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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (36030)	1/23/2004 9:12:07 AM
From: Wowzer	Respond to of 89467

Denial what a wonderful thing.... Cheney Is Adamant on Iraq 'Evidence' Vice president revives assertions on banned weaponry and links to Al Qaeda that other administration officials have backed away from. World Reaction Military Operations Commentary Graphics Related Links Complete Coverage Complete Coverage Cooler Heads Debate Issues Cheney Is Adamant on Iraq 'Evidence' 4 Iraqi Women Slain on Way to Work at Base Cleric Wants Iraqi Opinion on Possibility of Elections Back Into Baghdad's Streets more > By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq's biological weapons programs. The vice president stood by positions that others in the Bush administration have largely abandoned in recent months, as preliminary analysis of the trailers has been called into question and new evidence — including a document found with Hussein when he was captured — cast doubt on theories that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated. Cheney's comments were seen as stoking the controversy over Iraq as the vice president was embarking on a trip to an economic summit in Switzerland and meetings with European officials, some of them fierce opponents of the war who have been dismissive of U.S. claims about the threat posed by Iraq. Cheney has consistently espoused the most hawkish views among senior administration officials. His statements Thursday suggest he intends to maintain that tone as he takes a more high-profile role in President Bush's reelection campaign. "There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," Cheney said in an interview on National Public Radio. "I am very confident that there was an established relationship there." That assertion appeared at odds with the recent words of other senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said in an interview this month that he had "not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence" of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Danielle Pletka, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, defended Cheney's comments, saying he referred only to a "relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. "Nobody has ever said Saddam directed Al Qaeda in attacks," Pletka said. "But it is clear that had he decided to do so at any point it would have been easy." Members of Congress and some in the intelligence community said Thursday that Cheney's comments could lead the public to believe there was collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that that was not supported by the evidence. U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely. Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime. When Hussein was captured last month, he was found with a document warning his supporters to be wary of working with foreign fighters. "There's nothing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney's remarks Thursday "perplexing." Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration's case for war — the claim that Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction — had been validated by the discovery of two flatbed trailers outfitted with tanks and other equipment. "We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction." That view is at odds with the judgment of the government's lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that "we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort." In a BBC interview that aired Thursday night on public television in the United States, Kay said that is still the case. He said it was "premature and embarrassing" for the CIA to conclude shortly after the vehicles were discovered last year that they were weapons labs. "I wish that news hadn't come out," Kay said, calling the release of the information a "fiasco." Experts are still in disagreement over the purpose of the vehicles, with some saying they may have been meant for biological weapons production and others saying it was more likely they were meant for making hydrogen. Cheney is considered the administration official who has the most influence with Bush. His role in assembling the case for war has been controversial. His numerous trips to CIA headquarters before the war were interpreted by some critics as an effort to pressure agency analysts to adopt hard-line views. In his public appearances, he often cast the alleged threat from Iraq in a harsh light, warning that United Nations inspectors could not be effective and that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. Kay has since said there was no active nuclear program. Since the war, as the administration has sought to deflect charges that it exaggerated the Iraqi threat, Cheney has appeared reluctant to give ground. On occasion, this has created public relations problems for the White House. After Cheney implied in a television interview in September that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush was forced to acknowledge days later that the administration "had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved" in Sept. 11. The White House had no comment Thursday on Cheney's remarks. Citing Cheney's latest comments, Democrats on Capitol Hill renewed their calls for an examination of the administration's use of intelligence. "This is the same problem that existed before the war. Leaders are going beyond what the intelligence community said," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). The intelligence committees in the House and Senate are nearing completion of reports on intelligence failures in Iraq, but Republican leaders have resisted calls for examinations of claims made by officials in the executive branch. Cheney insisted the "jury is still out" on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded last year. He said the search for banned arms should continue there. "It's going to take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that," Cheney said. Bush has staunchly defended his decision to go to war, but has had to adopt somewhat strained language to characterize the threat he says was posed. With no weapons of mass destruction yet discovered, Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday said the United States had evidence of "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."

