The Garbage That Comes Out Of The Senate

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The Senate’s recent report where they decided that Saddam had NO connections whatsoever to terrorists is an embarrassment to the Senate, Congress, and the American people. They got more wrong then right with this piece of garbage. At one point in the report they actually have the gonads to say:

additional reviews of documents recovered in Iraq are unlikely to provide information that would contradict the Committee’s findings or conclusions.

Um…yeah.

The report still notes that there is a:

absence of a single comprehensive Intelligence Community analytic product on Iraq’s links to terrorism

But still comes to the conclusion that nothing from the Saddam documents will change their minds. Sounds like a bunch of spoiled kids to me. Stephen Hayes new article goes into much greater detail about this worthless report:

According to a report released September 8 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Saddam Hussein “was resistant to cooperating with al Qaeda or any other Islamist groups.” It’s an odd claim. Saddam Hussein’s regime has a long and well-documented history of cooperating with Islamists, including al Qaeda and its affiliates.

As early as 1982, the Iraqi regime was openly supporting, training, and funding the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization opposed to the secular regime of Hafez Assad. For years, Saddam Hussein cultivated warm relations with Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist who was the de facto leader of the Sudanese terrorist state, and a man Bill Clinton described as “a buddy of [Osama] bin Laden’s.”

Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi regime hosted Popular Islamic Conferences in Baghdad, gatherings modeled after conferences Turabi hosted in Khartoum. Mark Fineman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, attended one of the conferences and filed a story about his experience on January 26, 1993. “There are delegates from the most committed Islamic organizations on Earth,” he wrote. “Afghan mujahedeen (holy warriors), Palestinian militants, Sudanese fundamentalists, the Islamic Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Party of Islam.” Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey attended the same conference and wrote about it in 2002. “Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa, and Asia converged on Baghdad,” he wrote, “to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression. . . . Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a ‘secular Baathist ideologue’ who has nothing to do with Islamists or terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they’re talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam’s version of it.”

[…]None of this is a secret, as the press coverage attests. But the authors of the Senate report seem determined to write it out of the history. On what basis do the authors claim that Saddam Hussein was “resistant” to cooperation with Islamists? The finding is sourced to “postwar detainee debriefs–including debriefs of Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz.” Well then, that settles it.

But why take Saddam’s word for it? This is, after all, the same man who claims that he is the president of Iraq. Even assuming the man isn’t a pathological liar, isn’t it the case that detainees interrogated by a government fighting a global war on terror might have an incentive to understate their complicity in global terror?

This appears to have occurred to the report’s authors. “The Committee believes that the results of detainee debriefs largely comport with documentary evidence, but the Committee cannot definitively judge the accuracy of statements made by individuals in custody and cannot, in every case, confirm that detainee statements are truthful and accurate.”

[…]There is much to quarrel with in the report. But it is worth spending a moment to consider the vast amount of information that was left out of the committee’s treatment of Iraq’s links to al Qaeda. A few examples:

There is no mention in the report of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who admitted mixing the chemicals for the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, cited in the?July 2004 Senate report as an al Qaeda operation. The mastermind of that attack, Ramzi Yousef, is the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Two weeks after the bombing, according a July 2004 report issued by the same Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Yasin fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance. ABC News reported in 1994 that a Baghdad neighbor of Yasin’s told them that he travels freely and “works for the government.”

There is no mention of documents recovered in postwar Iraq confirming that the Iraqi regime provided Yasin with housing and funding after his return to Iraq until the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Vice President Dick Cheney has discussed these documents in television and radio interviews.

There is no mention of documents unearthed by reporters with the Toronto Star and the London Telegraph. The documents, expense reports from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, contain an exchange of memos between IIS officers about who will pay for a March 1998 trip to Baghdad by a “trusted confidante” of Osama bin Laden. The documents were provided to the U.S. intelligence community. “I have no doubt that what we found is the real thing,” wrote Mitch Potter, a reporter for the Toronto Star, and one of the journalists who found the documents in the bombed-out headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service days after the fall of Baghdad. Intelligence and military sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the documents are corroborated by telephone intercepts from March 1998.

There is no mention of documents showing that the Iraqi regime cultivated a relationship with bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, throughout the 1990s. Time magazine’s Joe Klein, an Iraq War critic who is dubious of a broader Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, noted last week: “Documents indicate that Saddam had long-term, low-level ties with regional terrorist groups–including Ayman al-Zawahiri, dating back to his time with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

[…]There is no mention of the Clinton administration’s many public claims that Iraq was working with al Qaeda on chemical weapons development in Sudan. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the passage in the indictment of bin Laden “led [Richard] Clarke, who for years had read intelligence reports on Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to [National Security Adviser Sandy] Berger that a large Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was ‘probably a direct result of the Iraq-al Qaeda agreement.’ Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al Shifa were the ‘exact formula used by Iraq.'”

This part I found quite humorous:

Where the report isn’t tendentious, it is sloppy. Key names are misspelled; it’s “Shakir” on one page, and “Shakhir” on another, which might be thought trivial. But consider: The writers of the report seem not to understand that “Shaykh Salman al-Awdah” and “Shaikh Sulayman al-Udah” is the same person and that he was an important spiritual mentor to al Qaeda and its leadership. At another point, the report claims that Saddam Hussein considered al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi an “outlaw.” In the body of the report, the claim is attributed to a senior Iraqi official; in its conclusions the same information is attributed to an “al Qaeda detainee.”

Where the report isn’t tendentious and sloppy, it’s confused. Saddam Hussein and his cronies disclaim any relationship and yet the Senate report itself cites two authenticated documents in which the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) itself discussed the “relationship” between Iraq and al Qaeda. A 1992 document notes that bin Laden is “a Saudi opposition official in Afghanistan” and claims “the Syria [IIS] section has a relationship with him.” An Iraqi Intelligence document describing the connections between Iraq and al Qaeda in 1997 notes that “through dialogue and agreements we will leave the door open to further develop the relationship and cooperation between both sides.”

[….]Some day there will be an authoritative and richly detailed history of the nature of the relationship between the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups. This latest product of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is unlikely to merit even a footnote in this history.

There is much more where that came from with a ton of actual FACTS, something the liberal Senate staffers who put this piece of dung together so obviously lacked.

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I posted this re this excellent article by Hayes.

RBT

*****

‘Bush Lied. People Died!’ Round III
HT Pajamas Media

PJM is linking to a new article at the Weekly Standard re the recent Senate Intel Co’s finding that there were no connections between the Saddam Regime and AQ.

[…]

RBT has said many times Saddam was up to his eyeballs supporting and collaborating with AQ, Shiia and Sunni Islamofascists, and other terrorist organizations. Even though Saddam was a Sunday go to Mosque Muslim, he would engage with these groups whenever it was in his own best interests. Especially when the US was involved.

The Blogos is rich with information contrary to the Intels Committee’s finding. Ray Robison , a FoxNews Contributor on the Saddam Regime docs, Mark Echenalaub of Regime of Terror, and Scott Malensek, author and frequent contibutor to The New Media Journal have all written extensively on these links that somehow the MSM is overlooking and failing to report to the American people.

Read More