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Pentagon officials don't normally gush, but Whispers has learned that top staffers were positively enthusiastic following their first meeting with the commander in chief in the secure conference room dubbed "the Tank" recently. They were impressed by the "high-level, global-strategic" discussion and by President Obama's detailed grasp of the difficulties that face the U.S. military. Said one senior Pentagon official: "He asked a lot of really, really good questions."
One congressman said, “How can our sons and daughters spill their blood while the Iraqi government goes on vacation?” The president responded, “The vice president is over there to tell them, do not go on vacation.”How can our boys die while they go on vacation?
..remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda(1), then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there (2) before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene (3), and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.... This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq (4).As I drove I raged at the radio: 1) Zarqawi wasn't in Afghanistan before Iraq, nor was he a member of Al Qaeda. 2) Zarqawi wasn't in Baghdad before the invasion, but in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. 3) Zarqawi created Al Qaeda in Iraq many months after the invasion. 4) How many times do we have to kill the Iraq-Al Qaeda-link lie before it dies?!
Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.Will this report be the end of the VPs lying on this issue? Don't hold your breath.The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.
The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.
"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.
The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.
Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.
· Quitting helps the terrorists. Few politicians want to be known as spokesmen for retreat. Instead we hear such words as "redeployment," "drawdown" or "troop cap." Let's be clear: If we restrict the ability of our troops to fight and win this war, we help the terrorists. Don't take my word for it. Read the plans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman Zawahiri to drive America from Iraq, establish a base for al-Qaeda and spread jihad across the Middle East. The terrorists are counting on us to lose our will and retreat under pressure. We're in danger of proving them right."Don't take my word for it. Read the plans" of the terrorists, indeed. The neoconservatives reliably quote the same lines from Bin Laden - that our retreat after Somalia showed "we didn't have the stomach for a prolonged fight," for instance - but they leave out half of Bin Laden's stated strategic goal. The economic war of attrition is how Osama believes he defeated the Soviet Union, vying with Reagan for credit.
So, for those of you conservatives who think that we have to "listen to Bin Laden's words" and to oppose his every intention, shouldn't you also now reject the War in Iraq as playing directly into Al Qaeda's strategic goals? His line about every one of Al Qaeda's dollars defeating a million American dollars carries weight. It is exactly the sort of calculus in which those of us who opposed this war engaged. You know, strategic thinking rather than "He killed my pappy.""We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
(snip)
As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
"Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.Of course, this represents the first acknowledgement that the U.S. uses techniques that everyone else in the world defines as torture. In fact, we prosecuted Nazis for waterboarding their prisoners, so our current practices are hard to defend. There are consequences for these actions.
Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.
U.S. President George W. Bush said Friday the United States does not torture prisoners, commenting after U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney embraced the suggestion that a dunk in water might be useful to get terrorist suspects to talk.Human rights groups complained that Cheney’s words amounted to an endorsement of a torture technique known as “water boarding,” in which the victim believes he is about to drown. The White House insisted Cheney was not talking about water boarding but would not explain what he meant.
Less than two weeks before midterm congressional elections, the White House was put on the defensive as news of Cheney’s remark spread. Bush was asked about it at a White House photo opportunity with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Presidential spokesman Tony Snow was pelted with questions at two briefings with reporters.
So, despite the fact that Cheney clearly was referring to waterboarding, they have to issue denials. They have to try to walk it back. To do otherwise would remove all the grey from the issue, and the international community would be able to call us torturers without us being able to contest the point. It would be devastating, so they're forced to make fools of themselves by denying Cheney's own words.
