Monthly Archives: March 2006

Today on the Tube

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Republican Senator Chuck Hagel is on ABC’s “This Week” saying that there’s been a “low-grade civil war” going on in Iraq for the past six months. He also asked the rhetorical question, are we better off, is the Middle East more stable, because we invaded Iraq? And he answered himself — no.

Channel flipping to NBC, I caught Andrew Sulivan telling Chris Matthews that Bush resists making any changes to his policies because he can’t admit he is wrong.

Update: The “This Week” roundtable, I kid you not — George Will, Cokie Robert, Sam Donaldson. Danger! Danger! Change channel! Change channel!

Ooo, on Meet the Press — Jack Murtha. Could be good.

Update: While we’re waiting for Murtha to come on, get this — Fred Barnes tells us which issues GOP candidates will run on for the midterm elections:

Party strategists, led by chairman Ken Mehlman, want to rejigger the debate so it’s about a choice between candidates, putting Democratic candidates on the defensive as well. In short, they want it to be a choice election, not a referendum election. …

… House Republicans, for their part, intend to seek votes on measures such as the Bush-backed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a bill allowing more public expression of religion, another requiring parental consent for women under 18 to get an abortion, legislation to bar all federal courts except the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, a bill to outlaw human cloning, and another that would require doctors to consider fetal pain before performing an abortion.


The BooMan says,

I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything in there about ending the war in Iraq, bringing down the federal defecit, creating good jobs, extending health care coverage, providing better education, protecting the environment, or cleaning up the corruption in Washington. All I see is an agenda pulled straight out of James Dobson’s playbook.

This midterm election won’t be a referendum. I’ll be an intelligence test, for voters.

Murtha says, What they [the Bushies] are trying to do is paint Iraq as if there were progress so that we can get out. … We’re caught in a civil war. … There’s less than a thousand al Qaeda; the Iraqis will get rid of al Qaeda as soon as we get out of there.

The Bushies are trying to blame the military for their mistakes, Murtha says.

The troops themselves don’t know what our mission is.

Murtha says his vote for the war in 2002 was a mistake. Why can’t the rest of the Dems who voted for the war say this?

“You know who wants us in Iraq, Tim? Iran wants us in Iraq, China wants us in Iraq, al Qaeda wants us in Iraq.”

“The public doesn’t want rhetoric.”

Murtha predicts the Dems will re-take the House of Representatives in November.

Caught Holding the Black Bag?

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You know you’re in Bizarro World when the last barricade between tyranny and liberty is … the director of the FBI.

Chitra Ragavan writes in the March 27 issue of U.S. News and World Report:

In the dark days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a small group of lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack. Soon after, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to begin conducting electronic eavesdropping on terrorism suspects in the United States, including American citizens, without court approval. Meeting in the FBI’s state-of-the-art command center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the lawyers talked with senior FBI officials about using the same legal authority to conduct physical searches of homes and businesses of terrorism suspects–also without court approval, one current and one former government official tell U.S. News. “There was a fair amount of discussion at Justice on the warrantless physical search issue,” says a former senior FBI official. “Discussions about–if [the searches] happened–where would the information go, and would it taint cases.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller was alarmed by the proposal, the two officials said, and pushed back hard against it. “Mueller was personally very concerned,” one official says, “not only because of the blowback issue but also because of the legal and constitutional questions raised by warrantless physical searches.”

An FBI spokesman told US News that the FBI has not conducted physical searches without consent or a court order. However, it is apparent that the Bush Administration thinks it can conduct physical searches without consent or a court order.

… in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, “a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.” …

…John Martin, a former Justice Department attorney who prosecuted the two most important cases involving warrantless searches and surveillance, says the department is sending an unambiguous message to Congress. “They couldn’t make it clearer,” says Martin, “that they are also making the case for inherent presidential power to conduct warrantless physical searches.”

TalkLeft reminds us that the U.S. engaged in physical monitoring of radiation levels mosques and homes without warrants. This monitoring sometimes required the agents involved to go on the property being monitored, which makes one suspect “radiation levels” was a smokescreen. The targets were almost all U.S. citizens.

