More Junk Intelligence
Today another “revelation” from Saddam Hussein’s files is spreading like kudzu all over the Right Blogosphere. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard reports here that “Saddam Hussein’s regime provided financial support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s.”
Yes, it’s bogus. Judd at Think Progress explains why.
For anyone who came in late — the Mahablog Junk Intelligence Archives thus far:
March 16 — “Jeez, Righties Are So Gullible”
March 17 — “Blarney”
March 18 — “Good Jokes”
Update: See Cernig.
Some of the captured files are described in an article in Foreign Affairs, at the following URL: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85301/kevin-woods-james-lacey-williamson-murray/saddam-s-delusions-the-view-from-the-inside.html
They describe a pathological system, with an army led by incompetents, with spies spying on commanders and more spies spying on the spies. Competent generals were afraid to contradict the crackpot ideas of Saddam, or to give him bad news. The article also explains why Saddam wanted people to think he had WMDs.
Comment by Jack — March 18, 2006 @ 8:45 pm
Thank you, Jack. What’s funny is that people like Hayes cite the Foreign Affairs article as if it corroborates their “Saddam was working with Osama” story.
Comment by maha — March 18, 2006 @ 9:08 pm
Outstanding series, Maha.
You know you’re in trouble when your old jobbers won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole and you have to do everything yourself.
But as for Saddam, the Iraq Survey Group (CIA) timeline says that his scientists finally told him in late 2001 that they had no capability to make WMD. That must have been some meeting!
Comment by archimedea — March 19, 2006 @ 6:03 am
According to a New York Times article published yesterday, it seems that the self-proclaimed “Sunni resistant” Ali Shalal Qaissi was not after all the famous man in the photograph that has become the symbol of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: a hooded man standing on a cardboard box, shivering, with electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms…
Fans of the systematic use of torture on Ayyrab detainees and other Neocon kultists will probably jump at the chance to discredit the “mainstream media”, or even worse, pretend that there never really was such a thing as the Abu Ghraib scandal…even though we have thousands of proofs documenting the mass persecution that took place in US-administered Iraqi prisons including graphic pictures of naked Iraqi women and children surround by barking German shepherds- President Bush’s canine homage to Commander Göring.
Anyhoo, whoever he is, the unknown Iraqi soldier on the box remains a very powerful symbol of the cruel bestiality of the Neocon Neros of Washington and TeX-Aviv: the hood is a fitting metaphor for the blindness of KKK nostalgics and other Southern Evangelical revivalists such as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texan-In-Chief George W. Bush.
As for the wires attached to the detainee’s outstretched arms, they are the technological embodiment of a Western civilization gone awry, a once glorious culture caricatured and debased by those who now speak and act in its name: machine-men and scientific cynics who believe in “harnessing the power of new technologies” to torture, kill and maim in the name of “liberty”…
Comment by Dr Victorino de la Vega — March 19, 2006 @ 8:21 am
[…] This is an update to “Junk Intelligence” (and “More Junk Intelligence“), in which I revealed that the Right Blogosphere had mistaken an old document from the Federation of American Scientists for something generated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service: Juan Cole says I’m right. He also translates the mystery Arabic page. What does the Arabic say? “The Institutions of the Apparatus of the Intelligence Service on the Internet: […]
Pingback by The Mahablog » More More Junk Intelligence — March 19, 2006 @ 2:34 pm
MAHA,
Thank you for the great work on this latest GOP agit-prop campaign.
Comment by Steve J. — March 20, 2006 @ 7:13 am
Mea effing culpa
So last week I posted an item from Investors Business Daily
Trackback by Cold Fury — March 20, 2006 @ 4:30 pm
[…] And speaking of coincidences — what a coincidence that John Negroponte had a hand in this! Negroponte was also behind last March’s “junk intelligence” escapade, also known as Dumbo Document Dump; see here, here, here, here, here, and here. […]
Pingback by The Mahablog » The Persistence of Stupid — June 22, 2006 @ 11:08 am