I do disagree with the implication that Iraq has in some way been easy and is now solved. It is not solved and never will be solved. There is still ongoing violence even today and there probably will be fifty years from now.
http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf
Oct. 16, 2002, Public Law 107-243 107th Congress Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114) To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.
...
[10th]Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
[11th]Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;
…
http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf
Congressional Intelligence Report 09/08/2006
Postwar information indicates that the Intelligence Community accurately assessed that al-Qa'ida affiliate group Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq
American Soldier, page 519, by General Tommy Franks, 7/1/2004
"10" Regan Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
... a steep valley in far northeastern Iraq, right on the border with Iran. These were the camps of the Ansar al-Isla terrorists, where al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi had trained disciples in the use of chemical and biological weapons
There is no question that the UN, congress, and the public were defrauded by the Bush administration relative to the need to invade Iraq. To mention just one false claim, the administration knew full well that Iraq had no connection with 9/11, despite the many lies by Bush and company that it did.
American Soldier, by General Tommy Franks, 7/1/2004
"10" Regan Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
page 519:
"[The Marines] also encountered several hundred foreign fighters from Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Lybia who were being trained by the regime in a camp south of Baghdad. Those foreign volunteers fought with suicidal ferocity, but they did not fight well. The Marines killed them all."
You're a goddam liar.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/12/kerry.powell.iraq/
Kerry challenges Bush on Iraq-9/11 connection
Says administration is implying link that has been disproved
Monday, September 13, 2004 Posted: 10:07 AM EDT (1407 GMT)
(CNN) -- Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry accused the Bush administration Sunday of falsely linking Iraq to the attacks of September 11, 2001, "in its desperate attempts to reinvent a rationale for the Iraq war."
Kerry made his charge in a statement released after Secretary of State Colin Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he has seen nothing to link Saddam Hussein's regime with the 9/11 attacks.
"We know that there had been connections and there had been exchanges between al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime. And those have been pursued and looked at," Powell said on the program.
"But I have seen nothing that makes a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and that awful regime, and what happened on 9/11."
Kerry said Powell "came clean with the American people about the lack of a connection between Iraq, Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks."
Not only that, Kerry said, Powell also contradicted comments Vice President Dick Cheney has made as recently as Friday.
At campaign stops Thursday and Friday, Cheney mentioned al Qaeda in discussing the Iraq war, but he did not link Iraq under Saddam to September 11. (Special report: America Votes 2004)
On Thursday in Cincinnati, Ohio, Cheney described Saddam as a "man who provided safe harbor and sanctuary to terrorists for years" and who "provided safe harbor and sanctuary as well for al Qaeda."
In Wisconsin on Friday, he said the "al Qaeda organization had a relationship with the Iraqis."
"The bottom line is that we're [in Iraq] for the safety and security of the nation, and our friends and allies around the world," Cheney said.
"We didn't do anything to provoke the attack of 9/11. We were attacked by the terrorists, and we've responded forcefully and aggressively."
In June, Cheney said "we don't know" whether Iraq was involved in 9/11.
In September 2003, Cheney said Iraq under Saddam had been "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
But at the time President Bush said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 [attacks]. What the vice president said was that he has been involved with al Qaeda."
The independent, bipartisan panel that investigated the attacks released its final report July 22. The 9/11 commission found there were numerous contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda in the 1990s, but it said those contacts did not result in a "collaborative relationship."
In his statement Sunday, Kerry complained that Cheney "continues to intentionally mislead the American public by drawing a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in an attempt to make the invasion of Iraq part of the global war on terror.
"The president needs to answer the question: Who do you think is right? Vice President Cheney or Secretary Powell? And if it's Secretary Powell, will you direct your vice president to stop misleading the American people?"
The Kerry statement continued: "On an issue of such importance, where U.S. troops are bearing nearly 90 percent of the burden, and American taxpayers are paying $200 billion and counting, the administration has an especially solemn obligation to conduct itself in an honest and straightforward way.