(Reminds me of at least one Law & Order episode in which the cops want to enter an apartment but don’t have a warrant. Lenny says, “Do you smell gas?” And they break the door down to check for a gas leak but are really looking for the gun used in a homicide. Having to wait for a warrant does slow down the plot.)

U.S. News says that (once again) the Bushies site the famous Gorelick testimony from the Aldrich Ames hearings as their precedent for warrantless searches without noticing that after these hearings Congress changed the FISA provisions so that what was done without warrants then couldn’t be done any more. In other words, the Bushies are violating law that didn’t exist when the Clintons were checking out Aldrich Ames. The Clinton Administration adhered to FISA law as it existed at the time.

But how weird is it that the “strict constructionists” who just hate it when Supreme Court justices “make law” think that it’s fine for a a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration to “make law”?

Clearly, the Bushies put FBI director Mueller on the spot.

A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department. On February 6, Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Gonzales whether the NSA spying program includes authority to tap E-mail or postal mail without warrants. “Can you do black-bag jobs?” Leahy asked. Gonzales replied that he was trying to outline for the committee “what the president has authorized, and that is all that he has authorized”–electronic surveillance. Three weeks later, Gonzales amended his answer to Leahy’s question, stating that he was addressing only the legal underpinnings for the NSA surveillance program but adding: “I did not and could not address operational aspects of the program, or any other classified intelligence activities.” In the past, when Congress has taken up explosive issues that affect the bureau, Mueller has made it a point, officials have said, to leave Washington–and sometimes the country–so as not to get pulled into the political crossfire. When Gonzales testified February 6, Mueller was on his way to Morocco.

The FBI gets a bit twitchy about black bags.

For the FBI, the very mention of the term “black-bag jobs” prompts a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. In 1975 and 1976, an investigative committee led by then Sen. Frank Church documented how the FBI engaged in broad surveillance of private citizens and members of antiwar and civil rights groups, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. The committee’s hearings and the executive-branch abuses that were documented in the Watergate investigation led to numerous reforms, including passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. The law created a special secret court tasked with approving electronic wiretaps in espionage and other national security investigations. After the Aldrich Ames spy case, Congress amended FISA to include approval of physical searches. After 9/11, the law was further amended to allow investigators to place wiretaps or conduct physical searches without notifying the court for 72 hours and to obtain “roving” wiretaps to allow investigators to tap multiple cellphones.

Of course, that’s not flexible enough for the Bushies. But then there’s the little problem of trying to get convictions with illegal evidence:

White House lawyers, in particular, Vice President Cheney’s counsel David Addington (who is now Cheney’s chief of staff), pressed Mueller to use information from the NSA program in court cases, without disclosing the origin of the information, and told Mueller to be prepared to drop prosecutions if judges demanded to know the sourcing, according to several government officials. Mueller, backed by Comey, resisted the administration’s efforts. “The White House was putting pressure on Mueller to broadly make cases with the intelligence,” says one official. “But he did not want to use it as a basis for any affidavit in any court.” Comey declined numerous requests for comment. Sources say Mueller and his general counsel, Valerie Caproni, continue to remain troubled by the domestic spying program. Martin, who has handled more intelligence-oriented criminal cases than anyone else at the Justice Department, puts the issue in stark terms: “The failure to allow it [information obtained from warrantless surveillance] to be used in court is a concession that it is an illegal surveillance.”

So what the hell is the point if you can’t get convictions?

Mueller has been criticized by some agents for being too close to the White House. His predecessor, Louis Freeh, made his break publicly from President Clinton, even returning his White House security access badge. Until recently, Mueller reported to the White House daily to brief Bush and Cheney. But Mueller has not shied away from making tough decisions. He refused to allow FBI agents to participate in CIA and Defense Department interviews of high-value prisoners because of the administration’s use of aggressive interrogation techniques. In Iraq and at the Pentagon-run camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it has been FBI agents who have called attention to what they viewed as abuse of detainees.

It is unclear how much resistance from the FBI the White House and the Justice Department will be willing to brook. What is clear, however, is the extraordinary extent to which officials in both places inject themselves in the bureau’s operations. In late 2004, President Bush asked then FBI Deputy Director Bruce Gebhardt, filling in for Mueller during the daily White House briefings, minute details about a suspected terrorism threat in Kansas. “Don’t worry, Mr. President,” responded Gebhardt, straight-faced. “We have Kansas surrounded.”

