OUGwave Wrote:The 9/11 commission REJECTED any notion that Saddam had any culpability in the 9/11 attacks. However, they also agreed with what I've been saying all along, that Saddam DID have ties to al-Qaeda, and CERTAINLY made attempts to setup a DIRECT OPERATIONAL LINK with al-Qaeda, clearly demonstrating his intent to use terrorism as a means to attack the United States.
Wrong.
There is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. That's what the report says, and it says it plainly.
You are twisting things around (just like George W. Bush does) by emphazing this notion of "ties."
For goodness sake,
George W. Bush has ties to bin Laden. Bin Laden's brother was an investor in Bush's first oil company.
So talk all you want about ties.
Let's talk facts.
At most, it was bin Laden who asked representatives of Saddam for help. And, as the report indicates, Saddam ignored bin Laden.
There is no evidence they worked together, according to the commission. Period.
Bush is wrong. He misled the American people on issues of national security. And he should apologize or be made to pay for that mistake.
Quote:What happened was an outrageous attempt by the New York Times and other media outfits to spin the 9/11 commission findings into a controversy that never existed, in their zeal to get John Kerry elected. To take the commission's finding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and then conflate that with some notion that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and then from there the notion that they had nothing to do with terrorism is sloppy journalism at best and quite possibly an agenda driven attempt by the Times editorial staff to mislead the U.S. public.
It is a fact: Saddam Hussein had no more to do with al Qaeda than George W. Bush.
Bush has spent his entire presidency suggesting or implying otherwise -- and becuase of that, this is a huge, legitimate story.
Quote:I'd like not to believe it, but how does the Times make such a glaring misinterpretation of the report that the commission members actually go out of their way to correct them? Thats like a college journalism mistake.
I hate Dick Cheney as much as the next guy, but he has every right to hold the Times' and the media in general's feet to the fire on this one. They simply got it wrong, and their stories flat out lied about what the commission found. It doesn't get more egregious than that. Anyone associated with journalism should be ashamed at that.
This is my take: The media is angry. They know they've been lied to through this entire presidency. This report finally gave them a chance to call Bush on one of his lies. So, they jumped at it -- as they should have.
Quote:There is an attempt by the mainstream media, here and abroad, to whitewash Saddam's regime and paint it as a dictatorship gone bad that might have done horrible things to its people, but in no way posed a real threat to the security of the United States. That is a horrible, horrible lie.
There is no whitewashing going on -- just a simple recitation of the facts.
Saddam was a horrible, horrible man. But Saddam was not a threat to the United States.
That's just the plain truth.
Quote:Iraq did pose a security threat for us, and its connections with al-Qaeda are but ONE aspect of that threat. He repeatedly sought methods of violence to employ to break the containment regime. A clear pattern had emerged over the past decade of this. After 9/11, he recognized the awesome power that one-time lethal attacks of a terrorist nature could have in the modern world, and Putin's information simply verifies what we already knew about his intentions in this area.
You typed a lot of words there, but they don't add up to anything.
The al-Qaeda connection simply isn't there. This has been established. You can keep talking about "ties," and I'll keep pointing to this report, which makes plain the fact that those "ties" didn't mean anything.
Saddam and bin Laden did not work together. Period. They weren't allies.
You should give it up. So should Bush and Cheney.
I mean, when will Cheney stop talking about this supposed meeting between Mohammad Atta and senior Iraq intelligence?
It's ridiculous. It obviously didn't happen. No one believes that story any more. The commission said, quite clearly, that phone records suggest Atta in Florida at the time. And the commission wasn't the first to sneer at that story.
For Cheney to get his pants all bunched up over the Times supposed failure to make clear distinctions is laughable -- because it was the intentional blurring of those distinctions that Cheney and Bush used to get us into a war we didn't have to fight.
Cheney wants it both ways.
And until Putin puts up or shuts up, I say he's spinning like mad to cover Bush's ***.
Even the Bush administration -- which out to be holding Putin's story up and parading it around Washington -- is downplaying it, saying it didn't add to the intellegence they already had.
As we can all see, that intelligence was piss poor.
Quote:You can disagree until the cows come home about whether the decision to launch a pre-emptive war was a justified or prudent way to deal with the threat that Saddam posed. But you can't effectively argue that he didn't pose a threat.
I can and I do. Iraq never posed a threat. Period. It's plain as day.
You are grasping at straws.
And Osama bin Laden is still missin'.
