"More wizard words from Oz Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard has once again ventured where lesser leaders dare to tread and has laid into US presidential hopeful Barack Obama over his opposition to the Iraq war, saying it encourages terrorists and threatens to destabilize the Middle East.
‘I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory,’ Howard said on Nine Network television. ‘If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.’
Way to go, John! Not for the first time, I mourn the fact that John Howard can’t run for US President himself.
Meanwhile, the anti-war crowd are making much of the criticism of certain Pentagon officials for conducting their own intelligence analysis before the Iraq war to find links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. As the New York Times reported:
Working under Douglas J. Feith, who at the time was under secretary of defense for policy, the group ‘developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers,’ the report concluded. Excerpts were quoted by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has long been critical of Mr. Feith and other Pentagon officials. The report, and the dueling over its conclusions, shows that bitter divisions over the handling of prewar intelligence remain even after many of the substantive questions have been laid to rest and the principal actors have left the government.
Of course: it has become the articles of anti-war faith (rather than Feith) that There Were No WMD, that Saddam Had No Links With Terror Let Alone With Al Qaeda, and that the dreaded neo-cons Made It All Up in order to pursue their Heinous Conspiracy To Put Us All At Risk. The evidence has always suggested otherwise — and that the CIA in particular, who disregarded or failed to spot the evidence, have subsequently done their damnedest to prevent anyone from making this known to the world. It was frustration with such systematic incompetence and negligence, and their fear that the US and the western world were vulnerable as a result to attack, that led Douglas Feith and these Pentagon officials to conduct their own review of the available intelligence evidence.
As Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review Online:
The IG’s report concludes that a Pentagon unit which scrubbed existing intelligence about Iraq’s terror ties under the leadership of Doug Feith, then Under Secretary for Policy, did not mislead Congress. It further finds that neither Feith nor any other Defense officials engaged in wrong-doing. Nevertheless, acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble huffs and puffs and contends that Feith’s unit still behaved ‘inappropriately.’ Why? Because it dared to question that which we now know for a fact was wrong: the Intelligence Community’s assessments about Iraq, and, in particular, the conventional wisdom that secular Saddam and his Baathists would never collude with Islamic fundamentalists…So the most perilous problem we face is thin, poorly analyzed intelligence driven by faulty assumptions. But still, after all we’ve been through, the IG’s report and those seizing on it would have us believe that critiquing such intelligence, rather than swallowing it whole, is somehow ‘inappropriate.’ Good luck preventing the next attack.
In Britain, however, it is now ‘fact’ that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda. That’s even though the Butler Report and the 9/11 report said there were such links, although there was no evidence of an ‘operational relationship’.
That’s even though in 1998, the Clinton administration publicly accused Iraq of supplying al Qaeda with chemical weapons, expertise and material.
That’s even though CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that information from ‘multiple sources’ revealed:
Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates; one of these associates characterised the relationship as successful.
That’s even though, as Stephen Hayes has documented:
In 1992 the Iraqi Intelligence services compiled a list of its assets. On page 14 of the document, marked “Top Secret” and dated March 28, 1992, is the name of Osama bin Laden, who is reported to have a “good relationship” with the Iraqi intelligence section in Syria. The Defense Intelligence Agency has possession of the document and has assessed that it is accurate. In 1993, Saddam Hussein and bin Laden reached an “understanding” that Islamic radicals would refrain from attacking the Iraqi regime in exchange for unspecified assistance, including weapons development.
This understanding, which was included in the Clinton administration’s indictment of bin Laden in the spring of 1998, has been corroborated by numerous Iraqis and al Qaeda terrorists now in U.S. custody. In 1994, Faruq Hijazi, then deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met face-to-face with bin Laden. Bin Laden requested anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq. Hijazi has detailed the meeting in a custodial interview with U.S. interrogators. In 1995, according to internal Iraqi intelligence documents first reported by the New York Times on June 25, 2004, a “former director of operations for Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with Mr. bin Laden on Feb. 19.” When bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, the document states, Iraqi intelligence sough “other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location.” That same year, Hussein agreed to a request from bin Laden to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state television. In 1997, al Qaeda sent an emissary with the nom de guerre Abdullah al Iraqi to Iraq for training on weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell cited this evidence in his presentation at the UN on February 5, 2003. The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Powell’s presentation on Iraq and terrorism was “reasonable.”
In 1998, according to documents unearthed in Iraq’s Intelligence headquarters in April 2003, al Qaeda sent a “trusted confidante” of bin Laden to Baghdad for 16 days of meetings beginning March 5. Iraqi intelligence paid for his stay in Room 414 of the Mansur al Melia hotel and expressed hope that the envoy would serve as the liaison between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden. The DIA has assessed those documents as authentic. In 1999, a CIA Counterterrorism Center analysis reported on April 13 that four intelligence reports indicate Saddam Hussein has given bin Laden a standing offer of safe haven in Iraq. The CTC report is included in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review on prewar intelligence.
In 2000, Saudi Arabia went on kingdom-wide alert after learning that Iraq had agreed to help al Qaeda attack U.S. and British interests on the peninsula. In 2001, satellite images show large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists displaced after the war in Afghanistan relocating to camps in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Hussein regime. In 2002, a report from the National Security Agency in October reveals that Iraq agreed to provide safe haven, financing and weapons to al Qaeda members relocating in northern Iraq. In 2003, on February 14, the Philippine government ousted Hisham Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, for his involvement in al Qaeda-related terrorist activites. Andrea Domingo, head of Immigration for the Philippine government, told reporters that “studying the movements and activities” of Iraqi intelligence assets in the country, including radical Islamists, revealed an “established network” of terrorists headed by Hussein.
That’s even though the Americans said an al Qaeda terrorist had travelled to traveled to Pakistan in 1998 with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars.
That’s even though an ABC News item in 1999 reported that Osama bin Laden was trying to obtain nukes for al Qaeda and went to Saddam Hussein, one of the few sources who was in a position to help, on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’; that the relationship had started in the Sudan; that Sudanese officials acting on behalf of bin Laden asked representatives of Saddam Hussein for asylum and were told that bin Laden would be welcome in Baghdad.
That’s even though, as the Weekly Standard reported:
We know from these IIS [Iraqi intelligence] documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden’s request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a “trusted confidante” of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden’s longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members “with open arms” before the war, that they “entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation,” and that the regime “strictly and directly” controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan’s King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi’s group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden’s top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.
There’s other evidence too. No matter: Feith and his colleagues are charged with distorting intelligence data to justify the invasion of Iraq. Because for the anti-war crowd, such evidence does not exist. They simply do not see it. They refuse to acknowledge it. To do so would destroy the entire edifice of illusion and fantasy they have constructed over the past three years to retrospectively justify their opposition to the toppling of Saddam by rewriting history. Extraordinary.
Oh — and I still believe there were WMD in pre-war Iraq, too; and that now they are elsewhere. Read the evidence, rather than the propaganda, and go figure."
