For Those Who Don't Hate Bush, More Evidence...For Bush Haters...more nails for your "Bush lied" coffins!
Hello, blog pals! More news about the Saddam/terrorist connection (notice I did NOT say 9/11) that comes from a Democrat this time! Woohoo!
Saddam Hussein Collaborated With Terrorists New Documents Show
And .001% of the world protested against the Iraq War as a sham! Well, I wonder what else we'll find out there!
Comment to your hearts content! I'm working on some dreaded term papers. Yawn.
posted by Underground Logician @ 8:30 PM
30 comments
30 Comments:
Not so UL, Bush still lied and manipulated info for the US public so that they'd back his foolish war.
You are jumping to conclusions from evidence that has not been fully examined and not proven as genuine (for example please see the 45 minutes attack claim, WMD in Iraq and the intelligence that failed to stop 9/11), I say this because a UK MP was falsely accused of connections with Saddam by false documents which he eventually won a law suit over.
The trouble is the historical evidence of a connection between al-Queda and Saddam is so at odds with a working realtionship that I find it hard to believe that when these documents have been investigated fully they will point to a connection, we;ll have to wait and see but to put this in context for those that don't know:
The bulk of evidence points to not a single connections between Iraq and al-Queda, these new found elements prove nothing yet. Remember that Saddam wanted a secular Middle East rather than an Islamic one, at odds with al-Queda, remember too that Osama launched attacks on Saddam's regime fearful of his expansionist drive in Kuwait and possibly Saudi Arabia and further more backed jihadist forces in the north of Iraq to carry out attacks on Saddam forces. Osama has never referred to Saddam in anything but a hostile way.
There is also no doubt that members of the Iraqi government under Saddam met with members of al-Queda; just as British, American, French, Israeli (the list goes) government officals have done pre 9/11. Crucially, this does not prove aiding and abetting.
The body of evidence and intelligence agency beliefs are massively in favour of not a single connection between Saddam and al-Queda but rather the opposite, arach enemys. Indeed one of the supposed training camps al-Queda had in Iraq was infact a counter terrorism camp used by Saddam to train his army against Osama.
So sorry, you haven't found anything that hasn't been disproven before and goes against the wealth of evidence that makes it clear there was no connection.
Bush lied.
Nope.
Well, I'm not a Bush hater and I don't think he always lies, but I don't think he always tells the truth, either. He may or may not have known that some of the reports were doctored at the time he made the decision to declare war without the Congress' approval. But I was with him then, and believe that WMDs are still there, buried out in the desert somewhere. I don't discount their existance, believe it or not. Also, I don't deny that Saddam's ties were with the terrorists.
However, I think we shoulda bombed the heck outta them and left. Period.
I posted on this last week.
My conclusions:
Saddam and al Queda might have been at odds but that doesn't mean they could have come together/combined forces for a common goal--screwing the US.
Remember Penguin and Catwoman teaming up against Batman? Same thing.
Catwoman found the Penguin to be disgusting and Penguin hated women but they found a common hatred for Batman and so...
...they make odd bedfellows but bedfellows all the same.
I love the way I posted facts and all I get is a nope.
That made me genuinely laugh.
As for the Penguin/Batgirl analogy it doesn't wash I'm afraid, what you're doing is taking no evidence and making a connection out of it, rather than taking the evidence that is there and seeing that there is no connection at all.
Which is weird. As for mutual enemies, I think you're forgetting that Saddma linked up with Reagan and advised on anti-terror policy in the Middle East as terrorism was an enemy of Iraq and the US.
Remember that they don't share the same end goals at all, Saddam wanted a secular Arab world whilst Osama the opposite.
Saddam and Osama are poles apart and would never work together.
It doesn't matter...they won't.
Well it does matter because you're trumpeting this stuff as a breakthrough to prove others wrong and it isn't so.
That's all.
No, it is a breakthrough.
*giggle*
(it was Penguin and Catwoman--not Batgirl. Batgirl was a wuss.)
i recently read an interesting article on foreign policy's website:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3416&fpsrc=ealert060328
it's about how "senior officials" in washington are laying the groundwork for military action against iran. i know, it sounds too stupid to be true, but the article is convincingly written.
I don't think people realize that this is a war on terror.
TS, as I said in your blog, this is very unsettling. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Sadie Lou, why is it that we like CatWoman better than BatGirl?
UL: Both here and on my blog I have rebutted the idea that Saddma and al-Qaeda had any connection at all and presented a wealth of evidence that totally outways anything that could be put forward to suggest the two had a connection, yet all you can offer is a no and it's a breakthrough.
Bewildering!
Speaking on the war on terror, exactly when was thr last time Iran carried out an attack on the US?
You're asking a trick question that assumes we should only wait to be attacked. The issue is pre-emption; do you stop a country before or after they have nukes, especially if they threaten to use them against us or our allies?
