Jonathan Landay and McClatchy Newspapers Still Ignorant About Saddam’s Ties To Al Queda

Earlier this week an article by Jonathan Landay was published by the failing McClatchy Newspapers. The article asserted that innumerable people had been tortured with the intent and purpose of proving a tie between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Al Queda network of terrorist groups. The article asserted that there never were any ties between the two, and that the torturing of captured Al Queda terrorists was done largely to create a fictional narrative that would support the case for invading Iraq (let’s ignore that the alleged “torture” happened AFTER the invasion of Iraq-just as was done in the article).

I attempted to contact Jonathan Landay to nicely and politely inform him that the issue of regime ties had never been closed. He responded nicely, pointed me in the direction of a few reports, then categorically declared that no ties existed and that the intelligence community had known this all along, but the Bush Administration “cherry-picked” intelligence to make its case for war.

After that initial email, Jonathon refused to respond to further attempts at educating him. SO, here we go…

• Khalid Sheik Mohammed (mastermind of the 911 attacks) was captured in 2003 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq (literally 19 days before the invasion, and half a year since the military, diplomatic, and rhetorical run-up to invasion began). We now know from the “torture” documents released by President Obama that “coercive interrogation”/”torture” was NOT the first method or the of choice. It’s not like someone captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed and then cried out, “WOO HOO! Get out the pliers so we can start pullin’ fingernails!!! Yeeee hawwwww!!” We also know that it was only used after traditional interrogation means had failed, AND after multiple leaders had agreed to it from higher in the chain of command. However, it’s impossible and incorrect to say that KSM was tortured to force him to create a false story that could be used to justify the invasion of Iraq….when he was captured just days before the invasion. Still, propagandists made that false and misleading claim (’cause they can’t look at a calender?).
• The claim that raw intelligence was cherry-picked and then used to make the case for war/to mislead elected officials is completely false and debunked by a simple calender. The cherry-picking claim stems from the idea that Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans picked out raw intel reports, arranged them in a condemning manner, then used that to trick elected officials into thinking there was a certain relationship between the regime and Al Queda, BUT (here’s the problem) Feith’s group gave it’s last presentation to the Bush Admin on Monday, Sept 16, 2002 (4 days after Pres. Bush began his rhetoric-run-up to war with his address to the UN). 48hours later-one Wednesday, Sept 18, 2002, the CIA met with the Administration and with elected officials (including the Democrat-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee). Any ambiguities, concerns, misleading, etc done by Feith’s group would have been cleared up and resolved and made irrelevant 48hrs after the Feith presentation. Jonathon would know this because the dates are presented in the report that he directed me to read.
• The issue of ties between Saddam’s regime and the Al Queda network of terrorist groups was never fully investigated, resolved, or closed as is often deliberately and falsely claimed. Entire bookstore shelves are filled with volumes of books that have been written on the subject of regime ties to Al Queda (including some by me), and there’s some great websites out there listing individuals in the regime and in Al Queda groups who were actually caught working together, but let’s step aside from those for the moment and see what the US government has “concluded” about regime ties…

I have read the various reports from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Sen Intel Com) regarding the issue of regime ties to Al Queda. From what I could gather, there were several pre-invasion reports from the CIA regarding the issue of regime ties:

