The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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November 17, 2003
Reckon how many smoking guns do you want? The Weekly Standard has a highly important story on connections between al Qaeda and the former Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein. You really should READ IT. It is based on a 16 page memo (dated October 27, 2003) from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee. This is not publicly released information- yet.
This document summarizes hundreds or perhaps thousands of pieces of evidence tying the Hussein regime to al Qaeda over a period of over a decade, before and after 9/11- indeed up till just a few days before we went in. Even this summary of a summary creates a strong narrative of increasing levels of co-operation between them, based on the work of multiple intelligence agencies, myriad human witnesses, and various kinds of documents.
Note that lots of documents are still coming to light as the US processes millions of pieces of paper and hard drives captured in taking over Iraq. They have to be translated from Arabic, and then sifted through for the relevant details. I would imagine we'll be years in sorting through all that stuff.
Before the war, the top reason given for going into Iraq was the presence of WMDs. Even as a supporter of the war, I'll admit that not finding any significant stash of such things (so far) looks bad. It might be that they weren't there, that we simply haven't figured out the right place to look for them, or (God forbid) that they were largely moved out of country. In any case, we haven't found any, which tends to make our case for war look weak.
However, this documentation of Iraqi links to al Qaeda now looks far stronger than most supporters of the war had thought- myself included. Representatives of the Bush administration in fact tread lightly before the war on making connections between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. They were mentioned only in passing, lacking hard evidence.
Now evidence is emerging clearly indicating extensive co-operation between them, with Iraq offering training grounds and safe haven for Bin Laden's people. This constitutes considerably stronger justification for the absolute necessity of taking down the Hussein regime than WMDs would. Hey, he might have just wanted some mustard gas for domestic use in killing his own people. However, training, funding and hiding the people who are attacking US seems like about as clearcut a justification for US destroying the regime as you could ask for.
So far, this Weekly Standard story seems to have generated only moderate attention, which seems odd to me. I would think this would be THE story for a good while, yet I haven't seen it mentioned even on the Fox News Channel- supposed Bush administration patsies. Why?