"Unfortunately, in its desperate attempts to reinvent a rationale for the Iraq war, this White House has repeatedly chosen to mislead the American people."
Fleischer and Bush Still Peddling 9/11 - Saddam Link
by Avenging Angel
Thu Mar 12, 2009 at 01:25:51 PM PDT
On the very day Politico detailed the concerted effort by former Bush aides to resuscitate their boss' moribund legacy, his one-time press secretary Ari Fleischer battled MSNBC's Chris Matthews on the subject of the Iraq war. But while a newly tenacious Matthews turned on a Bush White House he once praised as "good guys," Fleischer at least was consistent. Six years after the invasion of Iraq, Fleischer like President Bush continues to falsely link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.
* Avenging Angel's diary :: ::
*
It was at the tail end of Wednesday's slugfest that Fleischer casually dropped in the Saddam connection to September 11th:
"After September 11th having been hit once how could we take a chance that Saddam might strike again? And that's the threat that has been removed and I think we are all safer with that threat removed."
But if Fleischer was butchering history to justify the calamity in Iraq, he was only following George W. Bush's lead.
An unapologetic President Bush made that clear during his final address to the American people on January 15, 2009. Just days before his departure, Bush seamlessly wove the invasion of Iraq into his revisionist history of the aftermath of September 11, 2001:
"As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe...
...And with strong allies at our side, we have taken the fight to the terrorists and those who support them. Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States."
Of course, Bush's subtlety in January was nowhere on display during his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:
BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -
RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.
BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.
In an address ten days earlier to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, DC, President Bush argued on December 5th that the truth should not be the lens through which his decision to invade Iraq should be viewed. Whether Saddam had actual connections to Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the September 11 calamity, he proclaimed, was virtually irrelevant:
"It is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks. But the decision to remove Saddam from power cannot be viewed in isolation from 9/11. In a world where terrorists armed with box cutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror, and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction. It was clear to me, to members of both political parties, and to many leaders around the world that after 9/11, this was a risk we could not afford to take."
For his part, Dick Cheney (aided and abetted by his biographer and 9/11-Iraq fabulist Stephen Hayes) has continued to proclaim as fact the nonexistent Bin Laden-Hussein connection. (In March 2008, Cheney anticipated Bush's "so what?" response to Martha Raddatz, shrugging off her assertion that "two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting" in Iraq by simply remarking, "So?") And in an interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour on January 14, 2009, Vice President Cheney regurgitated his blatantly discredited claim about an Iraq-Al Qaeda nexus. Answering "I think so" when asked whether the 4500 Americans killed in Iraq was worth it, Cheney continued:
"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida. Now, we've had this debate, keeps people trying to conflate those arguments.
That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say - as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate - that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."
Of course, as ThinkProgress detailed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney throughout 2002 and 2003 warned of the mythical alliance between Saddam and Bin Laden. For example, on October 14, 2002, Bush announced that "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." On the eve of the war, the President told Americans that Iraq "has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." And as hostilities commenced, Cheney on March 21, 2003 decried Iraq as the "geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
As I documented back in June 2005, President Bush continued to nurture the false Iraq connection to 9/11 long after he grudgingly admitted on September 17, 2004 that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Bush's intentional conflation of the two included the amazing June 18, 2005 statement that "we went to war [with Iraq] because we were attacked." By December 2008, Bush's linkage had morphed into the "risk we could not afford to take."
As it turns out, for George W. Bush the "risk we could not afford to take" was not averting war with Iraq, but the absence of a compelling sales pitch for it. And to be sure, Bush was in that regard quite successful. As an October 2003 PIPA survey showed, even after the invasion of Iraq, majorities of Americans continued to believe Bush administration claims about Saddam (Iraq role in 9/11, an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Saddam's WMD) all long since proven false. (Unsurprisingly, viewers of Fox News were the most delusional.) And as late as July 2006, fully 50% of Americans still believed the discredited claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In his predictably self-absorbed farewell address to the nation, President George W. Bush grudgingly acknowledged, "There are things I would do differently if given the chance." But as he demonstrated that night, rejecting his repeated linkage of the 9/11 attacks to his war on Iraq is not among them. And Ari Fleischer showed again Wednesday, even as he and the president he served slink off into the sunset, their duplicitous conflation of Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is destined to outlive their disastrous tenure in the White House.