There isn't an easy answer, I'm afraid.
Your turn.
See Abe Lincoln on the flawed logic behind pre-emptive military action.
I've read it and it makes sense. But, back then, the Canadians didn't have a missel delivery system that could hit Washington from Montreal in 5 minutes.
Daniel, I agree with you fundamentally about just war doctrine. I think the problem for me is that the technology available has made the effect of misjudging or miscalculating a potential enemy so extremely catastrophic. It's one thing to have Hessians unload from boats onto your shores. It's another thing when millions of people die in seconds and an entire city is vaporized. It's a horror beyond my capacity to imagine.
So, I think there needs to be very clear guidelines in place. Diplomacy is top on the list. If a country like Iran refuses to engage in diplomacy, even with the entire world community is unified against Iran's uranium enrichment program, there is trouble. If handled poorly, it could be warmongering. That's why diplomacy must take center stage.
What if Iran continues to enrich uranium and all of a sudden had nukes that can hit England, and threatens to use them on England? What do you do? What does the U.S. do?
Your turn. (Good dialogue by the way)
1: Iraq never had nukes and was never in the hunt to make them.
2: You can't deny a nations right to utilise nuclear power because they might use nukes. One day the oil will run out and what then for Iran? Will they have to run on candle power?
This has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything to do Iran being next on the list, this is purely political posturing on the part of the Bush regime that is feeding and anti-Muslim world view.
Now, if we follow you ranalogy through why aren't we attacking Russia (which has more nukes than the US), France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
In theory all of these have the ability to destroy London and the US.
Please see that this has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything to do with the Bush agenda and that agenda is unacceptable, bullying other nations it doesn't take a fancy too.
Please also remember my rebuttal of the Iran/nuclear situation.
Murray Waas has just published the magnus opus on the Plame Afair. It's long, but everyone should read it.
Waas reveals the basic outlines of a much larger conspiracy. A conspiracy within which Valerie Plame played a relatively minor part.
And it all goes back to the those dreaded aluminum tubes. Let's get in our time machines and go back in time to September of 2002. The decision to invade in Iraq was probably made in April of 2002, but it was in August that the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed. And they formulated the public relations strategy that would set the nation on a course for preemptive war. The media campaign began immediately after Labor Day. When Matt Miller, of the New York Times, asked chief-of-staff Andrew Card why they had waited until after Labor Day, Card responded with his infamous:
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Things got rolling on September 8, 2002, when Michael Gordon and Judith Miller published "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts". That same day Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld went on television and cited Gordon and Miller's article as justification for taking a tough line on Iraq. The article stated:
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium...The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months. The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.
Yet, according to Waas's article, Bush was informed that there were severe doubts about the nuclear purpose for the tubes within days of this article's appearance:
In mid-September 2002...Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.
Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.
Then, in early October something happened that would become very significant once no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The President received a one-page National Intelligence summary that explictly informed him:
"...that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons..."
So, by early October, the President had been informed by George Tenet about the doubts from Energy and State, and the lack of unanimity at the CIA. He had heard that Powell was dubious. Still, on October 7th, Bush said in a speech:
...Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
Further confirmation of internal dissent arrived on January 10, 2003, when a highly classified memo entitled "Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date" was circulated to Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and others. Within it, the INR strongly disputed any conclusion that the tubes were suitable for uranium enrichment. Nevertheless, the President went on to state in his January 28th, 2003 State of the Union address:
Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
The President was clearly cherry-picking his facts. But it wasn't until no weapons of mass destruction were found and, especially, no traces of a nuclear program were detected, that these prior statements became problematic. And it was in the context of intragovernmental finger-pointing that Valerie Plame's identity was revealed.
Libby's attorneys said in court papers:
Plame's identity was disclosed during "a period of increasing bureaucratic infighting, when certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability," the attorneys said. "The White House and the CIA were widely regarded to be at war."
The White House was aware of and concerned about the fact that Ambassador Wilson was making allegations about the Niger aspects of the case for war. But, according to Waas, they were actually much more concerned about the aluminum tube angle. The reason? There was documented evidence that the President knew about the fierce internal debate about their suitability for uranium enrichment.
Most troublesome to those leading the damage-control effort was documentary evidence -- albeit in highly classified government records that they might be able to keep secret -- that the president had been advised that many in the intelligence community believed that the tubes were meant for conventional weapons...
"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes."
And so, the White House began to lie. After Wilson's article appeared on July 6, 2003:
Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he -- unlike others in the Bush administration -- had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe that Iraq's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.
Responding, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech] together ... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did.... The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view." Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me."
That statement from Rice is now known to have been a blatant lie. And it just got worse.
After Air Force One landed in Entebbe, the president placed the blame squarely on the CIA for the Niger information in the State of the Union: "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." Within hours, Tenet accepted full responsibility.
