So, the staff of the 9-11 Commission downplays the connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, despite extensive evidence to the contrary. And an eagerly gullible press turns this sentence...
We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.
... into sweeping conclusions like this:
Already in question, President Bush's justification for war in Iraq has suffered another major setback.An independent commission threw cold water Wednesday on the administration's insistent claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. That comes on top of the administration's failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Both ideas had been central ingredients of Bush's rationale for invading.
Well, Andrew C. McCarthy, the former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution of the al Qaeda cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, reviews the evidence and begs to differ.
This is clear — if anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" — from the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation sentence, which is worth parsing since it is already being gleefully misreported: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." (Italics mine.) That is, the staff is not saying al Qaeda and Iraq did cooperate — far from it. The staff seems to be saying: "they appear to have cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific terrorist attack, such as 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, or the embassy bombings."The same might, of course, be said about the deposed Taliban government in Afghanistan. Before anyone gets unhinged, I am not suggesting that bin Laden's ties to Iraq were as extensive as his connections to Afghanistan. But as is the case with Iraq, no one has yet tied the Taliban to a direct attack on the United States, although no one doubts for a moment that deposing the Taliban post-9/11 was absolutely the right thing to do.
I would point out, moreover, that al Qaeda is a full-time terrorist organization — it does not have the same pretensions as, say, Sinn Fein or Hamas, to be a part-time political party. Al Qaeda's time is fully devoted to conducting terrorist attacks and planning terrorist attacks. Thus, if a country cooperates with al Qaeda, it is cooperating in (or facilitating, abetting, promoting — you choose the euphemism) terrorism. What difference should it make that no one can find an actual bomb that was once in Saddam's closet and ended up at the Cole's hull? If al Qaeda and Iraq were cooperating, they had to be cooperating on terrorism, and as al Qaeda made no secret that it existed for the narrow purpose of inflicting terrorism on the United States, exactly what should we suppose Saddam was hoping to achieve by cooperating with bin Laden?
Among other crucial pieces of information, McCarthy reminds us of another sentence, this from the original 1998 (i.e., pre-Bush) U.S. indictment of Osama bin Laden:
In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.
Several things are clear. This story is far from told. The 9-11 Commission is a wasteful fraud. And, based on what was displayed in today's hearing, Bob Kerrey is a showboating ass.
Posted by Alan at June 17, 2004 08:52 PM