"I have argued in the past, and would again, if we had been able to pre-empt the attacks of 9/11 would we have done it? And I think absolutely. We have to be prepared now to take the kind of bold action that's being contemplated with respect to Iraq in order to ensure that we don't get hit with a devastating attack when the terrorists' organization gets married up with a rogue state that's willing to provide it with the kinds of deadly capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed and used over the years." - Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, NBC (3/16/2003)
The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include:
Ø Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
Ø Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
Ø Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
Ø Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
Ø The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
Ø The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.
Bush mislead the American People into war. Can you provide us with any credible challenge to the above article?
http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf,
Congress's Joint Resolution Oct. 16, 2002
Public Law 107-243 107th Congress Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114) To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.
...
[10th]Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
[11th]Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;
…
Congressional Intelligence Report 09/08/2006
Postwar information indicates that the Intelligence Community accurately assessed that al-Qa'ida affiliate group Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq
American Soldier, by General Tommy Franks, 7/1/2004
"10" Regan Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
page 483:
"The air picture changed once more. Now the icons were streaming toward two ridges and a steep valley in far northeastern Iraq, right on the border with Iran. These were the camps of the Ansar al-Isla terrorists, where al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi had trained disciples in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But this strike was more than just another [Tomahawk Land Attack Missile] bashing. Soon Special Forces and [Special Mission Unit] operators, leading Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, would be storming the camps, collecting evidence, taking prisoners, and killing all those who resisted."
page 519:
"[The Marines] also encountered several hundred foreign fighters from Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Lybia who were being trained by the regime in a camp south of Baghdad. Those foreign volunteers fought with suicidal ferocity, but they did not fight well. The Marines killed them all."
If that is so, then his preemptive attack on Iraq was an illegal war against a sovereign nation. You can't have it both ways; either they were involved and that's the reason Bush invaded Iraq, or Iraq didn't have any involvement, and he committed a crime.
http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf,
Congress's Joint Resolution Oct. 16, 2002
Public Law 107-243 107th Congress Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114) To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.
...
[10th]Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
[11th]Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;
…
Congressional Intelligence Report 09/08/2006
Postwar information indicates that the Intelligence Community accurately assessed that al-Qa'ida affiliate group Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq
American Soldier, by General Tommy Franks, 7/1/2004
"10" Regan Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
page 483:
"The air picture changed once more. Now the icons were streaming toward two ridges and a steep valley in far northeastern Iraq, right on the border with Iran. These were the camps of the Ansar al-Isla terrorists, where al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi had trained disciples in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But this strike was more than just another [Tomahawk Land Attack Missile] bashing. Soon Special Forces and [Special Mission Unit] operators, leading Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, would be storming the camps, collecting evidence, taking prisoners, and killing all those who resisted."
page 519:
"[The Marines] also encountered several hundred foreign fighters from Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Lybia who were being trained by the regime in a camp south of Baghdad. Those foreign volunteers fought with suicidal ferocity, but they did not fight well. The Marines killed them all."
AP/YahooNews: Study: False statements preceded war
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
[...]
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. “In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”
US President George W Bush was informed 10 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks that US intelligence had no proof of links between Iraq and this act of terror, The National Journal reported today.
Citing government documents as well as past and present Bush administration officials, the magazine said the president was briefed on September 21, 2001 that evidence of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network was insufficient.
Bush was also informed that there was some credible information about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that showed that the Iraqi dictator had tried to establish surveillance over the group, according to the report.
Saddam Hussein believed the radical Islamic network represented a threat for his secular regime.
Little additional evidence has emerged over the past four years that could contradict the CIA conclusion about a lack of a collaborative relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the Journal quotes a high-level government official as saying.
The magazine believes the evidence raises yet more questions about the administration's use of intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq.
