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This article originally provided by the Center for American ProgressAlso see below: Think Again: No
Link? Who Knew? Thursday 17 June 2004 "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." The 9/11 Commission informed us on Wednesday morning "no credible evidence" existed of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda in attacks against the United States. Many Americans who have not been paying close attention will be surprised to hear this. After all, it comes just two days after Vice President Dick Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaeda, an assertion that the Associated Press, with a degree of reticence that ended up lending credence to a lie, explained, "has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers." Let us take a moment, however, and examine the Bush administration campaign to convince Americans of something that was not true and for which they never had any convincing evidence. After all, at the moment we went to war with Iraq, a full 70 percent of Americans questioned told pollsters that Iraq had been responsible, in total or in part, for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Nearly 50 percent had actually invented the belief that a majority of the hijackers had been Iraqis. Both the Bush administration and much of the media-usually accused of being liberal, anti-war and anti-Bush-treat these beliefs as if they sprung out of thin air-as if nothing claimed by the administration or reported by the so-called "liberal media" could possibly have contributed to this widespread misimpression that paved the road for what has turned out to be a catastrophic war. Well, take a look at what the American people were seeing and hearing from their leaders, along with their alleged watchdogs charged by the First Amendment with keeping those leaders accountable. In the period leading up to the war, President Bush frequently couched his remarks to be deliberately misleading on this topic without actually crossing over the line into what all would recognize as a lie. For instance, in his 2003 State of the Union, Bush claimed, "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda,…Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." The theme of Saddam's training and funding of "al Qaeda–type organizations before, al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations" was a constant feature of the president's speeches. Following a terrorist attack in Bali that left over 180 people dead, Bush insisted that Saddam planned to employ al-Qaida as his own "forward army" against the West. In a speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, Bush charged, "Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder.... And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq." To Americans he used simple scare tactics that had no basis in recent reality. Borrowing a tactic from the late John Lennon, Bush asked, "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein," in his 2003 State of the Union Address. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. " Though he never came up with any evidence at all, Bush never gave up this particular line of argument. Just before the war began, he cried in similarly misleading terms, "The Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on." And in seeking to justify the war in its increasingly unpleasant aftermath before a July 4, 2003, audience of military families at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Bush fell back on his same rhetorical crutch: "Since that September day," he intoned, again making reference to the al Qaeda attack to justify his war against Iraq, "the United States will not stand by and wait for another attack or trust in the restraint and good intentions of evil men. We will not permit any terrorist group or outlaw regime to threaten us with weapons of mass murder." Per usual, the president offered no evidence nor even discernible logic to defend his position. Others in the administration naturally followed suit: Cheney, for instance, was perhaps most aggressive. He asked the audience of a Sunday morning talk show to imagine if, on 9/11, al Qaeda had "had a nuclear weapon and detonated it in the middle of one of our cities, or if they had unleashed . . . biological weapons of some kind, smallpox or anthrax." He then tied that to evidence found in Afghanistan of how al Qaeda leaders "have done everything they could to acquire those capabilities over the years." Recall that he was doing so in support of a war not against al Qaeda, but Iraq. Condoleezza Rice claimed, "There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented." Well, then, asks Arianna Huffington quite logically, "Why not document them?" The 9/11 Commission's report will not be news to anyone but the majority of the American people who believed their president. For it is not accurate to say that the administration was honestly mistaken in these claims. They knew, but they chose to mislead the country in order to justify the war they had decided upon, according to ex-administration sources like Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke, long before 9/11. "The al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," explains Greg Thielmann, former director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things." According to the State Department's annual report on the general subject, titled Patterns of Global Terrorism, Baghdad had no ties to al Qaeda or, for that matter, to any of the "al Qaeda–type organizations" operating in the Middle East and Africa. Although the report finds that Iraq has assisted "numerous terrorist groups," those outfits are all secular and "Marxist" or "socialist" in ideology-in other words, "infidels," the insult used by bin Laden to describe Saddam. That same report, released last year, notes that the "main focus" of Saddam's terror expenditures has been on "dissident Iraqi activity overseas." They knew. They just didn't care.
White House Statements on
Iraq, al-Qaida Wednesday 16 June 2004 Comments by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice alleging links between al-Qaida and Iraq under Saddam Hussein: 2002: Bush, Oct. 7: "We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy - the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade" and "we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." 2003: Bush, Feb. 6: "Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaida have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al-Qaida" and "Iraq has also provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons training." 2004: Cheney, Monday: Saddam Hussein
"had long-established ties with al-Qaida."
Defiant Bush and Blair Insist
Saddam Had al-Qa'ida Links Friday 18 June 2004 President George Bush and the Prime Minister's Office yesterday defied the independent US commission on 11 September and insisted that there were links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. The report by the commission on Wednesday dealt a devastating blow to the credibility to one of President Bush's reasons for going to war against Iraq by finding there was no credible evidence linking Saddam's regime to Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation. In a carefully co-ordinated riposte to the commission, London and Washington both insisted that Saddam had allowed al-Qa'ida to operate inside Iraq before the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qa'ida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida," Mr Bush said. "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida." A few hours earlier, Tony Blair insisted that Saddam had created "a permissive environment" for terrorists and al-Qa'ida operatives in Iraq. "The Prime Minister has always said Saddam created a permissive environment for terrorism and we know that the people affiliated to al-Qa'ida operated in Iraq," said a spokesman for Mr Blair. "The Prime Minister always made it clear that Saddam's was a rogue state which threatened the security of the region and the world." In contrast to the US administration, Tony Blair has carefully avoided claims that Saddam was involved in the 11 September attacks. Even the so-called "dodgy dossier" avoided making such a claim. Challenged by The Independent, the Downing Street spokesman said the Government was not claiming a direct link between the attackers on 11 September and Saddam, but insisted there was evidence that Saddam had created a "permissive regime" in which al-Qa'ida could operate. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, also refused to back down. He told al-Jazeera television there was a connection between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. "We have seen these connections ... and we stick to that," he said. "We have not said it was related to 9/11." The link was a key factor in President Bush's justification for the war. But it did not play a part in Mr Blair's argument for action, which rested entirely on Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. In a further embarrassment for the Bush administration yesterday, the independent commission reported that America's defence forces failed to respond quickly enough on the morning of 11 September. The ensuing chaos and miscommunications caused a crucial delay in relaying orders for the planes to be intercepted and shot down. "On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen," the report asserted. "What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defence by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced." Such was the lack of coordination between air traffic controllers, military officials and senior members of the government, that when Mr Cheney, the Vice-President, finally authorised shooting down the planes they had already hit their targets. Yet, Mr Cheney briefly believed that two of the planes had in fact been shot down. "It's my understanding that they've already taken a couple of aircraft out," Mr Cheney told the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in a telephone conversation, the transcript of which was released last night. The panel also played segments of tapes carrying portions of other conversations from that day. One apparently carried words spoken by Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, while he was at the controls of American Airlines flight 11, which took off from Boston and was the first plane to strike the World Trade Centre. "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport," Atta is heard telling the passengers. Later he warns: "If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane." The commission held its final public hearing yesterday on the terror strikes before issuing a complete and final report next month.
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