Move Along People, No Links to WMD or Al-qaida Here
The US government has started to release documents captured in Iraq during the invasion that have not been translated and evaluated yet.
Here, for instance, are the marching orders for Directorate 8, the Mukhabarat's "Technical Affairs" department: "The Eight Directorate is responsible for development of materials needed for covert offensive operations. It contains advanced laboratories for testing and production of weapons, poisons and explosives."
It goes on. Directorate 9, we discover, "is one of the most important directorates in the Mukhabarat. Most of its work is outside Iraq in coordination with other directorates, focusing on operations of sabotage and assassination."
The document also discusses the Mukhabarat's Office 16, set up to train "agents for clandestine operations abroad." The document helpfully adds that "special six-week courses in the use of of terror techniques are provided at a camp in Radwaniyhah."
I hope the msm covers these documents at least as zealously as the covered the fake National Guard memos about Bush, since these are real and all. My guess is that these will not be played up much because it doesn't fit the current meme that Bush lied etc., etc.
Here, for instance, are the marching orders for Directorate 8, the Mukhabarat's "Technical Affairs" department: "The Eight Directorate is responsible for development of materials needed for covert offensive operations. It contains advanced laboratories for testing and production of weapons, poisons and explosives."
It goes on. Directorate 9, we discover, "is one of the most important directorates in the Mukhabarat. Most of its work is outside Iraq in coordination with other directorates, focusing on operations of sabotage and assassination."
The document also discusses the Mukhabarat's Office 16, set up to train "agents for clandestine operations abroad." The document helpfully adds that "special six-week courses in the use of of terror techniques are provided at a camp in Radwaniyhah."
I hope the msm covers these documents at least as zealously as the covered the fake National Guard memos about Bush, since these are real and all. My guess is that these will not be played up much because it doesn't fit the current meme that Bush lied etc., etc.
posted by hurtleg at 8:45 AM
2 Comments:
Anyone see Jarhead?
"Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, [1] had no weapons of mass destruction and [2] no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters."
Both of these "claims" are BS. Most opponents of the war based their opposition on the notion that Iraq did not pose a security threat to the US, even if there were small numbers of residual banned weapons (you can go back through the pages of The Nation, for example, and see that people were saying that a) Saddam was not going to use any weapons he had against the US offensively, and that if he did have weapons, there was no better way to get him to use them against US citizens than to invade Iraq) and the ISG bore that conclusion out (from Wiki):
"On January 23, 2004, the head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties." Kay criticized the intelligence that led to the war in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), saying "we were all wrong and that is most disturbing." Kay's successor, named by CIA director George Tenet, is the former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer. Duelfer has stated that the chances of finding any WMD stockpiles in Iraq are "close to nil.""
I can't tell for sure, but I'm assuming the linked article article is little more than a blog post, no? I ask because, from the bare facts presented, claim [1] remains intact, and nothing in the "new revelations" cited by the author even suggests otherwise.
Claim [2] is just a red herring. The actual claim was that there were no connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and no connections between Iraq and 9/11. (As an aside, I just read in "The Assassin's Gate" that the terrorist training camps for foreign fighters that were set up in the south in the year before the war were actually set up in anticipation of the insurgent war that was to follow the invasion--something the Baathists foresaw and planned for, but not the neocons.) Even if there were limited connections between the two, the 9/11 commission found no "operational connections," which is what counts from a security perspective.
The meta-narrative of the war opponents is that the admin. exaggerated and fabricated threats in order to justify a war they started planning in January '01, and the documentation on that is by now pretty unassailable.
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