Chitra Ragavan also discusses the subject of a terrorism investigation who believes he was “black bagged.” For example, the subject had some run-ins with a man on his property who claimed to be part of a cleaning crew but who was, in fact, not cleaning.

On Friday’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann discussed the US News story with legal scholar Jonathan Turley. You can view the clip or read part of the transcript at Crooks and Liars. Sample:

Olbermann: (reading from a U.S. News & World Report press release) “Soon after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department argued that the same legal authority that the same legal authority that allowed warrentless electronic surveillance inside the US, could also be used to justify physical searches of terror suspects homes & businesses without court approval.”

Olbermann: Doesn’t that send chills down your spine?

Turley: Well it does. It’s horrific, because what that would constitute is to effectively remove the 4th Amendment from the U.S. Constitution and the fact that it was so quick as a suggestion shows the inclinations, unfortunately, of this administration. It treats the Constitution as some legal technicality instead of the thing were trying to fight to protect. …

… This is something to be very concerned about. These are not trivial matters. We’ve seen a sort of broad-based assault on basic Constitutional rights in our country since 9/11. We have a President who ordered electronic surveillance by the NSA without warrants in something that constitutes a federal crime. Congress isn’t even holding serious hearings on that. So we have a system that has checks & balances but none of them seem to be working. At the same time, as we noted earlier, we have an attack on the Judiciary itself, all of this should present a picture of concern for any American.

If I see anyone from the Right expressing concern about this matter (instead of expressing outrage at us lefties for hating America), I’ll let you know. Don’t hold your breath.

More Junk Intelligence

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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”

“Junk Intelligence”

March 18 — “Good Jokes”

“I Wish I’d Seen This Sooner”

Update: See Cernig.

I Wish I’d Seen This Sooner

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Juan Cole:

The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

And, as I said, we already knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. But he was in a part of Iraq protected from Saddam Hussein’s control.

Good Jokes

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Question: How many avant garde artists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: A fish.

I love that joke, which I heard from my daughter awhile back.

Sadly, No answers the next question: How are rightie bloggers like avant garde artists? Go read.

Why They Fight

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Life must be bleak for Andrew Sullivan these days.

One thing has struck me these past few years about the right in America. As it has slowly abandoned its own principles – limited government, individual freedom, balanced budgets, federalism – it has been forced to resort to three fundamental issues to keep itself alive. The first was the war on terror, the second fundamentalist Christianity, and the third, hatred of the left. The first has waned somewhat, not because we aren’t still at war and in great peril, but because it is manifestly obvious that this administration is stunningly incompetent in its execution of the war. There’s only so much you can do to defend it at this point. The evangelical base whose support for Bush is entirely for religious rather than political reasons – the theocratic heart of the GOP – will never stop believing, as long as the Supreme Leader refuses to show any doubt and keeps preventing vaccines from being developed, puts pro-lifers on the Court, and keeps up the pressure on gays. But the rest – and they’re critical – are motivated entirely by being anti-left.

The most depressing aspect of this was the vile “Swift Boat” attack on John Kerry in the last election campaign. But you only have to watch O’Reilly or read Powerline or listen to Sean Hannity or David Horowitz to know that the only thing that really gets them fired up any more is loathing of liberals.

This has been obvious for a long time, at least to everyone but the Right. Righties like to think they’re the ones with the “ideas.” Can anyone remember what those “ideas” might be? Oh, yeah … cut taxes, shrink government, cut taxes, promote corporate welfare, cut taxes, cut social programs, cut taxes, praise Jesus. And cut taxes. The same zombie ideas they’ve been dragging around since Goldwater. Even neoconservative foreign policies are leftovers from the Cold War.

From yesterday’s Liberal Oasis:

Republicans Have No Ideas

Only Enemies

According to top Republicans, what agenda item will motivate their supporters to the polls this year?

More tax cuts for the rich? More drilling in environmentally sensitive areas? Less help for the poor?

Trick question.

Since Republicans in Washington aren’t really into passing legislation anymore (when was the last time they passed something?), there’s no issue for their supporters to get excited about.

So what do Republicans have left? From the NY Times:

    “Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

    The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls.

