Freeper coworker claims Iraq/Al Qaida connection; need help debunking

My freeper colleague sent me this to support his claim that there was a pre-war connection between Iraq and Al Qaida:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp

I noticed that the leaked memo the article referenced was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith is a rabid anti-arab neo-con:
http://middleeastinfo.org/article701.html

Feith is also the head of the Office of Special Plans:
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Special_Plans

The office is accused of cherry-picking, if not outright falsifying, evidence justifying war in Iraq.

Anything else i should say to him?

Is a piece of right wing crap. Ask your buddy for an article from a mainstream publication.

Gaaahhh, just reading the masthead makes my skin crawl.

If mainstream is liberal biased and only the neocon rags are true you have lost. Actually, he has lost but will never know it.

Just tell them they are stupid, ignorant, stupid, fucking, assholes.
Is that enough ammunition?

even you can do it :)

dictatorships like Saddam Hussein's keep impeccable records. The US has access to all this data now, and there are no records of meetings between Iraq and al-quada beyond what would be expected of a state in the middle east and an Islamic multi-national. In other words, there is no record that Iraq ever knowingly met or planned or financed al-quada. The only 'evidence' is testimony from the same people who were convinced that a: people would dance in the streets, and b: that there were piles of chemical and biological weapons lying around for the taking.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=421588

Long interview with retired Army Lt.COl. Karen Kwiatkowski
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php

So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?

We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.

It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.



Can you be specific?

One item that was dropped was in November <2002>. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t happen.

Her regular column
http://www.militaryweek.com/kk021004.shtml

fundamentalist Islam extremist terrorists from Saudi Arabia man.
It boggles the mind...

That interview pretty much eviscerates that theory. You might find bits and pieces of that on the truthout.org site in their archives.

I am not going to change his mind. However, when he emails everybody with his RW stuff, I can delight in taking the wind out of what he says to everybody else.

I've noticed that he usually doesn't include me on his send list, but I get it forwarded to me by somebody else.

:yourock:

BTW, is it the same fellow from the excruciatingly long debate on Evolution?

Fromthe Cato Institute a year ago.

The idea that Saddam Hussein would trust Al Qaeda enough to give them chemical or biological weapons - and trust them to keep quiet about it - is simply not plausible.

Bin Laden has long considered Saddam Hussein an infidel enemy. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden offered to assemble his mujahedeen to battle Hussein and protect the Arabian peninsula.

Peter Bergen, the CNN terrorism expert who interviewed Bin Laden in 1998, noted that Bin Laden indicted Hussein as "a bad Muslim."

Of course, cooperation is possible; sworn enemies often collude when their interests coincide - most famously in the Nazi-Soviet nonagression pact of 1939. But Hussein, as a student and admirer of Stalin, knows how that turned out - with the Russian dictator double-crossed and almost destroyed by his Nazi ally.

Al Qaeda wants the Hussein regime overthrown. There's also good reason to believe they want to incite a US invasion of Iraq to draw new recruits against an alliance aimed at conquering the Middle East. Provoking a crackdown by the enemy has been a key terrorist strategy for as long as there have been terrorists.

Getting Iraqi WMDs, and then revealing that Hussein gave them the weapons, would give Al Qaeda a war that would finish Saddam's "infidel" regime and bring "the jurisdiction of the socialists" to an end. Did Saddam rise to the top of a totalitarian dictatorship by being quite so trusting?

Saddam has had longstanding ties with anti-Israeli terror groups, and had chemical weapons for over 20 years. Yet there has never been a nerve gas attack in Israel. Why? Because Israel has nuclear weapons and conventional superiority, and Hussein wants to live. If he's ever considered passing off chemical weapons to Palestinian terrorists, he decided that he wouldn't get away with it. He has even less reason to trust Al Qaeda with a potentially regime-ending secret.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-05-03.html

George Tenet was asked about it because cheney had said on the tee vee that memo was the authoritative info on the connections.

Tenet flatly said it was not. It was on c-span but I am not sure where to find transcripts.

ok, found some info

The Bush administration continues to push discredited information today. As recently as January 2004, Vice President Cheney publicly presented false evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, the vice president referred to a memo from Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, as "your best source of information" on the link – an illegally leaked memo never endorsed by any credible intelligence agency.

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=36655

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking minority member of the panel, questioned Tenet about a Cheney interview, published Jan. 9 in the Rocky Mountain News. The vice president, asked about the general relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq, directed the reporter to an article in the Weekly Standard from November that Cheney said was "based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago." He went on to describe the article as "your best source of information."

The Weekly Standard article discussed a memo that was classified, drafted in the Pentagon office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith in October 2003 using raw, unverified intelligence reports. It was put together in response to questions sent to Feith by a congressional intelligence committee seeking support for his claim of a close relationship between Hussein and Osama bin Laden's network.

