London Calling...

On the London terrorist attack, I've been haunting the winger sites for opinion. They tend to be the most invested and when they start in on this blame-game between each other it is a thing of beauty. Generally lefties who try to chime in are tortured by the winger's favorite tool -- crucifiction -- so I've kept a low profile. But the following exchange here between first, the winger CJ, and then the leftie Vaughn, was sheer elegance. There was nothing but pops and squeaks after that. So keep in mind that when "they" throw this at you:

According to the Clinton Justice Department's spring 1998 indictment of bin Laden, "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." (Page 114.)

In what the CIA nicknamed "Operation Dogmeat," two Iraqi students who lived in the Philippines tried to demolish U.S. Information Service headquarters in Manila. Iraqi diplomat Muwufak al Ani met with the bombers five times before the attack. His car even took them near their target on January 19, 1991. Their bomb exploded prematurely, killing Ahmed J. Ahmed, but his accomplice, Abdul Kadham Saad, survived and was whisked to a Manila hospital. Saad, carrying documents bearing two distinct identities, asked staffers to alert the Iraqi embassy, then recited its phone number. (Page 39.)

Around this time, according to former high-level CIA counterterrorist Stanley Bedlington, Hussein paired Iraqi intelligence operatives with members of the Arab Liberation Front to execute attacks. "The Iraqis had given them all passports," he said, "but they were all in numerical sequence." These tell-tale passport numbers helped friendly governments nab these terror teams. (Page 41.)

President George Herbert Walker Bush ignored information that Hussein "was offering state payment to terrorists," then-Senator Al Gore (D., Tennessee) declared on October 15, 1992. Gore also listed more than a dozen examples of Iraq-sponsored terrorism and said "an estimated 1,400 terrorists were operating openly out of Iraq." (Page 41.)

"In 1992, elements of al Qaeda came to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein," Abu Aman Amaleeki, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence, said on ABC's Nightline on September 26, 2002. Speaking from a Kurdish prison, he added: "And among them was Ayman al Zawahiri," bin Laden's chief deputy. "I was present when Ayman al Zawahiri visited Baghdad." (Page 43.)

Former Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) Deputy Director Faruq Hijazi, reports a reliable foreign spy agency, supplied blank Yemeni passports to al Qaeda in 1992. (Page 66.)

Mohammed Salameh, a 1993 World Trade Center attacker, called Baghdad 46 times in the two months before bomb maker Abdul Rahman Yasin flew from Baghdad to New Jersey to join the plot. Salameh's June 1992 phone bill totaled $1,401, which prompted his disconnection for non-payment. After the blast — which killed six individuals and injured 1,042 — Yasin fled to Baghdad, where records and multiple press accounts show he received safe haven and Baathist cash. (Pages 11 and 50.)

Based on a 20-page IIS document discovered in Baghdad, the Defense Intelligence Agency reports that "Alleged conspirators employed by IIS are wanted in connection with the [June 25, 1996] Khobar Towers bombing and the assassination attempt in 1993 of former President Bush." (Page 180.)

In an October 27, 2003 memo, Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith explained Hussein's bonus pay for terrorists: "Iraq increased support to Palestinian groups after major terrorist attacks and...the change in Iraqi relations with al Qaeda after the [1998 east African] embassy bombings followed this pattern." A top Philippine terrorist also said Iraq's payments to the al Qaeda-tied Abu Sayyaf grew after successful assaults. (Page 120.)

ABC News reported on January 14, 1999, that it "has learned that in December [1998] an Iraqi intelligence chief, named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden."

Hijazi "went to Afghanistan in December with the knowledge of the Taliban and met with Osama bin Laden," former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro told National Public Radio's Mike Shuster on February 18, 1999. "It's known through a variety of intelligence reports that the U.S. has, but it's also known through sources in Afghanistan, members of Osama's entourage let it be known that the meeting had taken place." (Page 124.)

