When you leave this Administration in 2008 maybe you could go back to FOX and get your own show titled Snow’s SPIN Zone.

I am aware that you were not part of the Bush Administration in 2003, but you were on the air and you should know better than spin this story. Honesty is a virtue that you appear to be pushing to the limits.

Here is a link to a Christian Science Monitor article of March 14, 2003 in which they refer to President Bush’s press conference of the previous week which focused almost solely on Iraq. The CSM said that the Pres. mentioned Sept. 11 eight times and he referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Quoting the CSM article, “Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was “personally involved” in Sept 11, about the same figure as a month ago.”

….. skipped several paragraphs….

“Polling data show that right after Sept 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either “most” or “some” of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.”

The link to this article is http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.htm

Tony, I do not know how you can sleep at night stretching the truth. Thank God for the internet where we can search stuff the Administration (The Pres, the VP, Condi, Rumsfeld, et al.) have said but have sort-of-kinda forgotten that they said it. So it is our job as citizens to remind this Administration that not only did they stretch the truth the first time but they are doing it again. Shame, shame.

The sad commentary on this is we have lost over 3,000 brave military, over another 1,000 coalition troops and contractors, tens of thousands of injured troops, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens – all supposedly to replace a dictator, but we all know it was for OIL, don’t we?

One could ask, where did the citizens get this misconception about Iraq and Saddam from – pray tell. Well they got it from all the Republican administration and Pentagon and State Department bobble heads that read off the same script to deceive the American public.

Meant #208 “VV” – not #209.

:-)

No dots for you, either.

I’ll be patient this time and wait for it to show up.

Yo, TP a little help with the postings ! :-)

In the big picture, what did Cannistaro think about attacking Iraq because of Saddam’s alledged terror activities?

(And by terror activities I mean against the U.S. or Europe … I am aware of the stories that he may have funded suicide bombings in Israel at $25 to $40K per bomber … I am not talking about that)

September 2002

“Is there any confirmed evidence of Iraq’s links to terrorism? No,” [Washington Post, 9/10/2002]

October, 2002

Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there’s a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.” [Guardian, 10/9/2002]

“They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it. And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can’t get him to say what they want on Iraq.” [Washington Post, 10/25/2002]

November 2002

The hawks are not getting evidence of al-Qaeda/Iraq ties “from the CIA because the CIA, to its credit, is telling it the way they see it, which is what they should be doing, describing the world as it is, not as policy-makers wish it to be, or hope it to be, but as it is.” [CBC News, 11/1/2002]

Citing Cannistraro does not support your point, it actually discredits it.

No dots for you.

NPR Radio, Feb 1999

“It appears that Osama bin Laden has abandoned his base in southern Afghanistan. Bin Laden is the Saudi millionaire the US holds responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa last summer. The attacks left hundreds dead. The US indicted bin Laden in connection with the bombings and is offering a $5 million reward for his capture. Afghanistan has provided him with sanctuary, but it’s not clear where he is now. NPR’s Mike Shuster reports. ”

SHUSTER: Iraq’s contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one US government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There is a wide gap between bin Laden’s fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship. But some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.

Mr. GEORGE TENET (Director, CIA): One of my greatest concerns, Mr. Chairman, is the serious prospect that bin Laden or another terrorist might use chemical or biological weapons. Bin Laden’s organization is just one of a dozen terrorist groups that have expressed an interest in or have sought chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear agents. Bin Laden, for example, has called on the acquisition of these weapons as, quote, “a religious duty” and noted that, quote, “How we use them is up to us.”

ENV

You know, I wrote that post with obvious sarcasm.

But after being out in my backyard and having the pitbull next door not only inform me that you had responded to my post, but also telling me precisely what to say in response — I may have to start taking Exley’s arguments a bit more seriously …

It’s true ENV … the neighborhood dogs … they have their own agendas …

I got a great chuckle out of that one. I thought of the animation 101 Dalmatiens where they heard about the puppy kidnappings from the dogs barking across the English countryside.

Thanks for the interesting info.

I will check out your links a bit later in the day.

Before I do – a few questions, just assuming for now that I won’t have any argument with your assertions once I read them …

1. Do you think Saddam was aware that his underlings dealing with AQ?

2. Do you think Bush was aware that Saddam was aware that his underlings were dealing with AQ?

3. Assuming the answer to the first two is “yes” – do you think that the invasion of March 2003 was the best way to address this?

This gets a bit “off topic” in the sense that Question #3 gets to the “others thought Saddam was a threat, too …” argument. It seems that things move at such a glacial pace on this subject – we won’t be talking about all of the ALTERNATIVE military options we could have persued against Saddam (if it was proven to be necessary) until 5 years from now.

For example, the Northern “No Fly” zone had pretty much allowed the Kurds to create a “semi-autonomous” state. Could this have been used as a friendly base for Special Forces operations? Or a mix of Special Ops and Conventional Ops? Maybe, maybe not. But these are options that should have won or lost out in robust debate – not a pre-determined “pie in the sky” “mono-rail” type of a strategy. We also controlled the Southern skies. Could we have pressed this advantage and persued alternatives that would have avoided being bogged down in an occupation?

Once you strip away all of the partisan bickering and barbs, the readers of this site – if I can take the liberty of speaking for all – side with Gore in his general assertion that the Bush administration was pushing (or not correcting) the most dire arguments involving Saddam to justify not only the pre-emptive striking of another nation, but also the pre-emptive OCCUPATION of another nation.

Bush needed a lot of juice in his argument to justify that and he tried to get it by frequently tapping the Saddam/AQ/Mushroom Cloud well – which was well primed given the pysche of Americans after 9-11.

Looking forward to reviewing your site a bit later.

Sorry for all of the duplicate posts.

The posts were either disappearring or not showing up for a long time after being sent.

Maybe a combination of problems on my end and problems at TP.

Again, sorry.

There were also members of al Qaeda who were arrested by Hussein’s regime and there are countless examples of Baathists and Hussein loyalists who have been fighting al Qaeda in Iraq RIGHT NOW. Groups such as the 1920’s Brigades and others are taking the fight to al Qaeda in Iraq and exemplify the split in the Baath party about working with Islamic militants, though some Baathists chose a different path (cooperation).

I understand this it outside the conventional wisdom or may be viewed as a defacto attempt to excuse the invasion of Iraq, but it’s not. Thanks for inviting me in to your guys excellent blog and I look forward to the ongoing education here.

Mark of http://www.regimeofterror.com

———————————

Osama bin Laden in 1999:

“A year before Saddam Hussein entered Kuwait, I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf.

No one believed me.

I distributed many tapes in Saudi Arabia. It was after it happened that they started believing me and believed my analysis of the situation.”

———————————-

Khaled Batarfi recalls talking to Osama bin Laden on the subject of Saddam:

Osama bin Laden said, “This guy [Saddam] can never be trusted.” He doesn’t believe [Saddam is] a Muslim. So he never liked him or trusted him.

—————————————

In February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, bin Laden released an audiotape in which he implied that Saddam was an apostate from Islam, the *** gravest charge bin Laden could make against a fellow Muslim. ***