[Media] Malpractice or Malice?
Posted by John Hinderaker
Power Line
Apr 6th 2007 10:23PM
Yesterday the Washington Post reported on the declassification of a report by the Inspector General of the Defense Department as though it were a scoop, in an article headlined "Hussein's Prewar Ties to Al-Qaeda Discounted." The casual reader would get the impression that the Inspector General's report contained some new, maybe even definitive information on the long-debated issue of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. In fact, though, the IG's report is old news. We wrote about it here (link below), in February. The substance of the report was made public then; the only news that occurred yesterday was that the report itself was declassified at the request of Democratic Senator Carl Levin.
As we noted a couple of months ago, the IG report was something of a joke. It criticized a Defense Department operation run by Undersecretary Douglas Feith for disagreeing with the CIA and the DIA on the significance of intelligence data on the connections between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Given what we know now about the CIA's performance in relation to Iraq, one would think that rethinking that agency's approach to such an important topic would be applauded. But no--the IG thought it was "improper" for a group within the Defense Department to dissent from the CIA's dogmatic interpretations of the evidence.
Further, the IG's report has already been an embarrassment to the Post. In February, the Post quoted from Carl Levin's press release about the report, which was much more critical of Feith's group than the report itself, and attributed Levin's quotes to the Inspector General. This gaffe led to a correction by the newspaper and an email from Post reporter Stephen Smith, which we reproduced here (see link below), in which Smith called his own paper's reporting an "egregious error," but said he had "nothing to do with" it.
One would think that Smith and the Post, having been burned on this story once already, would be careful to get their facts right the second time around. No such luck. Here is the first paragraph of Smith's story in yesterday's Post:
<<< Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday. >>>
To read this, one would think that the Post is actually reporting new information on this long-contentious subject. In fact, the IG's report contains no news on the subject at all, and the IG made no attempt to figure out who--the CIA or Feith's Defense Department group--was right. The statements in the IG's report that lead the Post's coverage come from a single footnote; worse, the Post didn't even report that footnote correctly. Here is what the footnote says:
<<< Noteworthy is that post-war debriefs of Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, al-Tikriti and al-Libi as well as document exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaeda did not cooperate in all categories. The terms the Intelligence Community used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda were validated, "no conclusive signs," and "direct cooperation...has not been established." >>>
Put aside, for a moment, the fatuity of assuming that Saddam and his henchmen can be relied on to describe their regime's relationship with al Qaeda truthfully, and note how the Post misrepresented the content of the footnote. The footnote doesn't say that Iraq and al Qaeda were not cooperating before th U.S. invasion, as the Post erroneously reported; it says that "direct cooperation...has not been established," an entirely different proposition. Further, the IG's footnote says that al Qaeda and Iraq "did not cooperate in all categories." This refers to a slide in a presentation prepared by Feith's group which says that al Qaeda and Iraq cooperated across "all categories," of which ten were listed, e.g., training and financing. So, far from saying that there was no cooperation at all, the IG footnote said that the two entities didn't cooperate "in all [ten] categories."
Further, by extracting (and misreporting) that single footnote, the Post misrepresents the overall tenor of prewar intelligence, as set forth in the IG's report. Far from flatly stating that al Qaeda and Iraq didn't collaborate, the CIA and DIA expressed doubt and agnosticism about the extent of such cooperation. Here are some quotes from those agencies' reports, as set forth by the IG:
<<< "Compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and al Qaeda has not been established, despite a large body of anecdotal information."
"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on specific terrorist operations, so discussion of the possible extent of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda is necessarily speculative."
As far as knowledge or implication in 9/11 goes, the [CIA's August 20, 2002] report offers, "no conclusive indication of Iraqi complicity or foreknowledge in the 11 September attacks." Further, the report cites "no conclusive reporting that al Qaeda and Iraq collaborated on terrorist operations...." >>>
While some of those phrases actually made it into the Post's account, the overall tenor of the article would lead all but the most careful readers to think that pre-war intelligence estimates flatly rejected the possibility of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. This false impression is accentuated by the Post's effort to suggest that the IG's report contradicts Vice President Dick Cheney's statements on the same subjects:
<<< The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.
