Missing Links Found

[acmavm]

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: November 24, 2003

WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Missing Links Found
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: November 24, 2003

>SNIP>
WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.

On weeklystandard.com, you can find chunks of a 16-page letter by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, responding to a Senate Intelligence Committee request for evidence of Saddam-bin Laden collaboration. Fifty specific instances from C.I.A., N.S.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon files are described, many from "sensitive reporting" never made public.

The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of "raw reports or products" of U.S. intelligence agencies on "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," cautioning that it "drew no conclusions." But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of "custodial interviews" of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial.

-MORE-

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What a load of crap. The New York Times has become a piece of crap newspaper. No big stories about the protests in London, and now this tripe washes up on the shore again.

What a joke.

[Ganja Ninja]

1. All I had to do was read the by line to know this was horse s**t.

William Saf-Liar

[xchrom]

2. he is trying to re-justify

imperial pre-emption.
he is to be ridiculed, laughed at, scorned, and publicly debased for carrying water for the bushco liemeisters.
what a fool.

[Brotherjohn]

3. If Al-Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad...

... just how does that show that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda?

By that reasoning, Bush is also an ally of Al Qaeda, and is in part responsible for 9-11, because Al Qaeda had set up sleeper cells in the United States prior to 9-11.

This is utter bulls***. Al-Zarqawi's organization, Ansar Al-Islam, was an avowed enemy of Hussein. Even so, what, exactly, is wrong with the head of a country making a pact with an enemy to help thwart an imminent invasion of the country they both share? IF he was setting up "cells" in Baghdad to counter an imminent invasion, it seems to me that simply amounts to self-defense. And IF he was working with Hussein, why would they have to be "sleeper" cells?

As for the regurgitation of the Atta/Iraq meeting in Prague... PLEASE. It is not simply the FBI and rental car records that have debunked that myth (besides which if I recall, the rental car story was always given with a grain of salt). The alleged meeting has been roundly debunked by the CIA, FBI, foreign intelligence, and Czechoslovakia, and many more thoroughly researched journalistic investigations than the two that Safire has cherry-picked. All he puts forward is "well, you can't prove they DIDN'T meet". Again, with the "disprove a negative" thing!.

Hearsay and rumor do not amount to a cassus belli... especially for an unprecedented pre-emptive war. It seems to me that Safire's column, and the ones to which he cites as providing "missing Links" between Saddam and Al Qaeda, provide nothing of the sort. They merely ask the same old tired questions that have already been thoroughly answered.

[underpants]

6. Thank you I read the article while picking up lunch

I was reading it like Safire was proving the existance of Santa Clause (bearing great gifts for W&Co.)

I didn't even remember the rental car part of the story. Notice he can't prove that Atta didn't use his credit card ($250,000 in debt) at that time in Va. Beach. Also notice that Safire thinking that anyone who has that much money (see above) at his disposal and was training to do what we think he did wouldn't have slipped a little extra cash ( a lot would do it) to the rental clerk. Ivory tower.

[Terwilliger]

4. Billy "yeah, I'm not biased" Safire?

Give me a break.

[seasat]

5. The repeating of the white-out document is silly.

One of the things on the list is the document with the whited out Al Queda references. This document was supposedly found by journalists looking over the rubble of Iraq's information ministry after it had been combed over by both US military intelligence and the FBI. The same journalists also found a document linking a British anti-war legislator and Iraq. The document on the British citzen was found to be a forgery. It turned out that an former Iraqi general was selling forged documents to journalists. I never heard anymore mention of the white-out document until this memo. I think it was part of the forgery group, if I recall correctly.