palestinians.

Hello.

Senators, the Palestinians are not secular terrorists. That is a myth from the 70’s promoted by the Palestinians to maintain American support. Islamic Jihad is now, and has been for some time, the leading socio-political force in the Palestinian territories. Let’s look at Rantisi who was taken out by the Israelis in 2004. He was the leader of Hamas, the same group paid off by Saddam. He was widely considered a Jihadist.

He was a doctor who went to Egyptian medical schools at the same time as Zawahiri. He was deeply involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, the same one that spawned the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, lead by the blind sheik and later by Zawahiri. Two Islamists, in Egyptian medical schools, heavily influenced by a terrorist group equivalent to Saudi wahabbism. Rantisi went back to Palestine to form Hamas which stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Zawahiri to al Qaeda (much later). And Saddam was paying Hamas off. Yet this committee finds no evidence Saddam would work with Islamic terrorists? BTW, none of this is specific to my work with document exploitation, it is all public record.

I really could go on, but there is not much point. The report says that officials don’t believe they have missed anything significant in the documents. But they leave the potential open. That is a good idea. Sammi and I have only just started.

Dafydd comes to the same conclusion about Zarqawi:

I am utterly persuaded that Saddam Hussein saw al-Qaeda, and especially Musab Zarqawi up in Ansar al-Islam, as a “threat” to his regime. But that does not mean Hussein made any attempt to remove Zarqawi, nor that he did not harbor Zarqawi, nor even that he did not have an operational relationship with Zarqawi.

For heaven’s sake, many Americans in the 1940s saw Communism as a threat to the United States (though the president did not)… but that did not stop FDR, with the support of the entire political establishment, from allying with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. There is an old proverb: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Thus, the central dichotomy of the AP story is a canard: there is no inherent conflict between fearing an enemy and allying with that same enemy.

AJStrata found this gem in the Senate report:

I plan to post more on this report later, but it is clear in the run up to the war (no matter what forgeries Joe Wilson lies about) there was a clear concern Saddam was planning attacks in the US. One item the news media missed (no surprise there) is this disturbing gem:

The Committee examined the assessments from the Intelligence Community on the topics discussed in the NIE produced prior to and following the NIE. In most cases, the opinions of the community and individual agencies did not change following the publication of the NIE or following the 2002-2003 United Nations’ inspections in Iraq. The community judgement did change pertaining to the intended use of the Iraq’s UAVs. Specifically, the NIE judgement that Iraq’s attempts to procure U.S. mapping software for its UAVs that was useless outside the U.S., “strongly suggests that Iraq is investigating the use of these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” A change was made to the UAV judgements in a new NIE published in January 2003 titled Nontraditional Threats to the US Homeland Through 2007.

People need to recognize this revelation came only a little more than a year after 9-11. And UAVs are built from parts you can buy here in the US. Many UAVs are simply transformed ultra-lights you buy from a catalogue (I know, I used to work on UAVs and some were exactly this kind of retrofit). The mapping SW is useless outside the US, but you need to integrate this SW into the UAV’s avionics SW first and make sure it works. This is why an enemy would build and test a prototype overseas and then simpy bring the SW into the US for the real deal. UAVs are cheap an can be made en masse once you are in the US.

This is not a minor issue and it explains why there was a lot of concern in the Administration. After 9-11 and anthrax attacks, this intel must have been like a bombshell. This illustrates an honest escalation of concern that Saddam would want to copy cat Al Qaeda with his own 9-11 plot.

Saddam was trying to get US mapping software to use for UAVs! You think that may worry some people? Your damn right.

In the end this report by the Senate was never about investigating the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link, it was all about giving Democratic politicians ammo against Bush….thats it in a nutshell.


In the end this report by the Senate was never about investigating the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link, it was all about giving Democratic politicians ammo against Bush….thats it in a nutshell.