"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda." >>>
So what is "alleged" about this history? Zarqawi indisputably ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and fled that country in late 2001 as the Taliban's regime crumbled. No one denies that he went from Afghanistan to Iraq and set up terrorist operations there. We know that, among other operations, he engineered the assassination of American diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan, while in Iraq prior to our invasion of that country. It is similarly beyond dispute that Zarqawi headed the "al Qaeda in Iraq" organization until his death last year. So how, exactly, has the IG report turned Cheney's narrative into "alleged history"? If you read to the very last paragraph of the Post piece, you find this:
<<< Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion. >>>
Given the Post's notorious fondness for anonymous sources, we don't know who these "intelligence analysts" who apparently speak with such confidence about Zarqawi's murky career might be. But how about a source who isn't afraid to be named, Sayf al Adl, al Qaeda's global security chief? Here is what he wrote about Zarqawi:
"Al-Zarqawi: The Second Al-Qaeda Generation," a recently
published book on Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi -- who pledged his
group's loyalty to Osama bin Laden last year -- chronicles
al-Zarqawi's presence in Afghanistan and his relationship
with the Al-Qaeda network, which funded al-Zarqawi
training camps in Herat before the U.S.-led invasion in
2001. Following the invasion, al-Zarqawi and other Al-
Qaeda leaders scattered and regrouped in Iran, pledging to
reassemble in Afghanistan in seven years' time, Sayf al-
Adl, the official in charge of security for the Global Al-
Qaeda of Islam Army, recounted in the book.
Al-Adl further documented al-Zarqawi's decision to
establish his network of fighters in Iraq in 2001, an
undertaking assisted through his relationship with the
Ansar Al-Islam terrorist network based in Iraqi Kurdistan
close to the Iranian border. That relationship was
reportedly forged in Afghanistan.
"We began to converge on Iran one after the other. The
fraternal brothers in the peninsula of the Arabs, Kuwait,
and the United Arab Emirates who were outside Afghanistan,
had already arrived. They possessed abundant funds. We set
up a central leadership and working groups," al-Adl
recounted. "We began to form some groups of fighters to
return to Afghanistan to carry out well-prepared missions
there. Meanwhile, we began to examine the situation of the
group and the fraternal brothers to pick new places for
them. Abu Mus'ab and his Jordanian and Palestinian
comrades opted to go to Iraq...[an] examination of the
situation indicated that the Americans would inevitably
make a mistake and invade Iraq sooner or later. Such an
invasion would aim at overthrowing the regime. Therefore,
we should play an important role in the confrontation and
resistance. It would be our historic chance to establish
the state of Islam that would play a major role in
alleviating injustice and establishing justice in this
world," al-Adl said.
Al-Adl's account is, obviously, fully supportive of Cheney's characterization of Zarqawi's role. Beyond that, this whole dispute turns on very fine distinctions. No one questions that Zarqawi worked with Ansar al-Islam, which is generally described as an al Qaeda "affiliate." What, exactly, does that mean? Terrorists have no need of clear rules or sharp lines between organizations. At the end of the day, it matters very little whether Zarqawi (or any other terrorist) was a "member" of al Qaeda or "merely" someone who communicated and cooperated with al Qaeda in pursuit of shared goals.
And, by the way, none of this has much to do with the IG report, which never mentions Zarqawi. It's just the occasion for more drive-by defamation of Dick Cheney.
The fact is that the extent of pre-war communication and collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda is still unknown. We know for sure that Saddam harbored terrorists and supported terrorist groups; what we don't know for sure the answer to a much less important question: to what extent did that support involve terrorists who were specifically linked to al Qaeda? Someday we may have definitive answers to that question. In the meantime, neither the IG report nor the Post's reporting adds an iota of information to our knowledge of the issue.
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