Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted
Pentagon Report Says Contacts Were Limited
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 6, 2007; A01
Captured Iraqi do ents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.
( As the military remains totally ineffective in Iraq, the Pentagon starts campaign to show how head set up the military and sent it into a bogus war. You also hear the military brass recently saying their is no military solution in Iraq, only a political solution, throwing the responsibility for losing Iraq back on the dubya/ head/condi )
The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.
( but head dribbled on for years saysing Saddam and al Quaida were significantly allied, and Saddam was involved in WTC. Is head now going to go after General Gimble's wife or kids to discredit and slime Gimble for daring to challenge head's murderous lies? )
The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.
"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.
The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.
Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.
"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on specific terrorist operations," that CIA report said, adding that discussions on the issue were "necessarily speculative."
The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than cooperating operationally.
The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.
But the contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office -- and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war -- were publicly praised by Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a cir stance the Pentagon report cites in do enting the impact of what it described as "inappropriate" work.
Feith has vigorously defended his work, accusing Gimble of "giving bad advice based on incomplete fact-finding and poor logic," and charging that the acting inspector general has been "cheered on by the chairmen of the Senate intelligence and armed services committees." In January, Feith's successor at the Pentagon, Eric S. Edelman, wrote a 52-page rebuttal to the inspector general's report that disputed its analysis and its recommendations for Pentagon reform.
Cheney's public statements before and after the war about the risks posed by Iraq have closely tracked the briefing Feith's office presented to the vice president's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. That includes the briefing's depiction of an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence official and one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers as one of eight "Known Iraq-Al Qaida Contacts."
( So to justify the head/PNAC/AIE war to grab oil, head had Feit, Edelman, Libby, etc distort and discredit the mutliple sources of intel that didnt support their oil war )
The defense report states that at the time, "the intelligence community disagreed with the briefing's assessment that the alleged meeting cons uted a 'known contact' " -- a cir stance that the report said was known to Feith's office. But his office had bluntly concluded in a July 2002 critique of a CIA report on Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that the CIA's interpretation of the facts it cited "ought to be ignored."
The briefing to Libby was also presented with slight variations to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. It was prepared in part by someone whom the defense report described as a "junior Naval Reservist" intelligence analyst detailed to Feith's office from the DIA. The person is not named in the report, but Edelman wrote that she was requested by Feith's office.
The briefing, a copy of which was declassified and released yesterday by Levin, goes so far as to state that "Fragmentary reporting points to possible Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11 but also in previous al Qaida attacks." That idea was dismissed in 2004 by a presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, noting that "no credible evidence" existed to support it.
When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by Feith's office -- led "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and taking issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's rebuttal was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but evidently not with others.
Edelman complained in his own account of the incident that a senior Joint Chiefs analyst -- in responding to a suggestion by the DIA analyst that the "Making the Case" account be widely circulated -- told its author that "putting it out there would be playing into the hands of people" such as then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and belittled the author for trying to support "some agenda of people in the building."
But the inspector general's report, in a footnote, commented that it is "noteworthy . . . that post-war debriefs of Sadaam Hussein, [former Iraqi foreign minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi intelligence minister Mani al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, as well as do ent exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in all categories" alleged by Feith's office.
From these sources, the report added, "the terms the Intelligence Community used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida were validated, [namely] 'no conclusive signs,' and 'direct cooperation . . . has not been established.' "
Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.
Staff writer Dafna Linzer and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
=====================
So No WMD
No Saddam - WTC link
No Saddam - al Quaida link
No Zarqawi - Al Quaida link before 2004.
So why did head/PNAC/AEI want this bogus war so badly, going back to 2000 and before? To grab the low-cost, high-quality Iraqi oil.
Impeach dubya and head.
WTF, you cracked out foo....
I never said anything...concerning Iraq being linked to 911. I never said anything about Zarqawi and when he went into Iraq and became affiliated with Al-Qaeda. .
Don't attribute that to me.