As it turns out, Rove and Hadley worked closely with Tenet to help craft his statement. But they carefully sidestepped the issue of the aluminum tubes and kept the focus on the Niger issue.
This was part of their overall strategy. And it worked.
In the end, the White House's damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president's knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush's re-election.
Waas also reports that Cheney, Libby, and David Addington overruled other White House advisors and refused to turn over these sensitive documents (that would have exposed their lies) to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."
And they did get past the election.
Daniel:
Your article says nothing of what Saddam had prior to the Iraq War. Many said he had no capacity to make them. How did he come up to use them? Stockpiles? If so, then there needs to be an accounting of them. To say that since didn't find any means there weren't any is a leap of logic, which means, it doesn't make sense. However, if Daniel keeps repeating the same thing, then it makes sense, or those that disagree with you will give in. I will not. The question of where did they go needs to be answered.
As to you statement of Iran having the right to use nuclear power, if they promise to create bombs to wipe out Israel and her allies, then you have a problem, bub. Iran just test fired a missel they claim can evade radar. Hmmm, looks like Iran is just going to use it for energy. You're being naive, and thank God people like you are NOT in political control.
As to Russia having nukes and having the potential to use them, well, they do have 'em. Do they say they're going to blow Israel off the map yet? You're making a moral equivalence that is unjustified. Think again.
Anonymous:
The size of your posts reminds me of someone. Quite lengthy and full of facts. However, there are more facts that are missing that would seem to show that you are slanting the information. You don't seem to include prior intel, satelite photos picking up unusual logistical activity prior to the outbreak of the war, etc. You cleverly link it all to the timing of the Plame pseudo-scandal.
Pu-lease, do NOT post it all here, I do not have time to read your verbose narratives. Give me URL's to go to please of DISINTERESTED sources that don't have an axe to grind either way, or places where these memos are transcribed. Substantiate your assertions. Do NOT give me anything from NYTimes, LATimes, WaPost, etc. If you do, you'll be wasting your time and mine; I will not read it. You might as well rant like Daniel does...it won't make a difference. Give me the URL's and I will check them out.
Thank you.
UL: before I respond I'll say that it is no good asking anon for urls, because whatever is presented you discredit and ignore because of what you believe in. Now onto your comment...
Saddam did not have nuclear weapons prior to the Iraq war although no doubt like most nations he wanted some but (non US approved) Israel strikes on his facilities in the early 80s destroyed this as an option; there was no nukes to hide or get rid of. Of course Iraq did have WMD because the US and Europe gave them to him to fight Iran with. After the Gulf War the UN destroyed and dismantled Iraq's WMD capacity, as was proven in the report I used in my post.
You seem to be playing this as a win-win for your arguement, if no one has found any nuclear/WMD you seem to be saying this isn't good enough, so how exactly can we go out proving what you are making unprovable, all evidence, every shred says no; how can you refute this?
Iran have made not statements to use nukes to destroy anyone, I have also covered the context of the anti-Zionist comments of their President and I urge you to read his quotes in full. I have already dismissed your warmongering equation of the test missle launch, I find it ironic that you feel Iran are warmongers who want to nuke everyone but fail to see your own aggression towards Iran and the unfounded aggression of the US/UK axis.
I pointed out the other nations with nuclear weapons to make a point you've missed and remember Iran has no nukes and I have already dispatched the Israel comment to where it belongs. The bin.
Before I go, consider the role of Israel in the unbalancing of the Middle East, of their broken UN resolutions, of their nuclear stockpile and human rights atrocities in Palestine.
See the big picture and stop following Bush so blindly and swallowing the bait that Iran is an enemy.
Whatever you say, Mr. Gill.
Saur--
BatGirl was like those girls that hang with all the tough guys and she expects everyone to think she's tough by association and not because she's worthy.
I knew girls like that in highschool.
CatWoman stood alone and fought like a champ.
Underground Logician said...
Whatever you say, Mr. Gill.
UL,
That is condescending and not worthy of you.
And the anonymous post was from me. I didn't take the time to type in my blog name and address.
I was in a hurry.
I thought it was you.
As to your belief that I'm condescending when I say "Whatever you say, Mr. Gill," I say, I don't care.
I have zero desire to argue with someone who cannot put together a cogent argument. I have absolutely no desire having to justify it any more than what I am right now.
I have put such a thorough and in depth arguement together relating to these documents that it left your theory in tatters (again) amd you know it.
As it stand, these documents prove nothing and there was no WMD in Iraq, as the pretxt for invasion.
Deal with these facts rather than waffle.
DHG:
Nah.
This means you've lost the arguement.
Your beliefs lead you to fight unwinnable wars on matter where your government have betrayed you, yet still you fight for them?
Actually no, I didn't lose the argument because it isn't an argument. I'm leaving you to your dogmatic statements.
Post a Comment
<< Home