    With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”

Tim Grieve at Salon:

We’re hearing a lot about Democrats these days — from Republicans. Democrats are going to run Hillary Clinton as their presidential nominee in 2008. Democrats are going to try to impeach George W. Bush if they win control of Congress in 2006. It’s enough to send the Republican base into panic — which is, of course, exactly the point.

For the last four years, the Bush White House has kept the American public in line by warning that the terrorists are everywhere and fixing to “hit us” again at any minute. That argument isn’t working anymore, at least not to the president’s benefit. The public has begun to disapprove of the way that George W. Bush is handling national security; only 30 percent still think that Bush’s “central front” in the war on terror — the war of choice he launched in Iraq — is actually making Americans safer.

But when all you’ve got is fear, you’d better hope that everything looks like a monster: So if Osama bin Laden isn’t scaring Americans into the president’s camp these days, the Republicans have to hope that Russ Feingold will.

Got that? We’re the new Osama.

Junk Intelligence

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I want to revisit the last post, because I have realized a couple of things since I wrote it that change the emphasis, so to speak. There is something way screwy going on that is way screwy even by Bush Administration standards.

The story thus far: This week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began to release documents it says were captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard writes about this here. He and Michael Barone have been hyping these documents for the past several weeks as the potential “proof” of an Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link.

Yesterday John Hinderacker of Power Line published a post called “In Saddam’s Archives” in which he links to and discusses one of these documents, posted on the Foreign Military Studies Office web site as “CMPC-2003-006430.” And here is that document as posted on the FMSO site [PDF].

Now here’s where it gets screwy. This document consists of a page of what looks like Arabic script (I don’t know Arabic from Parsi from whatever). This is followed by a seven-page document from the Federation of American Scientists about the Iraqi Intelligence Service, with information gleaned from various unclassified sources. This same document is still on the FAS web site, here, and was last updated in 1997, it says. Not exactly super-secret, in other words, and not from Iraq. What it contains is information floating around in the West as of 1997.

Note that Hinderacker doesn’t misrepresent this; he says plainly in his post that “The English portion of the document is a description of the Mukhabarat by the Federation of American Scientists. The Arabic portion apparently hasn’t been translated.” But then he goes on to quote the FAS document under the “In Saddam’s Archives” title, which would leave the uncareful reader with the impression that the FAS document is a translation. For all I know the Arabic portion is a laundry list.

However, Investor’s Business Daily isn’t so careful. Here is an article that quotes this same FAS document as if it were something captured in Iraq after the invasion. IBD trumpets the FAS document as “a manual for Saddam’s spy service” and proof of Saddam Hussein-terrorist connections. IBD says,

In the early stages of the war that began three years ago, the U.S. captured thousands of documents from Saddam and his spy agency, the Mukhabarat. It’s been widely thought the documents could shed light on why Saddam behaved as he did and how much of a threat his evil regime represented.

Yet, until this week, the documents lay molding in boxes in a government warehouse. Now the first batch is out, and though few in number, they’re loaded with information.

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

As we’ve reported several times, a number of former top military officials in Saddam’s regime have come forward to admit that, yes, Saddam had WMD, hid them and shipped them out of the country so they couldn’t be detected. And he had plans to make more.

Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam’s terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam’s spy service, innocuously listed as CMPC-2003-006430. It makes for interesting reading.

Yep, good ol’ CMPC-2003-006430.pdf. The problem is that the English language part of the document, which IBD goes on to quote, is not from Saddam’s archives. It is from the Federation of American Scientists.

As I predicted earlier, rightie bloggers are gleefully linking to the IBD article as “proof” that we liberals were wrong about Saddam Hussein. These bloggers include Glenn Reynolds, Lorie Byrd, and Cold Fury (upon which I commented and received a nice round of insults for my trouble), among others.

I’d like to point out, before I forget, that the FAS is an independent organization that compiles a lot of information on national security issues. The document being quoted probably is the best information available … in 1997. In the West. From nonclassified sources.

John Aravosis posted about the Negroponte document dump yesterday:

The new documents, released today by the Bush administration, are maybe, but maybe not, real Iraqi government documents that we found in Iraq. The Bush administration can’t vouch for the documents’ authenticity or the accuracy of the translations from Arabic, but they’re releasing them anyway in the hopes that – get this – right-wing blogs can help them prove their case that Saddam had WMD and ties to Al Qaeda.

