To Which I Would Add...

Thomas Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard continues his yeoman work in debunking Lawrence Wilkerson's claim that Cheney ordered detainees tortured to invent evidence linking Iraq to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Joscelyn also notes that there was plenty of prior evidence of contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, although arguably not enough to rise to the level of a strategic relationship.

But to his analysis I would add that the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence did not take particular issue with the pre-war intel linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, nor did they document streams of debunked confessions from high value detainees.

Let me clip this again, from the 2006 SSCI report:

Well.  If progressives don't want to abandon this Wilkerson meme (also promulgated by J Marshall and A Sullivan), perhaps they will want to shift gears and point to the lack of debunked confessions as more proof that torture does not work.

Just trying to help.

Comments

[Semanticleo]

Joscelyn's piece refers to docs and the link is to what? An article by Stephen Hayes, personal biographer of Dick Cheney.

Note; The analysis (creative writing) was 59 pages long using 600,000 documents.

More dickering by Dick......

"study was commissioned by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, and produced by analysts at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded military think tank. It is entitled "Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents." The study is based on a review of some 600,000 documents captured in postwar Iraq. Those "documents" include letters, memos, computer files, audiotapes, and videotapes produced by Saddam Hussein's regime, especially his intelligence services. The analysis section of the study covers 59 pages"

Must you be so slavish, Maguire?

[Semanticleo]

"although arguably not enough to rise to the level of a strategic relationship."

Ill take that back since this 'weasel' sentence provides some cover for deniability.

[PaulL]

Generally opposed collaboration is a clever way to avoid saying "In specific instances, UBL supported collaboration with Saddam."

[Syl]

Semantic

For the good of the world, please use your debunking techniques on global warming 'science' and the hype surrounding it. It's a bit more urgent at this point.

[Semanticleo]

I remember a quote, "When you do a crime, there's 50 ways to get caught. If you can think of 25, you're genius" Cheney is no genius.

But he did his best to close the loop on his criminality. Marks for effort......

[Neo]

Sen Ted Kennedy and POTUS Bush 43 collaborated on "No Child Left Behind", but it's safe to say that there was no "strategic relationship."

[matt]

i just love this. Pelosi could have killed this off 2 weks ago and it just keeps going and going and going......sooner or later, the memos Cheney wants declassified will find themselves published somewhere and then watch the sparks fly.

[verner]

I love the idea of multiple contacts, but on evidence of a strategic relationship.

Kind of like, we saw Joe walk into a dark alley at midnight with a known prostitute, but there's no evidence that he gave her $20 for a ..... they might have been playing trivial pursuit on his Iphone.

Are you kidding me? Besides, they've never been able to explain why a) Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and b) how quickly A-Q and the Baathists were able to start the insurgency.

And considering the abysmal track record of intelligence gathering, mainly because of the lack of good HUMINT, we might never know the full picture.

[Semanticleo]

You can't trust any of the official reports, memos, or leaked classified documents that we've been relying on to make our BUSH LIED!!! and WAR CRIMES!!!! and TORTURE!!!! charges for the past 8 years.

You need to adapt to the current paradigm where we instead rely on anonymous emailers to partisan Democratic bloggers, and the uncorroborated memories of Democratic politicians.

This obsession you wingers have with actually looking at documented evidence instead of just repeating the latest Journolist narrative is getting very annoying.

[matt]

gee, if Obama released the rpeorts Cheney asked for, perhaps we could get to the truth, Cleo. But unfortunately, he selectively released certain memos for political advantage and it's blown up in his face.

Right now it's the word of 3 CIA directors, Dick Cheney, and various other members of Congress from both parties versus Nancy Pelosi; the same Nancy Pelosi who claimed on the Charlie Rose show recently to be nonpartisan. Ms. Pelosi has a history of prevarication that is hard to overlook, and Helen Keller could look at her during her press conferences and see she's lying through her teeth.

As to war crimes, there has been no proof of this to meet any international standard. Try Chechnya, why don't you, or Darfur.

If Bush lied, then so did the UN, Blair, France, Russia, and Germany. The overwhelming evidence at the time was that Saddam had active WMD programs.

This is a broken record. Move on, little doggie. Your Speaker is authoring her own destruction.