• The Sept 21, 2001 PDB (I’ve never seen a Sept 12, 2001 PDB regarding regime ties)President’s Daily Brief (PDB)
  -Sept, 21, 2001
  -Just 10 days after the 911 attacks this summary assessment clearly suffered from lack of intelligence gathering and analysis since at the time it still wasn’t 100% clear that Al Queda was behind the 911 attacks.
• NESA Report on Iraq’s Ties to Terrorism (terrorism in general/not specific to Al Queda). This was basically a preliminary draft of the CIA’s “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2002” and “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2003” reports
  -October 2001
  -Formed no conclusions (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
  -cited a lack of evidence and a lack of investigations into the matter as no formal investigation and analysis had ever been conducted (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
• “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship”
  -6/12/02
  -Formed no conclusions (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
  -specifically cited a lack of evidence gathered (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
• “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2002”
  -9/18/02
  -Formed no conclusions (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
  -specifically cited a lack of evidence gathered (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
• Letter from DCI Tenet, head of the CIA, to Sen. Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee
  -10/7/02
  -Formed no conclusions, simply reiterated closed door testimony from CIA officials to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the more time passes, the more likely it is that Saddam would make WMD and use Al Queda to covertly and deniably attack the United States
  -Lists several examples of Saddam’s support for terrorism, Al Queda, and its proxy terror affiliates.
• “Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001-By the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence”
  -December 2002
  -Reiterated the comments from the 9/21/01 PDB and the 10/7/02 Tenet Letter
  -Added more reports of possible Iraqi involvement in the 911 attacks, but added caveats that the reports hadn’t been fully investigated by Dec 2002
  -cited a lack of evidence gathered as a problem that prevented forming any conclusions (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
• “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2003”
  -January 2003
  -This was basically a rehash of the 2002 version with a little new info since the CIA finally got a spy back into Iraq just a few weeks prior to its release (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
  -Formed no conclusions (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
  -specifically cited a lack of evidence gathered (per Sen Intel Com rpt on pre-war intel regarding Iraq)
• “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation Into Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq (Phase I report)”
  -July 7, 2004
  -confirmed the various reports of ties between Saddam’s regime and Al Queda as presented in other reports (including confirmation of most of the comments made by Feith and his office), and repeatedly stated that the Bush Administration’s claims were “reasonable” as well as often accurate reflections of the intelligence reporting at the time.
  -“Due to the limited amount and questionable quality of reporting on the leadership intentions of Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Ladin, the CIA was unable to make conclusive assessments in Iraqi Support for Terrorism regarding Iraq’s relationship with al-Qaida. The CIA stated in the Scope Note: ‘Our knowledge of Iraq’s ties to terrorism is evolving DELETED. . . . ‘”
  -at the rollout of the report, several of the senators-including Sen. Rockefeller (D), addressed the press and made it clear that the issue of regime ties to Al Queda was not looked at:
  “…the committee concluded there was a failure by intelligence community managers to adequately encourage analysts to challenge their assumptions, to fully consider alternative arguments, to accurately characterize intelligence reporting and to counsel analysts who had lost their objectivity.”
• Senator Pat Roberts 070904 SIC Release of WMD investigation report Press Conference transcript
  -”Most alarmingly, after 1998 and the exit of the U.N. inspectors, the CIA had no human intelligence sources inside Iraq who were collecting against the WMD target.”
  -”But with respect to Saddam Hussein’s regime and his link to terrorists, the committee did find that the CIA judgments were reasonable, based on the available intelligence. The agency was also more careful to inform policy-makers about uncertainties with their analysis.”
  -”Finally, the committee found no evidence that the intelligence community’s mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure.”
  -”Our human intelligence collection, as Pat Roberts has pointed out, was inadequate. Not only did we not have people on the ground after 1998 when the inspectors left, but we relied when they had left too much on the fragmentary reporting from years before, from the early ’90s, from the post-Iran/Iraq War situation and were never able to pin anything down.”
• “911 Commission Final Report”
  -July 22, 2004
  -Formed no conclusions regarding regime ties to Al Queda
  -members later specifically cited a lack of evidence gathered and asked that the question of regime ties to Al Queda be examined further-not dismissed or otherwise closed.
  -John Lehman (a 911 Commissioner) said, “There may well be–and probably will be–additional intelligence coming in from interrogations and from analysis of captured records and so forth which will fill out the intelligence picture. This is not phrased as–nor meant to be–the definitive word on Iraqi Intelligence activities.”
  -“This is a very significant set of facts,” former 9/11 commissioner, Mr. Kerry said yesterday. “I personally and strongly believe you don’t have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm. This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States.” (I believe he even went on Jon Stewart’s, The Daily Show, and reiterated that the issue of regime ties was never fully investigated, analyzed, or concluded, and he said that he thought it needed to be re-opened.
  -Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton also said: there was a lack of intelligence gathered which led to problems, that the matter was never concluded (or even started), and that it should be re-examined.
• “Iraqi Perspective Project Report” (DoD)
  -March 2006
  -Confirmed many of the previously reported ties between the regime and Al Queda
  -Found many more examples of ties and further demonstrated that there was in fact a relationship between the two, that it was dangerous, and that it was growing faster than expected
  -Cited a lack of intelligence gathered before the war, and an even larger, more deliberate, and more unexplained refusal to investigate the relationship after the invasion given the wealth of captured intelligence and detained regime members.
• “REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE ON POSTWAR FINDINGS ABOUT IRAQ’S WMD PROGRAMS AND LINKS TO TERRORISM AND HOW THEY COMPARE WITH PREWAR ASSESSMENTS (Phase II report)”
  -September 9, 2006
  -Cited the post-war refusal of any and all intelligence agencies to investigate the depth and threat of the relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Queda
  -Used the refusal of intelligence agencies to investigate pre-war intelligence and the causes for the lack thereof, the Senate Intelligence Committee openly, freely, and admittedly took it upon itself to act as an intelligence agency and form an intelligence assessment on its own.
  -(U) The CIA has not published a “fully researched, coordinated and approved position” on the postwar reporting on the former regime’s links to al-Qa’ida, but has published such a paper on the postwar reporting on Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and the former Iraqi regime. The CIA told the Committee that regarding Iraq’s links to terrorism, “the research the Counterterrorist Center has done on this issue has called into question some of the reports of contacts and training . . . revealed other contacts of which we were unaware, and shed new light on some contacts that appeared in prewar reporting. On balance, this research suggests that the prewar judgment remains valid.“l54 (Recall that previous investigations had determined that pre-war judgments as presented by the Bush Administration were “accurate” and “reasonable.”)

