Goe, not even touching the whole ‘neocon’ conspiracy insanity.

But the last two responses make me realize why the failure of our intelligence can’t be left alone by the neocons and thier fellow travellers. When I think about why the administration didn’t lie about finding WMDs when it has played fast and loose with truth on every front, the suspicion grows on me that they weren’t so much honest, as just too slow to realize they were wrong in time to cover it up.

And while the idea of unleashing our nuclear arsenal might seem appealing to some who hope that it would be more effective than our overstretched conventional forces, the fact remains that even with atomic weapons, some targeting information is useful. Blowing up starving North Korean peasants would be nothing more than valuable propaganda to Kim Il Jung. Crippling North Korea’s economy is pretty much redundant. The environmental impact would be of more concern to North Korea’s neighbors than it’s rulers.

And thus the reason that the WMD intell issue still remains. If we couldn’t trust this administration to have good intelligence then, why should we trust them now? And if we can’t trust thier intelligence, how can we trust them to effectively use the powers they wield in our name?

“North Korea, want more nuclear weapons? CATCH!”

Goe, can see the upside.

Goe, mmm… lunch.

Have another glass of that koolaid.

Evangolis, who thought the war was a bad mistake even when everyone expected to find WMD, and now thinks it was a bad mistake whose execution was horribly bungled at the very top, and as a result has damaged our soldiers, our military, and our country.

Goe, because all is not right in whoville.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3717024.stm

Or here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html

The second one in particular indicates that while Bin Laden was interested in getting aid from Iraq and tried several times to do so, there’s was never any credible evidence of Iraqi support for Al-Qaeda. (Although there’d be a great deal of credible evidence for the proposition that WE were behind 9/11, based on documented meetings with Al-Qaeda and funding for Osama Bin Laden. I notice we’re not trying to justify invading ourselves.)

The WMD thing – read the Duelfer report, or anything since. While it’s probable Hussein might have eventually tried to build up a stockpile of WMDs again, there’s no evidence at all he’d done so before we invaded. Quoting David Kay on the subject is slightly ironic, given that a year after he gave that testimony he was one of the loudest voices calling for the Bush administration to admit there had never been any WMDs.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddams hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam’s son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddams mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraqs mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is “thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq,” the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Janes Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Janes reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaedas No. 2 man.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being “directly involved with the preparation and planning” of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his “al Qaeda nom de guerre,” Londons Independent reports.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddams son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawis Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawis cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

plus, the clinton administration acted on intelligence linking al qaeda and iraq before the wtc attacks.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/527uwabl.asp?pg=1

” “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’”

according to the brits… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3892809.stm

“British intelligence on the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger was “credible”. There was not conclusive evidence Iraq actually purchased the material, nor did the government make that claim.”

and we know from the kay report that despite his claims of not finding any wmd’s in iraq, he found mountains of stuff indicating that they were making wmd’s out of things they knew we weren’t looking for.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html

” New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.”

” Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.”

but of course, you have a reason that the iraqi army wanted to _camoflauge_ vast amounts of _highly toxic_ pesticides next to chemical weapons warheads in their ammunition dumps.

Goe, doesn’t store cyclosarin around his house.

Anyways, the CIA has flat out stated “dur, wait, he wasn’t in cahoots with AQ”: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9831216/site/newsweek
Left and right, the evidence that they did anything but go “hey, support us” “no” “please?” “no” is coming out, and it’s pretty obvious now that we were looking for something that wasn’t there.

The last link.. coverup? The basic concept of it was that Saddam was a terrible person. Nobody’s going to deny that and paint him as some civil rights leader. But he wasn’t supporting the terrorists who attacked us, and he wasn’t stockpiling WMDs to use against us. He was a brutal dictator, but so are plenty of other people. We invaded iraq under false pretenses, and that should bother people. If they sold the war from the start as “dude’s a jerk, we’re taking him out”, I’d not be nearly as pissed off. I mind when good friends die because of a lie.