[The Ace]

Just trying to help.

Again, I love trips down memory lane:

The United States also claims it had other evidence linking the plant with chemical weapons production. That evidence includes links between officials at the facility in Sudan and an Iraqi official who has been labeled by U.S. intelligence as "the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program."

The Iraqi, identified as Emad Al Ani, is said to have had extensive dealings with officials at the plant in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.

That and the connection between terrorism sponsor Osama bin Laden and Sudan's "military industrial complex" were enough to convince the United States that the Shifa plant was involved in chemical weapons production, the official said.

Further,
Former Defense Secretary William Cohen testified before your commission to the effect that the Clinton administration believed that Osama bin Laden and Iraq collaborated on the construction of a nerve gas factory in the Sudan. And it was on that basis that the factory was bombed on August 20th, 1998.

But hey, those ideas weren't so crazy in the late 90's. Gee, I wonder why that is?

[verner]

If Bush lied, then so did the UN, Blair, France, Russia, and Germany. The overwhelming evidence at the time was that Saddam had active WMD programs.

Which brings us to another point. If Saddam and A-Q were coordinating efforts, I bet they would make sure a whole lot of people knew about it! Hey, it's not like Saddam wasn't under sanctions, and didn't have a history of shadowy terrorist groups doing his dirty work for him already, or anything like that.

DUH.

And let's remember what is NOT in dispute:

1) He had an entire year to get whatever stock he had out of the country.

2)He put a great deal of effort in keeping his teams of scientists, and equipment intact.

3)They caught him negotiating with the North Koreans. Remember that little facility the Israelis just bombed in Syria?

4)He had completely corrupted the UN and others VIA the Oil for Food program and those fake oil contracts.

[Cecil Turner]

Joscelyn's piece refers to docs and the link is to what? An article by Stephen Hayes, personal biographer of Dick Cheney.

How lame. The link includes a very good description of the documents, excerpts from the abstract, and enough information to quickly find the online version of the full data-dump if one desires.

If you wanted to contest the conclusions of the study, that might be a reasonable discussion. The implication it's somehow invalid because the link doesn't go directly to the study is imbecilic.

[Soylent Red]

Look folks...

I work with a guy who was part of the group sent in to locate and catalog WMD locations after the invasion.

As he tells it, they found all kinds of precursors and indicators, but the Run to Baghdad was moving so fast there was no one around to secure it. Mark it on your plugger and check back tomorrow.

Except that by tomorrow, the stuff was cleaned out and hauled away. Oops. He says that there was many, many cases where this happened. I believe him because I know his pedigree.

Now, of course we are talking precursors and indicators, not shipping crates marked "WMD" stored in downtown Baghdad. So I guess some people will never be satisfied that maybe, in fact, Bush didn't lie.

The unfortunate reality is that whether or not there was WMD hanky panky going on, there was a general consensus in the international intellligence community on the appearance of hanky panky. Even Saddam's people thought he had them.

So to again beat a very dead horse, in 2003 I'd rather Bush opted to act on the worst case scenario, than I would that we all live the worst case scenario.

[Topsecretk9]

Deutch too was busted for taking a classified laptop to his home.

"Soon after Deutch's departure from the CIA in 1996 it was revealed that classified materials were being kept on several of Deutch's laptop computers designated as unclassified. In January 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management at CIA declined to fully pursue the security breach. Over two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Janet Reno declined prosecution. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance.[4] President Clinton pardoned Deutch on his last day in office.[5]"

Weird.
Weird how all kinds of Clintonista's are involved in classified information breaches on a much larger scale than the reveal the name of the already known 9 to 5 CIA ninja and none of them found their way into media freak-out meltdown ala Libby and if they did get prosecuted it was of the lightest of wrist slaps.

[Jack is Back!]

You can parse all the memo's and reports and such stuff until the cows come home. The point is that Congress gets briefed at all times by the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the NRO, et.al. in order to satisfy all kinds of laws but most importantly to keep in the good graces of the appropriators. It comes down to whether you are willing to believe professional intelligence managers and operatives or Congressmen and the occasional staff assistant. I don't remember Will Rogers making jokes about intelligence managers and their powers or lack of equivocation.

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