Yes, it’s come to that. Bush is now relying on Michelle Malkin’s keen intelligence skills to prove the case for war in Iraq.

I think that’s exactly the plan. The documents released so far are mostly junk. But it’s carefully selected junk. And the righties are all too eager to “discover” the wondrous things in them that will justify their support of the war. Glenn Reynolds says “It’s funny that these documents are getting so little attention from the press.” Not funny at all; part of the plan. The last thing the Bushies want is for news reporters, who are sometimes slightly less gullible than your average rightie blogger, to start scrutinizing this stuff closely. (See also this AMERICAblog post for more.)

By dumping a truckload of phony “intelligence,” the Bushies figure they can keep what’s left of the “base” in line.

Yesterday I wrote about why another document actually “revealed” nothing at all that wasn’t already well known, but which a number of righties believed was new information proving that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (not). That’s pretty much the point of the AMERICAblog posts linked above. See also upyernoz.

And notice how well the document dump is timed to Bush’s reaffirmation of the “Bush Doctrine” and the escalation of saber-rattling over Iran. Hmmm.

Update: See also “White House White House caught fixing intelligence again?”

Update update: Sadly, No figured all this stuff out way before I did.

Blarney

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Quick follow-up to the last post, in which I expressed frustration (cough) at cognitively challenged righties who think newly released Iraqi documents contain evidence of an al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection —

John H. at Power Line hypes an undated document that describes the function and duties of the Iraqi intelligence service. The document lists such activities as developing and testing weapons, poisons, and explosives; providing training in “terrorist techniques”; and conducting operations of sabotage and assassination outside Iraq. [Update: I realized after I had posted that the previously “secret” document had been pulled off the web site of the Federation of American Scientists.]

It will not occur to the righties that without knowing how long these documents have been sitting around in a filing cabinet somewhere they don’t exactly prove anything. Righties have a weak grasp of linear time. You’ll remember, for example, how the gassing of the Kurds in 1988 (which the Right and the Reagan-Bush I administrations pretty much ignored in 1988) was repeatedly thrown in our faces as a reason to invade Iraq in 2003 — fifteen years later.

Another example: The 2003 State of the Union Address — Home of the Sixteen Words — also contained this little gem:

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb

Strictly speaking, the sentence is true. This IAEA fact sheet on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program shows that Iraq was working hard to enrich uranium to make a bomb — before the 1991 Gulf War.

However, if you’ll scroll down the fact sheet page you’ll learn that “As of 16 December 1998” the Iraqi nuclear weapons program was defunct and not going anywhere. You can read an IAEA report (PDF) dated 1999 that says (on page 7): “These verification activities have revealed no indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material, or that Iraq has retained any practical capability (facilities or hardware) for the production of such material.”

And, of course, at the time Bush delivered the 2003 SOTU, IAEA inspectors had had a few weeks to visit the old Iraqi nuclear weapons sites, and they confirmed that the equipment and stores of yellowcake uranium were sitting unused, the IAEA inspection seals from 1998 still intact.

So, while the IAEA had confirmed that before the Gulf War Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, they also confirmed “All known indigenous facilities capable of producing uranium compounds useful to a nuclear programme were destroyed during the Gulf War.”

Bush left that part out of the 2003 SOTU. It still amazes me this little oversight hasn’t gotten as much attention as the Sixteen Words, since it is a more bare-assed and easily refuted misrepresentation than the African uranium story. The IAEA posts their inspection reports and findings on their bleeping web site. In English. I bet even Douglas Feith could have found them.

(In July 2003, when people were starting to wonder where the WMDs were, it was pointed out to Condi Rice that a lot of their “intelligence” about WMDs was, um, old. And this is what she said:

Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, said Saturday that the question of new evidence vs. old was beside the point. “The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question,” she said. [James Risen, David Sanger, and Thom Shanker, “In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat,” The New York Times, July 20, 2003]

Perhaps the Bushies should have been a little more … interested.)

