Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted

A newly declassified US Defence Department report has confirmed what most sane people on the planet already knew, Saddam Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The very notion that a secular dictator would assist a man Hell bent on establishing an Islamic theocracy was always fanciful. Especially as the man wanting the Islamic theocracy had already labelled the secular dictator, "an apostate, an infidel and a traitor to Islam."

And yet that insane theory was propagated by the Bush regime as one of the reasons why Saddam constituted a threat to the United States.

And yet, even yesterday, even as this report was being released, Dick Cheney - surely the biggest liar ever to hold the office of the Vice President - was waxing forth on the Rush Limbaugh radio programme about Saddam and the al-Qaeda link. He claimed:

.. that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

The newly declassified report underlines the seriousness of the scale of the lies peddled before the war from the Office of Special Plans headed by Douglas Feith. They had claimed that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.

Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.

"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on specific terrorist operations," that CIA report said, adding that discussions on the issue were "necessarily speculative."

The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than cooperating operationally.

The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

And yet Feith's conclusions were leaked to William Kristol's Weekly Standard magazine and peddled as fact by those whose agenda favoured an invasion of Iraq. Indeed, Cheney at the time, praised this as the best source of information available on the subject.

All of Cheney's insane statements before and after the invasion have closely followed the line taken by Feith's Office of Special Plans, including the claims that there was a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi official and one of the 9-11 hijackers.

The defense report states that at the time, "the intelligence community disagreed with the briefing's assessment that the alleged meeting constituted a 'known contact' " -- a circumstance that the report said was known to Feith's office. But his office had bluntly concluded in a July 2002 critique of a CIA report on Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that the CIA's interpretation of the facts it cited "ought to be ignored."

When Feith's report - a report that was given not only to Cheney but was also repeated to Rumsfeld - was finally seen by a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's counterterrorism task force, he concluded that it was of "no intelligence value" and took issue with 15 of the 26 "key conclusions".

And yet, Cheney continues to take to the airwaves and repeat the lies peddled by Feith and his Office of Special Plans, despite the fact that all the post-war debriefs of Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, and Iraqi intelligence officials, plus all the Iraqi documentation seized by the DIA, all confirm that the intelligence community was right and Feith and his Office of Special Plans was wrong.

So it is against this background of facts that we have to examine the claims that Dick Cheney continues to propagate. Leaving one with the uncomfortable conclusion that the Vice President is either so wedded to his beliefs that he literally ignores all evidence that does not fit into his preconceived notions of what is true, or he is a serial liar.

There is literally no other conclusion that one can rationally come to.

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

These lies are not a small matter. Because of these lies, hundreds of thousands of people are dead, US soldiers amongst them, because these lies were used to propagate a war.

In any civilised rational society, the people who told these lies would be prosecuted; and, if they were found to have knowingly lied, they would be jailed.

If you told a lie of that size in the UK whilst selling a product, you would fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority. If you told a lie of that size on your Tax Form, you would be considered a fraudster.

Why, when the consequences of these lies are so much more serious, is the Vice President allowed to roam the country repeating them?

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Tags: al-Qaeda links, Cheney, Feith, Office of Special Plans, Iraq war