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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (584523)	6/22/2004 8:02:51 AM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About those Sept. 11 reports Published June 22, 2004 Last week the staff of the commission probing the events of Sept. 11, 2001, issued three crucial reports, 61 pages that should be read by every American old enough to comprehend them. Regrettably, public discourse about the reports--they're at chicagotribune.com/911reports--has largely focused not on current terrorist threats, but on who-said-what-when about a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Some critics of the war in Iraq have read 12 lines in the first report to argue that it refutes White House assertions of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. In fact, the report describes contacts beginning in the 1990s but says those contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." Failing that, says the report, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Those sentences fueled copious news coverage that echoed the top headline in Thursday's New York Times: "PANEL FINDS NO QAEDA-IRAQ TIE." The commission's staff report, however, asserts that Iraq played no role in Sept. 11. That distinction was emphasized by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the commission's Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman, when they spoke Wednesday evening on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer": Kean: "[T]he staff in their investigation has found that, yes, there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there. But as far as any evidence that Saddam Hussein was in any way involved in the attack on 9/11, it just isn't there." Hamilton: "I don't think there's any doubt but that there were some contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's people. But our finding relates to a collaborative effort, the lack of evidence for a collaborative effort to attack the United States. We're not saying that there were no contacts of any kind or description. ... " Hamilton later took issue with news coverage that portrayed the staff report as significantly disagreeing with White House statements about alleged links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Saturday's Tribune quoted Hamilton saying that the "sharp differences that the press has drawn" between the views of the staff and of administration officials "are not that apparent to me." Kean in effect points up the irrelevance of this gotcha debate in the new issue of Time magazine: "[T]o say that sooner or later Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda would have found a common [interest] to fight a common enemy is not unreasonable." Good point. On "NewsHour," Hamilton and Kean also were asked if they have learned of subsequent terror plots that have been quashed--and about the likelihood of another attack: Hamilton: "I think there isn't any doubt in our mind that we have in fact blocked some of these attacks. We have, after all, a remarkable record since 9/11. ..." Kean: "This is an enemy who is determined to do another major attack, who is determined to kill Americans, and we've got to keep our guard up. We've got to be vigilant because it's coming." Both men made excellent points largely overlooked in the fascination with Al Qaeda and Iraq. There's more. Among the least reported of the commission staff's conclusions is a section that itemizes successes in damaging Al Qaeda. That section notes the arrests and deaths of several key Al Qaeda figures; the elimination of corrupt charities that benefited Al Qaeda; the eradication of its Afghan training camps; and the isolation of bin Laden: "Al Qaeda today is more a loose collection of regional networks with a greatly weakened central organization." Yet that section of Staff Statement No. 15 concludes that Al Qaeda "is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties." That likely truth--not the endless rereading of 12 lines in 61 pages--should focus Americans today on the need to confront international terrorism. Wherever it exists. Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

To: JDN who wrote (584523)	6/22/2004 12:42:53 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 769670

Ideology blinded Cheney I believe Dick Cheney. I believe the vice president when he claims that there was a link of some sort between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda - and by intended implication with the events of 9/11. I believe, that is, that he is not necessarily lying, not making things up. I believe, in other words, that Cheney's - and President Bush's - insistence on this association is just more evidence that the two of them are blinkered by ideology and seeing precisely what they want. I'll tell you a story. There was a man who went to see a psychiatrist. First, the shrink showed him a picture of crossed sticks and then one of hundreds of little dots. "What's that?" the shrink asked. The man said snakes and ants having sex. The shrink told the man he was obsessed with sex. "What do you expect," the patient replied, "when you keep showing me dirty pictures?" In life as in jokes, you see what you want. Cheney and Bush always saw a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That link was tenuous at best, but it was supported by this or that meeting or sighting. Aficionados of the Mafia will recognize the telltale signs. This person is linked to this person who is associated with that person who is married to yet another person who was once in business with the brother-in-law of yet another person. Once you have that mindset, the Mafia is everywhere. It is the same with intelligence. Very little of it is definitive. We have learned that the hard way. Even the mobile chemical labs in Iraq precisely identified by spy satellites turned out to be something else. Were there contacts? Maybe. It's not inconceivable that someone in Saddam's regime wanted to keep an ear open. Were those contacts nefarious? Who knows? Did they lead in some way to the events of 9/11? It appears not. No evidence suggests that's the case, and the lack of such evidence is not proof of anything. It's not surprising, though, that an administration already bent on war would interpret every dot as evidence that Saddam and Bin Laden were in cahoots. This made sense to Bush and Cheney since, as we have found out, they cannot distinguish between one kind of evil and another. Every possible suggestion of cooperation somehow became proof. This was particularly the case with Cheney, when it came to weapons of mass destruction. He seized on the most murky of reports to proclaim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, which, lo, these many months later, has yet to be found. So deluded were our top guys that they invaded Iraq expecting that the major problem would be how to clean up after all the victory parades. Was Cheney lying or was he merely so driven by ideological or intellectual conviction that to him the occasional tree became a forest? It's hard to say. As my colleague Al Kamen reports, the vice president did indeed say it was "pretty well confirmed" that one of the 9/11 terrorists, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official. Actually, that meeting has never been confirmed and Cheney, for obvious reasons, has recently unconfirmed his statement, insisting he was never so definitive. Kamen confirmed he was. But just as Cheney and Bush missed the forest for the trees, so do those who defend them and insist that the 9/11 commission overstated the case by reporting (in a draft) that "no collaborative" relationship existed. The fact remains that Saddam's fingerprints are not on 9/11 and that the U.S. went to war for stated reasons that have simply evaporated. This brings me not to a joke but to the wisdom of the late Don Quixote, who says something to remember when this or that intelligence report is trumpeted by Cheney or Bush in justification for an unjustified war: "Facts are the enemy of truth." nydailynews.com