I hadn’t meant to ramble on so about the old news. But to get back to the Iraq Intelligence Service documents that J.H. finds so interesting — a document that (for all we know) was drawn up before the Gulf War doesn’t tell us anything about what Saddam Hussein was up to in 2003. [Update: I see a note at the end of the document that says “Maintained by John Pike Updated Wednesday, November 26, 1997.” It was on the web site of the Federation of American Scientists. This is just weird.]

And a document that talks about what the IIS was supposed to be doing doesn’t tell us if they were doing it. Which takes us to another bit of news, reported by Shmuel Rosner of Haaretz.

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein pretended to have chemical weapons because, among other reasons, he feared that Israel might attack if it discovered he did not. This is revealed in a recently declassified internal report by the American military.

The report was compiled from many dozens of interviews with senior Iraqi officials and hundreds of documents captured by the American forces during and after the war. …

… “According to Chemical Ali, Hussein was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary,” the report states. Ali explained that such a declaration could encourage Israel to attack, the report says.

The 100-page report has not been released yet, but some 9,000 words of it are to appear in the next edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine.

A lot of people have speculated that’s what Saddam Hussein was up to, but I don’t know that there’s been anything in the way of corroboration before now. But this I’ve heard before:

Senior Iraqi officials told their interrogators that Hussein had no idea what the true state of the country’s weapons was, because everyone lied to him and refrained from giving him bad news for fear of being executed.

Hussein’s deputy Tariq Aziz told interrogators, “The people in the military industrial commission were liars. They lied to you, and they lied to Hussein. They were always saying they were producing special weapons.”

“A captured military industrial commission annual report of investments from 2002 showed more than 170 research projects. When Hussein asked for updates on the nonexistent projects, they simply faked plans and designs to show progress,” the report says.

I don’t remember where I read that before and I’m not going to take time to hunt around for a link, but I’m sure at least one Iraqi weapons scientist pretty much said the same thing when he was interviewed after the invasion. Perhaps it was the same guy who had the remains of the Iraqi nuclear centrifuge buried in his flower garden.

Update to the Update: As I said in the first update, what might seem to be a translation of an Arabic document said to have been seized in post-invasion Iraq is actually an old report taken from the web site of the Federation of American Scientists. Information in the report appears to have been gleaned from various unclassified sources. It was last updated in 1997. John Hinkeracker of Power Line states in his post that the document was from the FAS, so I can’t accuse him of misrepresenting it — even though he published quotes from FAS under the heading “In Saddam’s Archives.”

However, Investor’s Business Daily is not so careful. In this articled titled “Declassified Truth” IBD quotes from the 1997 FAS document as if it were something discovered in Saddam’s archives. IBD says the FAS document refutes the claim that Saddam “had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country.” I’m sure a big chunk of the Right Blogosphere will link to this article before the day is over.

These document were released per the direction of John Negroponte, note.

Jeez, Righties Are So Gullible

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Last night the Bush Administration began release of some Iraqi documents seized by U.S. intelligence after the invasion. John Solomon reports for the Associated Press:

The documents, the first of thousands expected to be declassified over the next several months, were released via a Pentagon Web site at the direction of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Many were in Arabic _ with no English translation _ including one the administration said showed that Iraqi intelligence officials suspected al-Qaida members were inside Iraq in 2002.

The Pentagon Web site described that document this way: “2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names.”

Various rightie pundits like Michael Barone and Stephen Hayes have been hyping these documents in recent weeks. Barone, for example, wrote ten days ago,

Light on the Saddam regime’s collaboration with terrorists will almost certainly be shed by analysis of some 2 million documents captured in Iraq. But, as the intrepid Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, almost none of those documents has been translated or released either to the public or to the congressional intelligence committees. It appears that career professionals and, perhaps, political appointees have been blocking release of these documents.

Oooo, the dreaded career professionals.

Why do their superiors not order them released? Many Americans cling with religious intensity to the notion that somehow Saddam had no terrorist ties — a notion used to delegitimize our war effort. We should bring the truth, or as much of it as is available, out into the open.

I commented on this Barone screed here.

Looking back, the recent hyping of and now the release of these documents seems just a little too … coordinated. Especially since it seems timed to the beginning of an air war against North Viet Nam insurgent strongholds in Iraq.

And it was also timed to the release today of a Bush foreign policy document that restates the “Bush Doctrine” — the right to pre-empt threats, e.g. invade anybody we damn well like — and which also states “We face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

We know where this is going, don’t we?

