As reported in today's Washington Post and New York Times, George W. Bush has a curious response to the September 11 Commission's official finding that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda before or during 9/11. His response is "yes there was. Dick Cheney and I say so and we're going to keep saying so no matter what you worthless pointy-headed experts and reporters come up with."
According to Post writers Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, "the report, issued yesterday by the bipartisan commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, said that all relevant classified information that it reviewed showed that the contacts that took place between Iraq and al Qaeda officials never led to actual cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding."
"The commission's staff report said that bin Laden 'explored possible cooperation with Iraq' while in Sudan through 1996, but that 'Iraq apparently never responded' to a bin Laden request for help in 1994. The commission cited reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after bin Laden went to Afghanistan in 1996, adding, 'but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship... We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.'"
Bush's response? "So what? I'm the president and if I say something what I say goes."
Here's the real quote...I'm not making this one up: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
Case closed.
As recently as this Monday, Cheney asserted that evidence of a strong, 9/11-related link between Saddam and al Qaeda is "overhwelming," claiming that Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." Asked if Cheney would retract his statements in light of the commission's findings, an administration told a Reuters reporter, "Hell No."
Reporters, administration officials, and Democrats are quibbling about the precise semantics of exactly what Bush, Cheney and other key White House personnel said and didn't say. Bush claims that "this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda." Reporters note that "there are a legion of quotes from Bush and Cheney directly asserting a connection between Hussein and al Qaeda -- and at the very least intimating a link between Hussein and 9/11."
Thanks in part to the failure of "mainstream" (corporate-state) media to fully question that connection at the most relevant time, "a plurality of Americans, 49 percent to 36 percent," believe that 'clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found.'"
Whatever the precise content of White House language, the bottom line is that the Bush-Cheney cabal finds the conspiratorial Saddam-9/11-al Qaeda link highly functional for their broader imperial purposes. The link provides indispensable rationale, they think, for their bloody decision to exploit 9/11 as an opportunity to undertake a grand imperialist action consistent with their quest for global hegemony.
They are not about to give the link up, whatever the actual evidence, especialy when large numbers of American voters have bought their Big Lie. They will continue to advance their thesis --- more through repetition than through actual argument --- as an article of faith, regardless of the mere formality of evidence. But that's a key part of how propaganda works. It's not about rational debate, evidence, and discussion. It's about drumming confusion and power-friendly, empire-serving ideas into the brains of the "citizenry."
It's why no amount of evidence to the contrary could persuade American policy-makers during the 1960s to drop the insistent, obsessive repetition of their claim that the nationalist Vietnamese National Liberation Front was the agent of an international Communist conspiracy directed from the Soviet Kremlin. As Noam Chomsky noted in his book For Reasons of State (1970), "the failure of intelligence to establish the needed link in no way impeded the ideologists, who simply continued to insist that the required thesis was correct, accepting it and proclaiming it as an article of faith." The false link was not argued; it was "merely intoned," by Chomsky's account.
Yet another Vietnam analogy that sticks regarding Iraq. There are other analogies from the Third Reich that merit reflection.
Posted by Paul Street at June 17, 2004 02:32 PM | Sustainers: Comment (1 so far)Ahmed Hikmat Shakir is a name I've seen come up. There's a concern that he's actually a member of the Feyadeen Saddam, and that he was at one of the 9/11 planning meetings; in Malaysia in this case. . .
Just wondering what you think of the connection. . . plug that name in a few places and you'll see what I mean.
My take, from my blog at http://sigma6.blogspot.com/
is:
The current argument (the thinly stretched desire to find a link (any link, like, for example, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir) ) is tantamount to splitting hairs instead of looking at the head. There are a lot of places where it's easy to find actual terrorists. In fact, in Saudi Arabia, they're teeming about and blowing things up left and right.
Right now, the best we've got for Iraq is a man who (may have, no-one is sure yet) met with the 9/11 planners at one of their meetings, this one in Malaysia. Assuming he did, there are any number of things he might have said. It's reasonable to assume (but better to find out for sure) that the result was about as successful as any other attempt to get Al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq to co-operate, as much as they tried. Like the Sudan contacts, and the visits to Iraq, that's very little. A good piece of evidence, even better than a confirmation that this is the same guy in both the Feyadeen Saddam rosters (assuming the rosters are genuine, I'd like to see copies) and the Malaysia event, would be a pay stub, per se; Evidence that a decision had in fact, been made, and that Iraq was providing funds or support, instead of simply negotiating on their heels, or just lending a willing ear.
That said, again, we've got one place of many where terrorists are running around with bombs making statements, blowing things up, capturing people and sending off videos, thick as bees, and the one being scrutinized still is one where after years of searching all we can come up with is a name that may or may not match a list of other names. Needless to say; if it takes you years to find a tentative connection to one person in one place, and in the other ones stuff is blowing up, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
Nonetheless, a number of the more desparate conservatives, more willing to toss that brand of logic out the window to prove their old false assertions right, have grabbed onto this name and won't let go. To a few less conscientious fellows out there, now that this name has come up in two places ("But John Smith is also a US Army officer, don't you see!?"), it's dead certain that Saddam absolutely planned the 9/11 attacks himself and did everything up to and including pay for the tickets. Needless to say, that's pretty weak, and it's also disappointing, because it demonstrates a lack of dedication to the facts.
The problem is, after the President sent the Army to Iraq and removed Saddam's regime, there now is, without a doubt, a serious confluence of Al Qaeda influence in Iraq. As the Saudi Royal Family feared, without Saddam's maniacal regime in power, enforcing its secular view, Al Qaeda has taken the opportunity to engage in the quick and easy access to Americans, and the violent free-for-all that is post-war Iraq.