All I have ever said, is that we had legal recourse to go into Iraq based on violation of cease fire agreements...and we did.
As for this other ...
And another thing....
Who gives a what terrorist group Zarqawi was affiliated with? He was still a terrorist.
I didn't even know that...
you are telling me there were terrorist groups in Iraq?
The whole ing movement needs to go. IF they advocate suicide bombing, nuclear holocaust, and hostage taking, and deliberate targeting of civilllians... them. No matter who they hate...and whose problem they are.
That needs to go...
And boutons, you are an anti-American..just stop lying about it.
Go yourself, whott.
You bought and endlessly supported every ing lie dubya and head spewed.
Actually...I wasn't and still don't pay much attention to the rhetoric.
Whether Saddam had WMD or not was irrelevant to whether or not he needed to be gone...
He violated the sanctions, he kicked out the weapons inspectors, he violated the cease fire and he was a military threat to every country in that region if we weren't there to fence him in.
And I don't care what you think...
All those leaders in the Mid-East need to be gone.
The ones in Saudi
The ones in Egypt
The ones in Syria
The ones in Iraq(check)
The ones in Iran
These are not popularly elected governments...they are the puppet governments but in place by Europe(or resultant from) as they carved up the Middle East.
And they need to be gone, they sit on all the world's wealth, while their people starve, they have no civil rights for women or relgious or ethnic minorities(he;; they don't have them for the muslims)...
They are fascists that are intolerant and do not buy into religious equality.
They need to be gone...and they need to be gone now, the leaders that create them need to be gone...before nuke tech proliferates the mid-east.
And you are a flat out insane madman if you think otherwise.
You are stupid if you think Bush causes terrorism...you are stupid if you think sanctions work to remove entrenched dictators, and you are stupid if you think backing down to them will gain their respect and friendship...
And you are truly a fool if you think doing nothing was going to prevent their(terrorist) spread and growing threat.
These people are power seizing despots, that are illequippted to rule popluations of 20+ million people.
off boutons...you show your true colors time and time again.
While I think a lot of the libs are misguided and naive and am usually only trolling them for being stupid...you are definitely anti-American. You are definitely a dhimmi .
Last edited by whottt; 04-06-2007 at 03:51 AM.
Yeah -- to be fair, this should be directed at Yoni more than anyone.
His rebuttal will be "They're still translating the do ents!"
Boutons loves Genocide!!!!!
Hooray mass murder!!!!!!
And to think as recently as yesterday is still talking of the Al-Qaeda- Iraq link..I hate that evil er
Funny how bush and cheney supporters always give the same excuse.."it doesn't matter if Saddam had WMD's or was linked to 9/11.." blah, blah, blah..yet they were the main reasons bush and cheney shoved down the American public's throats. Some like whottt and yoni swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Here's another take:
Pentagon Officer Created Phony Intel on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link
By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report
Friday 06 April 2007
Newly released do ents confirm that a Pentagon unit knowingly cooked up intelligence claiming a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.
A report prepared by the Defense Department's Inspector General for Carl Levin, the Democratic Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, explicitly shows how former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith used his defense department position to cook intelligence claiming a connection between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Inspector General's report, "Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy," focuses specifically on Feith's intelligence gathering operations in the months prior to the March 2003 invasion. An executive summary of the report was declassified in February. The full report was declassified and released Thursday at Levin's request.
"It is important for the public to see why the Pentagon's inspector general concluded that Secretary Feith's office 'developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,' which included 'conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community,' and why the Inspector General concluded that these actions were 'inappropriate,'" Levin said. "Until today, those details were classified and outside the public's view."
Do ents released in conjunction with the inspector general's findings include a July 25, 2002 memorandum and briefing from Feith's Office of Special Plans led "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" that claimed a "mature, symbiotic relationship [between Iraq and al-Qaida]" existed.
But according to the IG's declassified report, "a Senior Intelligence Analyst working in the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) countered point-by-point, each instance of an alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida ..."