But the real knee-slapper is this … the usual tools are hyping the Saddam-al Qaeda connection with a vengeance. Al Qaeda was in Iraq before the invasion! This guy writes (under the headline “Saddam Tied to al Qaeda”) “Consider this the final nail in the coffin of the liberal fantasy about Al Qaeda ties to Iraq.” Another found a photo of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the documents!

Do these people have fewer than three functioning brain cells apiece? Or were they not paying attention?

OF COURSE Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before the invasion. And he was running terrorist training camps in Iraq before the invasion. This is not a secret. Everybody knows this. I’ve even written about it myself several times.

But here is the part the bleepheads of the Right never get through their impenetrable skulls: Zarqawi was operating in Iraqi KURDISTAN, an area of northern Iraq that had become a safe haven for Kurds. He was in a part of Iraq over which Saddam Hussein had no control. He was, in fact, in part of Iraq controlled by our buddies, the Kurds. Kurdish autonomy had been shielded by U.S. air power since the end of the 1991 war.

Now, here is the juicy part. Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, April 14, 2004 (righties, this is for you, so pay attention):

Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the [NBC News] story puts it:

    [T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn’t take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.

I’ll pause to let that sink in. Kaplan continued,

As far back as June 2002, U.S. intelligence reported that Zarqawi had set up a weapons lab at Kirma in northern Iraq that was capable of producing ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon drew up an attack plan involving cruise missiles and smart bombs. The White House turned it down. In October 2002, intelligence reported that Zarqawi was preparing to use his bio-weapons in Europe. The Pentagon drew up another attack plan. The White House again demurred. In January 2003, police in London arrested terrorist suspects connected to the camp. The Pentagon devised another attack plan. Again, the White House killed the plan, not Zarqawi.

When the war finally started in March, the camp was attacked early on. But by that time, Zarqawi and his followers had departed.

This camp was in the Kurdish enclave of Iraq. The U.S. military had been mounting airstrikes against various targets throughout Iraq—mainly air-defense sites—for the previous few years. It would not have been a major escalation to destroy this camp, especially after the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The Kurds, whose autonomy had been shielded by U.S. air power since the end of the 1991 war, wouldn’t have minded and could even have helped.

But the problem, from Bush’s perspective, was that this was the only tangible evidence of terrorists in Iraq. Colin Powell even showed the location of the camp on a map during his famous Feb. 5 briefing at the U.N. Security Council. The camp was in an area of Iraq that Saddam didn’t control. But never mind, it was something. To wipe it out ahead of time might lead some people—in Congress, the United Nations, and the American public—to conclude that Saddam’s links to terrorists were finished, that maybe the war wasn’t necessary. So Bush let it be.

Also in Slate, Daniel Benjamin wrote (October, 2004):

Why didn’t the Bush administration kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when it had the chance?

That it had opportunities to take out the Jordanian-born jihadist has been clear since Secretary of State Colin Powell devoted a long section of his February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council. In those remarks, which were given to underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Powell dwelt at length on the terrorist camp in Khurmal, in the pre-invasion Kurdish enclave. It was at that camp that Zarqawi, other jihadists who had fled Afghanistan, and Kurdish radicals were training and producing the poison ricin and cyanide.

Neither the Khurmal camp nor the surrounding area were under Saddam’s control, but Powell provided much detail purporting to show Zarqawi’s ties to the Baghdad regime. His arguments have since been largely discredited by the intelligence community. Many of us who have worked in counterterrorism wondered at the time about Powell’s claims. If we knew where the camp of a leading jihadist was and knew that his followers were working on unconventional weapons, why weren’t we bombing it or sending in special operations forces—especially since this was a relatively “permissive” environment?

Benjamin’s answer boils down to “because Bushies are idiots,” as opposed to Kaplan’s theory that the Bushies left Zarqawi alone deliberately because his presence in Iraq was one of their excuses for invading it.

But today, once again, Zarqawi is dangled in front of the mouth-breathers and throwbacks of the Right to show them that, see, Saddam Hussein did too have ties to terrorism. And they, dumb beasts that they are, take the bait.

‘Scuse me while I pound my head on the floor and scream.