To: stockman_scott who wrote (36030)	1/23/2004 9:46:15 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

commondreams.org Published on Thursday, January 22, 2004 by the Salt Lake Tribune Al-Qaida will do Whatever it Takes to Assure Bush is Re-elected by Gwynne Dyer I have always admired Edward Luttwak, one of the clearest American thinkers in the strategy/security game, and I have nothing but contempt for the U.S. Homeland Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsabteilung, in the original German) and its ridiculous color-coded threat levels. So I started reading a recent article by the former on the latter with genuine pleasure, anticipating that Luttwak was going to condemn Homeland Security for its habit of running up the levels from puce to magenta and back down to mauve, shredding Americans' nerves with warnings nobody can respond to in a useful way, for no better reason than to cover its own bureaucratic behind. That's just what he did, and the article was rollicking along with me cheering Luttwak on every line of the way -- when his whole argument suddenly veered off into the ditch, rolled three times, and lay there bleeding. What he said was: "The successive warnings of ill-defined threats that frighten many Americans are achieving the very aim of the terrorists. Terrorism cannot materially weaken the United States, so their entire purpose is precisely to terrorize, to make Americans unhappy, in the hope that this will induce them to accept terrorist demands." If one of the most clever security analysts in the country has got no further than this in his thinking about what the terrorists want, then it's no surprise that 60 or 70 percent of Luttwak's fellow countrymen believe that Saddam Hussein sent the terrorists. He thinks that the terrorists are trying to make Americans unhappy in order to "induce them to accept terrorist demands"? What demands could the Islamist terrorists of al-Qaida possibly make that the United States could conceivably grant? Fly them all to Havana? Convert to Islam? Put the money in unmarked notes in a brown paper bag and leave it behind the radiator? The whole notion that this is some sort of giant extortion operation is as naive (or as wilfully ignorant) as the Bush administration's pet explanation that the terrorists attack the U.S. because "they hate our freedoms." Unfortunately, the post-9-11 intellectual climate in the United States has prevented any serious discussion of the terrorists' goals and their strategies for achieving them. In the post-9-11 chill, even conceding that the terrorist leaders are intelligent people with rational goals seemed somehow disloyal to America's dead. Instead, it was assumed that their fanaticism made them too blind or stupid for purposeful action at the strategic level. Even terrorist groups as marginal and self-deluded as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Weathermen had a more or less coherent analysis, political goals and some notion of how their attacks moved them toward those goals, but the public debate in the U.S. grants none of that to al-Qaida. Yet the Islamist radicals have always been completely open about their goals. They want to take power in the Muslim countries (phase one of the project), and then unite the entire Muslim world in a final struggle to overthrow the power of the West (phase two). They are still stuck in phase one, with little to show for it despite 30 years of trying, so in the early 1990s Osama bin Laden and his colleagues switched from head-on assaults on the regimes in Muslim countries to direct attacks on Western targets. Yet their first-phase goal remains seizing power in the Muslim world, not some fantasy about "bringing the West to its knees." Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about their strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then how does attacking the West help? Well, the U.S. in particular may be goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries -- and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes finally get off the ground. Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was the principal motive for the 9-11 attack. They would add that by giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaida's attacks have paid off handsomely. U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power. It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States. I know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point that al-Qaida wants Bush to win next November's presidential election and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for another four years, and will act to save Bush from defeat if necessary. It probably would not do so unless Bush's number were slipping badly, for any terrorist attack on U.S. soil carries the risk of stimulating resentment against the current administration for failing to prevent it. Certainly another attack on the scale of 9-11 would risk producing that result, even if al-Qaida had the resources for it. But a simple truck bomb in some U.S. city center a few months before the election, killing just a couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Bush's arms and turn a tight election around. Al-Qaida is clever enough for that. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. © Copyright 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune