The really amazing thing about this article is that it’s all relatively unknown to the average person. Everything we hear harped by the media, the politicians, anyone… is that there was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. The 9/11 commission said they couldn’t find anything (of course that can be blamed on the piss-poor intel they had to work from), so everyone takes that as the final word.
Grab a cup of coffee, this is a long read (don’t miss page 2!); but it’s well worth the time. The extent of the failure of the intelligence community is sickening. Keep that in mind while our congress works to hamstring what’s left of it. (Satellites cannot replace human-intelligence!)
FOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime’s ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence “indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States” and ran blaring headlines like the one on the June 17, 2004, front page of the New York Times: “Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.”
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THE CONCLUSION of the Senate Intelligence Committee report–that the CIA did not have the type of intelligence reporting that “would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship”–was ignored by the press. We now have reporting that demonstrates the nature of the relationship. One day there will be much more. At a large warehouse in Doha, Qatar, the Defense Intelligence Agency is reviewing millions of pages of documents from the former Iraqi regime. That process is painfully slow due to a lack of resources and a lack of interest in pursuing the full story of Iraqi support for terrorism.