Tenet said yesterday that when the CIA learned of the Feith memo in November, it got the Pentagon to retract it "because of our concerns with what the document said." Asked by Levin whether he was going to inform the vice president of the CIA's doubts about the accuracy of the memo, Tenet replied, "I will talk to him about it."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44616-2004Mar9.html

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Did al Qaeda have longstanding contacts with Saddam Hussein's Iraq? A furor of sorts has erupted over a leaked memo and the connections made by a conservative news magazine "The Weekly Standard."
Joining us now to debate this are the author of the article, Stephen Hayes of "The Weekly Standard" and retired U.S. Army Colonel Pat Lang, a former chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency over at the Pentagon. Thanks to both of you for joining us.

Steve, the thrust of the piece is that there's a lot more to this connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda than we may have suspected in the past. And there may even be a connection between al Qaeda, Saddam and 9/11.

STEPHEN HAYES, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": Well, the piece was very deliberate in stopping short of suggesting that connection to 9/11 and I want to be clear about that.

What I think the piece shows -- and it's based on a memo that was sent from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee. What the piece does is put flesh on the allegations that George Tenet, among others has made in the past that there's been a high level relationship going back a decade, really.

BLITZER: A relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda, the al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden.

HAYES: Right. Exactly.

BLITZER: And those are the points in the article.

You don't buy it, though, Pat.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG (RET.), U.S. ARMY: Well it depends what you mean on some of these words.

If by relationship you mean there were a series of contacts that occurred repeatedly by these two groups of people seeing if they had common ground and sort of feeling around each other to see if there are areas of cooperation, then I think you can probably say there was a relationship.

On the other hand if you're going say there was an operationalized relationship that amounted to participation in each other's activities attacks and things like that. I just don't think the annex to a letter which the office of the secretary of defense sent to the Senate actually proves that case.

BLITZER: Let me take up that point. Was there an operational level as far as specific terrorist actions? The attack on the USS Cole, the embassy bombings in East Africa, the first World Trade Center bombing between Iraq and Osama bin Laden?

HAYES: I think the memo makes clear that there may be fragmentary evidence about some of those things that you're talking about. But certainly some of the reporting seems to suggest a higher level of cooperation.

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0311/20/nfcnn.02.html

google: feith tenet senate memo

on edit: added the bold, the pentagon retracted the memo, PERIOD!

http://www.dod.gov/releases/2003/nr20031115-0642.html


Let me introduce to you what people in the know refer to as "FEITH" based intelligence pun defiantly intended. Some Media outlets and Newspapers jumped the biased gun by endorsing the Weekly standard story that featured the Douglas Feith memo. The Pentagon issued a press release responding to the above-mentioned memo.(November 15, 2003) http://www.dod.gov/releases/2003/nr20031115-0642.html

<snippets>

"News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate."

"The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."

-------------------------
Now on to "FEITH" based intelligence let me give you the background and partisan conflict of interest of "Douglas Feith" he heads the "Office of special plans". Who and what is the office of special plans? Glad you asked.

They are a shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and the state department. Their task is to cherry pick, and often manufacture evidence. They have no congressional oversight and Dick Cheney is their sponsor and defender. Why was this group of ideological amateurs, lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing think tanks in Washington, who Few had experience in intelligence created? When the CIA and State Department tell this Office that their plans and intelligence make no sense, use the influence of the Vice President's office to cut them completely out of the loop. Your Office of Special Plans will now be the main source of information delivered to the National Security Council, Congress, and the American people.

George Orwell is grinning from the grave at this present day “Ministry of Peace” see George Orwell’s 1984 if you don’t understand the Orwellian reference. WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY and IGNORANCE is STRENGTH. The OSP has been George W. Bush’s library of reference for the DOUBLESPEAK and revisionism he spews out of his mouth to try to justify this invasion, our generations Gulf of Tonkin.

Ok back on the track now..
“They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defense had this huge defense intelligence agency, and he went around it." In fact, the OSP's activities were a complete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon. "The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr. Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

To date no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq and the CIA recently concluded that there is no evidence Saddam Hussein gave any WMD”S to the hiding under the bed terrorists. By their own admission now the Bush/Cheney oil cartel have admitted that there was no connection between Iraq and 911. How convenient they mention it after many Americans hold that fallacy to be true a direct result of the administrations word association game. Talk about fuzzy math 15 out of the 19 highjackers were from Saudi Arabia close friends to the Bush family and we attack Iraq?
If 15 out of the 19 highjackers were from Mexico would we have attacked Canada? Why did we attack Iraq see “Project for the new American Century”……

nothing will. Your right-wing buddy is beyond hope.