More fake “documents” used to push Bush’s war on Iraq, Newsweek reports:
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.)via Laura RozenCurrent 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.
So, the CIA managed to keep the Niger forgeries out of Bush’s Cincinnati speech of October 7, 2002 but the WHIGgers shoehorned this one in:
We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.Though the Saddam-Al Qaida connection is generally scoffed at now and considered about as reliable as the Niger uranium myth, at the time they were trying to scare the American people into a war, the Bushies desperately needed to prove this connection. As the number of American war dead passes 2,000 and the unknown tens of thousands of Iraqi dead continue to mount, consider the consequences of this series of lies. Consider the wasted efforts of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, and then the ISG, searching the sand dunes of Iraq for imaginary WMD. Consider the frustrations of being sent on a deadly dangerous task purely on the basis of fake, worthless “intelligence.” As the Telegraph reported in April of 2004:
US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, “told us what we wanted to hear”.And now we know why. It was just more faked, cooked up propaganda, not “intelligence” at all. This is how the War Party “supports the troops.”“We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq,” the agent said.
“Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”
The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The Bush administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the country’s worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had links to al-Qa’eda.
However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq’s Sunni minority.
[…]
Both President George W Bush and Tony Blair have, to varying degrees, conceded that intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme was misleading. But both continue to maintain that the continued violence since Saddam was ousted is because Iraq is now the front line in the war on terrorism.Yet it now seems that the intelligence on which such claims are based is haphazard, scanty and contradictory