According to the IG report, both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had throughly examined the possibility of an active relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and determined there were "no conclusive signs [of a relationship]," and "direct cooperation ... has not been established."
Feith's Office of Special Plans, however, created a briefing based on a previous report, "Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al Qaida." The presentation was aimed at discrediting the conclusions of the CIA and the DIA.
"The very le of the Feith briefing slides [Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al Qaida] contradicts his claim on February 16, 2007 that 'we didn't do intelligence assessments,' as well as his claim on February 14, 2007 that the briefing was simply 'a critique of the CIA's work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship,' and no more than an effort to 'raise questions about CIA work,'" Levin said Thursday.
Specifically, one slide led "Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information," called the expertise of the Intelligence Community into question. According to the report, the Office of Special Plans, a policy shop with no official role in intelligence collection or vetting, "accuse[d] the Intelligence Community of applying a standard requiring juridical evidence for reports, underestimating the importance for both Iraq and al-Qaida to keep their relationship hidden, and assuming that the two would not cooperate because of religious differences." This particular slide was omitted from the presentation when it was given to the directors of the CIA and the DIA.
In a statement released in February, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, said, "the Senate intelligence committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law."
The last slide of the presentation concludes with a hypothetical assertion that an Iraq/al-Qaida "relationship would be compartmented by both sides; closely guarded secret; indications of excellent operational security by both parties," implying that this relationship existed but was so secret that it would be impossible for the CIA or DIA to discover it.
On August 15, 2002, a briefing on Feith's findings was held by former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenent. However, left out of the presentation was the slide led "Fundamental Problems With How the Intelligence Community is Assessing Information," because according to the IG report, Feith thought "it had a critical tone."
( "There They Go Again", suppressing doubts about intel, while outright fabricating their own intel. Waiting for Yoni to find a radical right blog fantasy proving all the fantastic Saddam-al Qaida cooperation ..... )
After this briefing was presented to the DIA and CIA, Tenent told Feith, "get this back into analytical channels and out of policy channels."
Despite being rebuked, Feith fast-tracked the information and presented the findings to then Deputy National Security Director Steven Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney
According to Thursday's IG report, the briefing was altered to include not only the slide that was critical of the work done by the Intelligence Community, but also a new slide en led "Facilitation: Atta Meeting in Prague." According to the IG report, this new slide "discussed the alleged meeting between [al-Qaida hijacker] Mohammad Atta and [Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmad] al-Ani in April 2001 in Prague without caveats regarding Intelligence Community consesnus."
But the IG states that the CIA "called the reporting on the alleged meeting between Atta and al-Ani as 'inconclusive,'" yet Feith's Office of Special Plans presented it to these top officials of the Bush administration as fact and it was subsequently used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney in speeches prior to the March 2003 invasion.
Long after the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida was debunked, Bush continued to insist it existed. On June 17, 2004, in response to the 9/11 Commission report, Bush said "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda."
===============
The ing, lying, murderous mother ers.
The Truth Is Being Told
Impeach dubya and head
Of course the cat Al Zarqawi was never in Iraq. NorAnd to think as recently as yesterday is still talking of the Al-Qaeda- Iraq link..I hate that evil er
any other Al-Qaeda folks, right? And they aren't there now
so we should just get out. So who is evil. Well Bush of
course.
You know why it's not a big deal to me?
Because EVERYONE was saying they had them and our intelligence had deteriorated.
Straight up answer this question...
Did Bill Clinton say Saddam had them, or was getting close?
Did Koif Anan?
Did John Kerry?
Did Hilary?
Did Ted Kennedy?
Hans Blix?
Did they? or Did they not?
Before Bush was even in the whitehouse?
This doesn't even take into account that they did find the materials to make WMD, this doesn't take into account that Hussein was getting sanctioned materials via the OFF program from the countries who opposed this war.
This doesn't take into account...that, hey, he only 3 months to get rid of them...for all we know he sent them to Iran and that's sped Iran's nuke program.
I could care less that Saddam didn't have them...
Scratch that, I am glad he didn't have them, and I am glad he is gone.
