What connection to Al-Quaeda?

As I said in the comments section of Aziz's earlier post, the dam has burst. This AP article contains the following gem:

Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best. "There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week.


But wait, there's more:

Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaida. "The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous," the former official said. A United Nations terrorism committee says it has no evidence - other than Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertions in his Feb. 5 U.N. speech - of any ties between al-Qaida and Iraq. And U.S. officials say American forces searching in Iraq have found no significant evidence tying Saddam's regime with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.


And that's not all. Go read the whole thing.

In addition, Bush is now claiming the uranium controvery is a closed subject. I beg to differ, Mr President, and I'm calling bullshit. In the MSNBC article which reported Bush's terse "case closed" remarks, we find this nugget:

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other officials asserted this week that the president’s statement was justified at the time because the CIA cleared the address in its entirety, including the uranium claim. They said the CIA never told the White House that the claim was suspicious. But U.S. officials told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell that Tenet himself advised Rice’s top deputy, Steven Hadley, to remove a reference to the uranium report from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, establishing that the nation’s top intelligence officials suspected that the allegation was false more than three months before they approved Bush’s repeating it in his nationally televised address on Jan. 28. The Washington Post reported Friday that the CIA also told British officials about its doubts and passed word along to several U.S. agencies before the State of the Union address.


So, CIA officials warned Condi's team about the bogus uranium claim. In addition, members of Bush's own intelligence team are saying the Al-Quaeda claims were bogus as well. So, the two biggest reasons that the public supported the war ("They're gonna nuke us!" and "They're harboring Al-Quaeda!") have turned out to be complete and utter bullshit.

Mr President, the buck stops with you. What did you know and when did you know it?

It also looks like the American public is beginning to realise that they were snookered. If the press doesn't keep pounding this issue, then it's up to Americans like you and me. Write and call your local papers and demand that they continue to follow up on the biggest scandal since Watergate.

update LOL! Go freep the beard (props to skippy)! Today's questions is "Who do you blame for the mistake in the president's State of the Union address on Iraq?" Guess where America thinks the buck stops??

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gay Saudi Arabia

Five Things Dean Supporters Can Do Right Now to Fight Terrorism