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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: freelyhovering who wrote (74256)	2/15/2003 3:30:05 PM
From: aladin	Respond to of 281500

It is getting Clintonesque out there as the administration, from its progressive critics viewpoint, continues its rush to war. Makes you think of Clinton doesn't it? (as in define 'rush'?). Its currently February 2003, Bushs speech making Iraq a central threat was 13 months ago, his address to the UN was 5 months ago. Ok - it took FDR 27 months to get the US into WW2. But no one accused him of rushing :-) John

To: freelyhovering who wrote (74256)	2/15/2003 3:36:29 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The Frayed Fabric of Powell's Suit Against Iraq Conspiracy Theories Far from making matters any clearer, the Bush administration's rush to war had by Monday produced an open breach in NATO, with France and Germany determined to block NATO military support for Turkey. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell had been embarrassed in attempting to prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. No sooner had Powell made his speech than British intelligence, angry at being taken for a bunch of idiots, turned on Tony Blair and Powell, telling the press that there was no hard evidence of connections among Iraq, Al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and terrorist activities in Europe. "It is all a question of interpretation," one intelligence source told the Guardian on February 6. The sources said that while Zarqawi had been traveling around the Middle East he was not in Iraq. In his presentation, Powell contended to the Security Council that the existence of the Ansar al-Islam camp near the Iranian border was evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaeda. But British intelligence quickly refuted that claim. "Baghdad's writ genuinely does not run there," a senior British government source told the Independent, describing the camp as a "little node of Islamic extremism." Mullah Krekar, the head of Ansar, told the Guardian last week, "I am against Saddam Hussein. I want [Iraq] to change into an Islamic regime." (British intelligence apparently believes Krekar has ties with Chechen rebels and would like to make chemical weapons, but that's different from actually making them.) The Brits pooh-poohed other possible ties between Iraq and bin Laden. A super-secret Defense Intelligence staff report of January 12, 2003, leaked to the BBC by irate spy masters after Powell's talk, bluntly stated, "While there have been contacts between [Al Qaeda] and the regime in the past, it is assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies. . . . Though training of some AQ members in Iraq may have continued, we believe that bin Laden views the Ba'ath as an apostate regime. His aim of restoration of an Islamic caliphate, whose capital is Baghdad, is in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq." This is pretty much what U.S. critics of the Bush war policy have been pointing out for months to no avail. As for Blair, he waffled before the House of Commons: "There are unquestionably links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. It is a matter of speculation, obviously, how far those links go." If the U.S. and British knew about this supposed Iraqi Al Qaeda camp, why didn't they take it out? If, on the other hand, the U.S. government, with the help of Tony Blair, made it up out of old magazine articles, then it is just one more example of our lousy intelligence organizations at work. Of course, the Brits were forced to admit they had indeed plagiarized a post-graduate student's 5000-word thesis and also lifted material from Jane's Intelligence Review. If the Bush administration were to forget the CIA and rely on Jane's, we'd know more about what's going on. As it stands, we're left to rely on a politicized bunch of spooks whom Bush trots out to provide evidence for his ideological policies. For example, we'll probably never know to what extent Attorney General Ashcroft's orange alarm Friday was to drum up support for the coming war, or how much to rationalize the need for a conservative rewrite of the U.S. Patriot Act. In its new draft form this proposed legislation calls for secret arrests, something never before tolerated in American history. Senator Bob Graham, who headed the Senate Intelligence Committee last summer, asked the CIA to give him a candid estimate of the likelihood of Saddam Hussein's using weapons of mass destruction. The report, which the government at first sought to hide, was that the prospect was "very low" for the "foreseeable future." However, the report did note that if Saddam were attacked, he might unleash such weapons. villagevoice.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------