Saturday, November 15, 2003
This is a major development - to say the least. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has come into possession of and released this Top Secret government memo on the connections between the Regime and Bin Laden. This also makes the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee look very bad - to say the least.
(Via LGF) Case Closed: From the November 24, 2003 issue: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies...
Update: Roger L. Simon has some thoughts.
Update2: As I said in the comments at Roger's blog, one of the prime messages this memo bears for me is what it may mean from a purely domestic politics standpoint. That "the idea of Saddam cooperating with terrorists, particularly Bin Laden, was not a fabrication. It was believed internally, with significant evidence. It wraps foam-rubber around the Administration's enemies "Bush lied about the terror connection" baseball bat.
Will it end the "Bush lied" [or, "intentionally mislead"] mantra? No, just as we still hear "Where are the WMD's" even though you could spend from now until tomorrow listing everyone from the French to the UN to Bill Clinton who believe/d he had them - but it sure helps.
That's one of the reasons I find this disclosure interesting. It's a glimpse inside, and a signal that my faith [understanding that we've never been, nor can we be, privy to all the secret intelligence - we need to go on some amount of faith in the people who are in the know] hasn't been misplaced."
Only one named source? One cannot seriously buy this memo whole hog. If this is true, why didn't we go after Iraq first instead of Afghanistan? Why didn't this info go to the U.N. or potential "coalition of the willing?" This reminds me of the Bush yellow cake state of the union speech, Rumsfeld's they'll great us as liberators, Kuwaiti finding weapons of mass destruction story or Iraq scientist revealing WMD not to mention that Saddam and Osama are STILL on the loose. It's a hack memo leak grasping at straws.
Shortly after the hack memo was released, the DOD issued a statement saying, "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate."
We went after Afghanistan first because that's where Osama and Al Qaeda actually lived. It would have been a bit silly to go after the people working with them without going after the principles themselves.
What this memo shows is that the Iraq/Al Qaeda connection was well believed internally, and hinged on far more than one questionable meeting with Atta in Prague, but I wrote that already.
The DoD memo discounts the significance of this memo not at all. On the contrary, it shows the memo is real and not a fabrication.
It's therefore up to everyone to decide what the significance of the memo and the 50 points are. I have no doubt that some people will do anything possible to convince themselves that Bush lied...etc...if so, I can't help you.