On January 5, 2000, Malaysian intelligence photographed September 11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar being escorted through Kuala Lumpur's airport by VIP facilitator Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi recommended to Malaysian Airlines by Baghdad's embassy there. The pair soon were photographed again at al Qaeda's three-day planning summit for the October 2000 U.S.S. Cole and 9/11 attacks. Three separate documents recently unearthed in Iraq identify an Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as a lieutenant colonel in Uday Hussein's elite Saddam Fedayeen. (Page 4)

Memo to communications-addled White House: Release these photos!

Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani is the former Iraqi diplomat suspected of meeting September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta in Prague on April 8, 2001, and possibly June 2, 2000, the day before Atta flew from Prague to Newark, New Jersey. Top secret Pentagon records cite a Czech intelligence report that al Ani "ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office." During the summer of 2000, $99,455 was wired from financial institutions in the United Arab Emirates to Atta's Sun Trust bank account in Florida.(Page 129.)

After evacuating an al Qaeda training camp he ran in Afghanistan as U.S. troops approached, Ansar al-Islam founder Abu Musab al Zarqawi eventually had his leg amputated and replaced with a prosthesis around late May 2002. He was treated in Baghdad's Olympic Hospital, an elite facility whose director was the late Uday Hussein, son of the deposed tyrant. Zarqawi is implicated in ongoing attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and is believed to have sawed off American businessman Nick Berg's head. (Page 167.)

U.S troops inspecting an al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam camp in Iraq discovered, Hayes reports, "several hundred passports belonging to suspected Ansar and al Qaeda fighters, dozens of them bearing visas issued by the Iraqi regime." A passport found on one dead terrorist listed his visit's purpose as "jihad." (Page 172.)

...respond with this:

You originally told me that you were getting your info from the 9-11 report, but you are getting your info from the "Pre-War Intelligence Assessments On Iraq" The "9-11 Report" is a totally different document!

You are reading the report that got us into the damn Iraq war.

You should look at the real 9-11 Commission Report , as well as the Conclusions on Pre-War Intelligence Failures .

A couple of excerpts:

"Conclusion 1. Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence."

"At the time the IC drafted and coordinated the NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in September 2002, most of what intelligence analysts actually "knew" about Iraq's weapons programs pre-dated the 1991 Gulf War, leaving them with very little direct knowledge about the current state of those programs."

"Conclusion 3. The Intelligence Community (1C) suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. This "group think" dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs. This presumption was so strong that formalized IC mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and group think were not utilized."

and in response to "componenets of WMDs were found in 109 cities in Iraq", (again from Vaughn):

No, I haven't missed this. It's all in the Deulfer Report. And I don't doubt that Saddam was constantly trying to make a weapon. But, Saddam was far from being able to manufacture anything that could be considered a threat to anybody but himself and his people. We had him contained, and we should have continued practicing containment until we could fully address the issue of terrorism which was flourishing outside of Iraq. Because, that was the post-9-11 goal -- fighting terrorism. They type that allowed SAUDI ARABIANS training in AFGHANISTAN under OSAMA BIN LADEN to fly airplanes into buildings in the UNITED STATES (emphasis on what the goals should have been). Would it have been so difficult to put more pressure on Iraq, and continue fighting terrorists in every country where they existed with the help of the local governments? After 9-11, nearly every leader of every country was willing to put forth an effort to address terrorism. But the trumped up story about WMDs (that existed in disparate pieces across Iraq -- pieces that are so vaguely defined that we probably have elements in our own garages), and then the story about freeing the Iraqis, then the story about spreading democracy, etc. etc. -- it was just too much for normal people to handle.

We should have been fighting terrorism -- not nation building. If you believe that the purpose of Iraq was spreading the seeds of democracy so terrorism can be addressed in the M.E., well it doesn't seem to have worked. It was a flawed concept from the start. Every time we set foot on soil that is owned by Muslims, we create a terrorist. We knew that going in. Now, we have more terrorists than before the invasion -- more than the world has ever seen.

When will an admission, of "Oh, shit, we screwed up" ever come? It won't. Our "CEO President" is turning out to be more like Kenneth Lay as a CEO. He wanted to run this country like a business, but he has never acted to correct errors like a good businessman would do.