Sound Politics Public Blog: No Smoking Gun Found (Part Duex)

March 11, 2008

No Smoking Gun Found (Part Duex)

The on-going argument that the current administration has put forth with regards to the Iraq war was based a lot on two major premises. The first premise was that Sadaam was attempting to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and could provide them to terrorist groups. The second premise was that there was a link between Sadaam and al Qaeda. Since al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, then we were justified in going after countries that were supporting them. We didn't want Sadaam to provide al Qaeda with WMD's.

ABC News reports today that a comprehensive U.S. Military analysis of 600,000 Iraqi documents seized by U.S. forces after the invasion concluded that there was no link between Sadaam and al Qaeda.

The concluding paragraph in the article is most interesting:

"The primary target, however, of Saddam's terror activities was not the United States, and not Israel. "The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq." Saddam's primary aim was self preservation and the elimination of potential internal threats to his power."

Hopefully, this will put to rest the propoganda that this administration has putting forth that Iraq attacked us on 9/11.

Posted by thcase at March 11, 2008 10:29 AM | Email This

Comments

1. I will let others address the al Quaeda matter.

The ongoing obsession over the supposed Bush 'lies about WMD' will be recorded by history as one of the biggest idiocies ever. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most observers assumed that Saddam had WMD stockpiles. As late as March '03, Saddam's own senior officers still believed it.

In Mar. 03, after the invasion began, Saddam issued a cryptic order to "hold the coalition for eight days, and leave the rest to [me]." His senior people were relieved, because they assumed it meant that Saddam still had a secret cache of WMD. They were used to being left out of the loop, because Saddam trusted no one. (from "Cobra II: The inside Story of the Invasion and occupation of Iraq," by NYT reporter Michael Gordon and Gen Bernard Trainor, p190).

The fact that the 'Bush lied, thousands died' mantra gained so much traction in spite of being insanely stupid is worrisome.

Posted by: russell garrard on March 11, 2008 12:38 PM

2. I will only note one trivial point.

All the stories note there was no "direct operational link", but that is not to say there was no contact or connection.

My only aother question is that 'millions' of pages of documents were siezed. Only 600k were studied. Is this a complete study?

Finally note this:

http://iraqdocs.blogspot.com/2006/09/iraqi-documents-rebut-senate.html

So maybe it depends on which documents you read.

Posted by: karl on March 11, 2008 05:52 PM

3. Not to mention that allot of the intelligence predated the Bush Administration. Remember that George Tennet, the head of the CIA at the time, was also the head of CIA during the Clinton Administration. Not to mention it was also the French Government who also claimed that Saddam had WMD's (not quite a Bush ally).

I also saw that one of the FBI agents that debriefed Saddam after he was captured has recently retired and has stated that Saddam purposely mislead the world into thinking that he did still have WMD's to make himself seem more of a threat so he could continue to bully his way around the middle east and he was trying to reconstruct his WMD program but having difficulties.

As for the Al Qaeda link, I cannot say one way or another if there was or was not. What I can say is yes there were in fact terrorists found in Iraq during the invasion. I know this as I was on the Forward Operating Base where they were being held in 2004 (the base was set up in late spring of 2003 when they caught the terrorists). There were 3500 members of a group placed on the terrorist watch list by President CLinton. This group is known as the PMOI (Peoples Muhjadeen Of Iran). It is believed that they helped Saddam gas the Kurds and also played a part in the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut in the 80's. So there is a link between Saddam and Teroorists. You ask why has it not been in the news your guess is as good as mine.

Posted by: TrueSoldier on March 12, 2008 06:48 AM

4. I don't think anyone said there was a direct link between alQeda and Hussein.

However, there is one interesting tidbit that most people leave out- Abu Nidal, or whatever, committed suicide in Iraq just before the invasion. He committed suicide by shooting several different caliper guns into himself and thusly killing himself and those were from some distance away.

This guy was the smoking gun linking Hussein with all the terrorists.

Posted by: swatter on March 12, 2008 07:15 AM

5. Read the actual report and decide for yourself how accurate ABC's reporting was.

For an analysis, go here.

Posted by: SouthernRoots on March 14, 2008 06:32 AM