Ok, here's my response: I've lifted it verbatum from Josh Marshal's site;
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_29.html#002629>>>
So Zarqawi and Ansar were in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus they were 'in Iraq'. And they were linked to al Qaida. So al Qaida was 'in Iraq'. That was the argument.
Now, there was a pretty big problem with this argument. Namely, the US and the UK had made Iraqi Kurdistan into a virtual Anglo-American protectorate through its no-fly zones which kept not only Iraqi air power but basically all of Saddam's forces out of the region. The Kurds themselves had already set up a de facto government, though the region where Ansar was operating from was one they didn't control.
In other words, saying Ansar was operating out of Iraq was deeply misleading in anything other than a narrowly geographical sense since Ansar was operating from area we had taken from Saddam's control. Saddam might as credibly -- perhaps more credibly -- have charged us with harboring Ansar as vice versa.
(A side note: various Iraq hawks have alleged that Saddam's secret police were in contact with or even controlling Ansar. And it's true that Saddam and Ansar had a common enemy: the pro-American Kurdish parties. But I've never seen any credible evidence to persuade me of such links.)
In any case, to review, using Ansar and Zarqawi as proof of a Saddam-al Qaida link had serious evidentiary and logical problems. But that didn't stop the White House from making it a centerpiece of their argument -- as Colin Powell did during his presentation at the UN.
In the immediate lead-up to the war there were various parts of the White House's argument for war that were becoming weaker by the day. That, after all, was what was happening with the inspectors themselves who were, in the weeks and months just before the war, generating lots of new evidence that threw many of the earlier suspicions of WMD into real doubt -- particularly on the nuclear front.
The reports we have now about the White House's refusal to move against Zarqawi are still incomplete. And I think we've got to keep open the possibility that there were military or diplomatic restraints we were operating under that are not yet clear.
But if the reports bear out, the White House's reasons for not moving against Zarqawi when we could have don't seem to require much explanation. If we got rid of Zarqawi and Ansar the much-trumpeted Iraq-al Qaida, already so profoundly tenuous, would have collapsed altogether. To put it bluntly, we needed Zarqawi and Ansar.
That would mean it was a political decision -- one intended to aid in convincing the American people of the necessity of war -- for which we are now paying a grave price.
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If the White House knew, it did nothing, and it did nothing in order to have evidence to invade Iraq. If it did not know then why did they trump up Zarqawi and Ansar as reasons to invade Iraq? In either event the Bush administration was lying to us and risking our very lives with it's dishonesty.
As for Robbins' article -
(
http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins091903.asp )
you and I know that the news and the papers are never perfect sources of information. At the very least you need to see sources cited within a news report.
But the sourcing within Robbin's article is very poor. Here's a paragraph:
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There is also the case of Abu Zubayr, an officer in Saddam's secret police who was also the ringleader of an al Qaeda cell in Morocco. He attended the September 5, 2001 meeting in Spain with other al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, the 9/11 financial chief. Abu Zubayr was apprehended in May, 2002, while putting together a plot to mount suicide attacks on U.S. ships passing through the straits of Gibraltar. He has allegedly since stated that Iraq trained and supplied chemical weapons to al Qaeda. In the fall of 2001 al Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan took refuge in northern Iraq until they were driven out by Coalition forces, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda terrorist active in Europe and North Africa, fled from Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has reportedly been sent back to Iraq to coordinate al Qaeda activities there.
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All well and good. But where have you heard all this from, Mr. Robbins? And what are the counter points? He makes a very broad and presumptious series of arguments, but he doesn't list where from! TELL ME.
One of the reasons I like to use Josh's site is that he puts his sources into his argument. I can link to them. Indeed, most print reporters do one better, by actually quoting those that make various statements and citing in the text itself where they get certain facts from.
But Robbins does cite someone. Here's an example:
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The most intriguing potential link is reflected in documents found by Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter in Baghdad in April, 2003. The documents detail direct links between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime dating back at least to 1998, and mention Osama bin Laden by name. The find supports an October 2001 report by William Safire that noted, among other things, a 1998 meeting in Baghdad between al Qaeda #2 Ayman al Zawahiri and Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan. Other reports have alleged bin Laden himself traveled to Iraq around that time, or at least planned to. Former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, now in custody, allegedly met with bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.
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"The most intriguing potential link is reflected in documents found by Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter in Baghdad in April, 2003."
What is the date of publication? What is the article's title? Come on, Rob.
"The documents detail direct links between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime dating back at least to 1998, and mention Osama bin Laden by name."
If so, then cite from the actual document. Robbin's must have read it or read some portion of it in order to make believe these claims enought ot print them, so why doesn't he quote the text of the documents?
I'd expect because he's never read them. He's never even read a synopsis. He's probalyl read something along the lines of the actual text he prints: that is, a statement without any evidence.
"Other reports have alleged bin Laden himself traveled to Iraq around that time, or at least planned to. Former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, now in custody, allegedly met with bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks."
Which other reports? What are the details of those allegations? See how he undercuts his own argument here, discussing how Binny came to Iraq ... or planned to. Which is it?
My question is, how many alleged things will Robbin's quote in order to support his allegations?
My simple point is that Mr. Robbin's article is not convincing dispite numerous powerful point because it does nothing to prove those points.
I can scream and wail all night long about how even the doomsday predictions about our budget deficit predict a smaller deficit than there really is. But unless I cite where I heard that from it's only hersay.
http://www.cepr.net/real_budget.htmThen Robbins said this:
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The more controversial part of the story is the alleged meeting between Atta and al-Ani in the Iraqi embassy in Prague in the spring of 2001.
...
But if they met, why? It is unlikely they were discussing the alleged RFE/RL operation, since Atta had more important things to do and the Iraqis did not need his help with that one anyway. They might have been discussing the 9/11 attacks, but there is no evidence to support that claim. The article in Das Bild raised another, more intriguing possibility: The Iraqis were supplying Atta with anthrax spores for use in attacks on the United States. The anthrax attacks had commenced shortly before the article was published, and the idea seemed plausible at the time. In fact, it still does ? the anthrax used in the attacks was weapons grade, the attacks originated from areas near where the hijackers had been active, and two years of investigation have not turned up the presupposed domestic perpetrator. At some point, you would think Occam's Razor would come into play.
The US Justice Department disputes most of the above. Because the US has no independent evidence that the 2001 meeting occurred, and since an examination of INS records published in May 2002 showed no movements corresponding to the Czech timeline, Justice concluded that the meeting could not have taken place.
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Huh? Ok, so Robbin's goes through a series of suppositions that undercut the point he's trying to make, then presumes his point is true by asking "why they met" despite the lack of credible evidence and despite that the State Department itself has determined that Atta was not there. And then he offers a truly laughable nugget: SADDAM'S PEOPLE GAVE TERRORISTS THE ANTHRAX THAT WAS USED TO ATTACK AMERICA!
Wtf is this guys smoking.
I BEG EVERYONE to read this article from the National Review. It is a telling read. It goes far to convince you the the arguments about Iraq having ties to al-Qaida, that it was harboring terrorists, and so on, are intelectually dishonest arguments.
(I thoroughly enjoyed this)