There are some consistencies in all these investigations and their reports:

They all refuse to form a conclusion
They all say there was a relationship, but the depth of it is debated inside the intelligence community
They all say the matter should be looked into rather than dismissed, closed, or perpetuated as a resolved point of discussion.

People can also point to 1990’s, pre-Bush Administration, open-source, mass media reports from: Newsweek, TIME, US News, NYT, LAT, ABC, and CBS; all of which claimed in 1998 and 1999 that there was a relationship between the two. Still, I bow to the reports and the bi-partisan claims from at least (4) 911 Commission members and both the chair and vice-chair of the Senate Intel Committee all of whom I’ve cited above as saying there was a lack of evidence gathering, a lack of analysis, and that the matter was never closed.

There are also MILLIONS of captured and authenticated documents, videos, tapes etc. brought back from Afghanistan and Iraq, and in these documents-many made public, some even listed by the FBI-individual terror groups that are in the Al Queda network of terrorist groups and were taking orders and working with Iraqi Intelligence (lest we forget “Al Queda” translates as “the Base” or the start of jihad, and is really a network of groups rather than a single club type entity).

Oh….there were definitely ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Al Queda terrorist network, but the question was about closeness. Were they just entities with a common mission, were they occasional allies, were they close allies like Roosevelt and Stalin, were there operational ties, cooperational ties, did Saddam want Osama to have his baby, did they share wives, were they snuggle-buggle-huggy lovers, or did they use each other. That ties existed was claimed and proven from 1996 onward, but the depth and detail of those ties was never fully investigated or concluded despite high-ranking calls from Democrats and Republicans to look into it.

Still some people-even after being informed-prefer to maintain the idea that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with Al Queda. It’s an ironic claim for if it were true, then their ire would be equally directed towards the Obama Administration’s war there: one aimed at-Barack Obama’s words-fighting Al Queda.

I invite anyone and everyone to send Jonathan ( jlanday@mcclatchydc.com… ) and McClatchy newspapers a link to this post which categorically proves they were wrong in their assertions that there were never any ties between Saddam’s regime and the Al Queda terrorist network.

Let’s support President Obama’s war in Iraq-and his fight against Al Queda there-by halting the lie that the war has nothing to do with Al Queda.