The American people are owed the best efforts of diplomatic and intelligence staff. Decision making is difficult enough just sorting through the personal biases of honest intel staff. Sabotage of the process by staff should be prosecutable.

Outing/endangerment of covert assets? All roads leading to the Langley HQ are public. Any foreign intel service that does not know the names, addresses, romantic entanglements, and level of indebtedness of Langley personnel is simply not trying.

Yet here we have ABC’s own prior reporting that documents ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda in collaboration on WMD’s. The whole thing is there. So what changed between 1999 and 2003 – the facts, or the politics?

If (as I assume it does) ABC’s subsequent reporting claims that Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda and had no WMD’s, shouldn’t ABC go back and issue a correction or retraction of their 1999 reports?

No hypothesis neccessary. We jumped through these legal hoops because it was the price of British cooperation. As I recall, many felt at the time that the price was too high.

Thank you Roger for staying after these links. This is absolutely crucial for the continued robustness of will that this country needs. Only lawyers were impressed by the Case the President made regarding the WMD’s. Mom and Dads who send their kids to war want to know that we are going after the people who helped bring those buildings down.

The Bush Administration made a major error when they decided to pursue the Legalistic Argument to go to war. The only way we could ever lose this war was to lose the will and the only way to keep our will is to know that we are going after the bastards responsible for terrorism.

Btw I happen to agree that the WMD’s were important but I dont believe that the American people would have worried had the President decided to go to war based on the connections to terror that Saddam had. And those Connections would have been self evident as soon as we got into Baghdad as we have so sadly seen.

I am interested in hypothesis on why the Administration decided to pursue the legal route. A country does not have to prove a case to go to war…unless we truly do have to seek permission to defend ourselves.

The links to Terror are extensive and even an amateur like myself has compiled some very interesting facts.

Pierre Legrand

Great find. How did you locate it? I played the clip in my podcast today, and pointed to the video on the Media Research site also. Nice catch!

Charlie

But true.

“leave one another’s barns alone” was probably the main objective, at least from OBL’s standpoint. The whole Arab world knew very well the butchery of which Sadaam & Sons were capable, and OBL was no exception. (“Important to be in good graces of the biggest baddest bully on the block” thought the tall gay impotent Muslim.) Hussein’s status as said bully was all the reason I needed to continue the WoT in his house.

Don’t bother looking for a needle in a particular haystack. That is unimportant. What is important is understanding why haystacks burst into flames.

Saddam and OBL (and others) are demented farmers who dilligently pitch extra loads of manure into haystacks to increase the rate with which haystacks burst into flames. They both want burning haystacks in the barns of their enemies.

Whether or not they shared particular haystacks in particular as targets and whether or not they both pitched manure onto the same ones here or there is ultimately unimportant. There is almost no doubt remaining that they discussed – in general terms at least – haystacks, barns, manure, and combustion as matters of mutual interest.

It is nearly preposterous to insist that these sorts of discussions did not progress to the point of at least narrowing down general priorities for the types of targets which were most mutually beneficial. It really is not necessary to prove that they agreed on a particular haystack in a particular barn and cooperated to make it burn. All that matters is that they had general agreement to set haystacks on fire in barns on farms “over there” and “over there” and to leave one another’s barns alone.

A once noble profession (as if) has sold itself to the pimps of political advocacy and they don’t even care enough to try to stop it.

I really do not like to think in terms of “conspiracies” but I suspect (or at least hope) that within my lifetime we will discover the buyers and sellers in this. And I am convinced there are buyers and sellers in the fullest sense of those terms. This is not a matter of universal ideology from top to bottom – real money and other compensation has and is changing hands.

I have no doubt that the buyers are clever enough to know who and what they can have for free or very little cost, but they also know where, and with whom, they need to spend a buck to make a buck.

So now the new Iraqi government and a 6-year old ABC news clip are part of the American “Right-Wing”?

Never mind this radio clip, a large amount of the new information linking al Qaeda to the Hussein regime has been found in the vast fields of Iraqi intelligence documents and disseminated by the fledgling Iraqi government. Things like meetings between bin Laden’s number two man al Zawahiri and Hussein cronies.

I suppose they were old college buddies.

Nothing to see here…

At any rate, it never ceases to amaze me how Iraq/al Qaeda naysayers will go totaly out of their way to discount the numerous ties between the two, ties that were very pointedly explained in the 9/11 Commission Report, yet seek the blood of Bush administration officials at even the SUGGESTION of inproprity.

Also, I find it somewhat telling that you seem more interested in digging up possible links between the Bush family and the bin Laden’s than in finding out the truth about Saddam’s possible involvement with terrorism.

Not that I’m one to question a fellow American’s patriotism (the horror!) but who’s frickin’ side are you on?

Mr. B

http://www.mediaresearch.org/rm/cyber/2004/binladen061704/segment1.ram