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The Terrorist From Jordan’s Only Got One Leg?

There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush’s justification for going to war. The declassified document being released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied […]

There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush’s justification for going to war.

The declassified document being released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war. ~AP

Via Antiwar

I have never believed in any such connection, and it is discouraging that it took four years and a Senate investigation to confirm what common sense should have been telling everyone all along.  This is why I tend to be skeptical these days when people say, “The government knows things we don’t.”  It is likely that they know things we don’t, but it also seems clear that many people in government, especially the higher-ups, have horrendous judgement in using whatever knowledge they do have and, in some cases, the average guy who regularly reads the newspaper might well know almost as much about a country where we have no human intelligence as the CIA analysts working on that country. 

The part that first gave it away for me was the claim that Zarqawi had had one of his legs amputated in Baghdad, which proved, you see, that Hussein and Al Qaeda were close allies.  You could just see the great terrorist mastermind hobbling all over the Near East, couldn’t you?  Except that it never made any sense.  Of all the places a crazed Salafist terrorist might go for medical attention, he went to Baghdad, then the center of Baathism?  No, it was too preposterous.  Then it turned out later that Zarqawi seemed to have two very whole, functioning legs (which we later saw in his almost self-parodying videos), which should have told us all back in 2004 that the entire story about Zarqawi’s relationship with the Iraqi government was the result of either badly sourced intelligence or out-and-out fabrications. 

One of the ways you could tell that it was a fabrication was the shakiness of the nature of the Iraqi regime’s “collaboration” with al Qaeda.  The collaboration was proved mostly simply by the presence of Ansar al Islam in Kurdish Iraq (outside of Hussein’s effective control), which again made no sense.  Iraq’s government could not be “harbouring” terrorists on territory it did not control–was the Northern Alliance “harbouring” Al Qaeda, too, since they claimed to be the legitimate government of Afghanistan?  To claim that Iraq’s government “harboured” Ansar al Islam was to lie, because anyone with a map could see that it was impossible, but they were counting on an ignorant public and a quiescent, servile Congress to go along because of the “seriousness” of the threat.  It’s rather like the man who makes a spurious accusation against someone, but then demands that he defend himself because of the “seriousness” of the charge. 

Then there was the other snag: if true, it would mean that Kurdish Islamists were working with the Mukhabarat.  They would have had two reasons to despise Hussein, one because they were Kurdish and the other because they were Islamists.  The idea that they had a working relationship in any meaningful sense was laughable.  But the administration swallowed it, Powell said it and apparently a lot of Americans were fooled.  Will the public be holding Mr. Bush’s feet to the fire over this manifest deception?  I won’t be holding my breath.  Nobody of any political importance saw fit to challenge him on it when it mattered, so who will be bothered about it now?

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