You want to be upset because Saddam Hussein is gone? Be my guest...I think that makes you a really confused individual with a distorted sense of right and wrong.
The whole point is that "intel" was totally irrelevant to WHIG.
As the British guy said "The WH had a (ideological) policy of war on Iraq, and the "intel" was being "fixed" around that policy".
Absolutely nothing we have learned since Feb 2003 has refuted that allegation. In fact, EVERYTHING we know now supports that allegation as being absolutely the case.
Going to war isn't a "faith-based" decision, where everybody "believed" there were WMD.
The best the WH could come up with as HARD evidence to give to Powell to win the UN vote was the mobile bio-weapons labs, which even the CIA/NSA/whatever knew, BEFORE Powell's speech, to be total bull , but they let him embarrassingly on his honorable career anyway.
Intelligence about Iraq was totally irrelevant to the WHIG/PNAC/AEI/nec- s. That cabal had decided to go after Iraqi oil before the 2000 election (dubya was talking about Saddam in his first cabinet meeting). The neo- cabal exploited 9/11, the war on terra, fixed up the intelligence on Saddam, and abused the benefit of the doubt from and goodwill of the US people to suit their oil-grab war.
The Truth Is Being Told
Impeach dubya and head
Of course the cat Al Zarqawi was never in Iraq. Nor
any other Al-Qaeda folks, right? And they aren't there now
so we should just get out. So who is evil. Well Bush of
course.
Please Ray I never said Bush is evil. He just happened to destabilize the Middle East....In 5 yrs which is very impressive.
SO being an opressive dictator is ok as long as you are stable?
And you wonder why the Mid-Easterners hate us....
That was exactly what Europe said when they forced a bunch of clashing ethnic groups and religious sects together...ehh, we'll just stick some brutal dictators in there to control them.
That cavalier at ude was also what lead to promising the Jews and the Palestinians the same ing land...
They were like, who cares as long as we get rid of the jews from Europe? The Arabs will kill them off in no time.
You are the ultimate elitist and the ultimate snob.
And not only will your at ude not fix the middle east....
It was what created it as it currently sits.
Last edited by whottt; 04-06-2007 at 09:07 PM.
Since when was the ME EVER stabilized?
Since when was the ME EVER stabilized?
Ok I stand corrected. He has created a 'less stable' ME since he came into office. Be proud snake!
"opressive dictator is ok as long as you are stable?"
Stable Iraq under Saddam, a counterweight to Iran, was a of a lot better than the Iraq hole that dubya has created.
And don't play the "dubya is such a humanitarian, sympathetic saint to want to free the Iraqi people from Saddam" card because that was NOT the stated reason for going into Iraq, WMD was, followed by Saddam-did-WTC, and Saddam+al Quaida. The payoff for going into Iraq was the (privatized) oil-production-sharing agreements for the US/UK oilcos.
"Saddam was a bad guy" and "bring democracy to Iraq" were not in the (final) top 3 bull reasons. And those reasons would NOT have been sellable to the US and world. WMD was the overhwelmingly primary reason, as used by Powell to win the UN backing.
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998.
What a stupid y ou are.
Can you read? Can you read you dumb ?
Can you ing read, you dumbass?
Can you read?
Can you read?
Can you ing read?
What part of every one said that don't you ing get?
What part of...his WMD were further along in91 than any intelligence indicated?
what partof, we tried to make it a multilateral UN effort, a multilateral effort, don't you ing get?
What part of, the countries that mainly opposed us had the post sanction development deals?
WHat part of, he should have been taken out 15 years earlier don't you get?
Damn.
If you are going to be anti-war and anti American then do it...but stop being an illiterate asswipe spouting a bunch of half truth propagnadized newblurbs.
Damn you are ing stupid.
SO why was Bush for Vietnam? For the Oil?
You mean why did he hide in Alabama during Vietnam.
Well sure he did. The ME was such a stable region before
9/11. I just keep forgetting.
The only head and sucker is the original poster in this thread.
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