Safire's Smoking Gun (ties Hussein to OBL)

Just saw this in the Times.  Safire claims to have found a smoking gun (CD with email from OBL's number two to Hussein). Sounds bogus.  Does anyone know about this and why it might be bogus?  You know this column is going to echo throughout the Wurlitzer...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/opinion/11SAFI.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Found: A Smoking Gun
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

n the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga.

That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a "clear link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.

The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to Al Qaeda the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements. The Kurds turned him over to Americans for further interrogation, which is proving fruitful.

The Times reporter Dexter Filkins in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages' authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, "We couldn't make this up if we tried."

The author of the lengthy Ansar-to-Qaeda electronic message is suspected of being the most wanted terror operative in the world today: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, long familiar to readers of this space as "the man with the limp," who personifies the link of Ansar and Al Qaeda.

On Sept. 24, 2001 -- not two weeks after 9/11 -- Kurdish sources led me to report: "The clear link between the terrorist in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in Kurdistan. . . . The Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of Al Qaeda mullahs and terrorists. . . . Some 400 `Arab Afghan' mercenaries . . . have already murdered a high Kurdish official as well as a Muslim scholar who dared to interpret the Koran humanely."

The C.I.A. blew off that report. Our National Security Council did not learn of subsequent warfare against the Kurds by the Qaeda affiliate doing Saddam's bidding until its members read it in The Times. After Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker and C. J. Chivers of The Times developed the story from inside northern Iraq, it dawned on some intelligence analysts that a "clear link" was probable.

On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year."

The leader whose leg was treated, perhaps amputated, in Baghdad was identified here in January 2003, as Zarqawi (twice, after one misspelling). The presence of this international terrorist for two months in a Baghdad hospital required the approval of Saddam's ubiquitous secret police.

In his U.N. speech the following month, Colin Powell publicly identified the Palestinian, born in Jordan, as one who oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan three years before: "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden."

Now we have documentary evidence of Ansar's current operation: employing suicide bombers to foment a civil war in Iraq that would reinstate safe haven for terrorists. The notion that these serial killers are not central players in the global network that attacked us -- that the Ansar boss in Iraq must be found carrying an official Qaeda membership card signed by bin Laden -- is simply silly.

Of the liberation's three casus belli, one was to stop mass murder, bloodier than in Kosovo; we are finding horrific mass graves in Iraq. Another was informed suspicion that a clear link existed between world terror and Saddam; this terrorist plea for Qaeda reinforcements to kill Iraqi democracy is the smoking gun proving that.

The third was a reasoned judgment that Saddam had a bioweapon that could wipe out a city; in time, we are likely to find a buried suitcase containing that, too.  

•  Transparent

  The last paragraph says the whole thing -- they want to get people to stop criticizing Bush for no WMD. They want them to still believe in finding WMD.

  And it will probably work.

  by JamesB3 on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:01:01 AM PDT

•  Read before you post

  Or more carefully, at least.

  You fell into Safire's Kurd trap.

  Ansar are Fundamentalist Kurds.  They were out of Saddam's reach.  No Fundamentalists with links to Al Qaeda operated outside the no-fly zones, where Saddam could easily crush them.

  Safire mentions Ansar repeatedly, just like the Wurlitzer did a year ago.  And Bush did too.

  Then we found out that "oops, Ansar not tied to Saddam."

  Safire then slips in his own previous column, based on the accusations of friendly Kurds.  They claim that Ansar and Saddam are linked.  But there's no evidence of that.  And, on top of that, most of the CD dealt with post-Saddam plans.
  But Bill doesn't mention that.

  I do think we'll find that suitcase he mentions.  But it won't be in Iraq.

  by Ptolemy on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:05:35 AM PDT

  •  Do you think

    this will fool the press and the public?

    by JamesB3 on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:07:17 AM PDT

    •  No.

      Not this column anyway.

      Let's see how many times they repeat it.

      The Wurlitzer ain't functioning so good, since Bush started banging on the keys.

      by Ptolemy on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:10:51 AM PDT

  •  Let me state it another way

    1. Safire claims that Ansar thrived under Saddam. But they only thrived in the Kurdish area where Saddam had no control. So if they thrived, it had more to do with our allies the Kurds or (shock) us.
    2. The CD solicits help in the future. That implies that they haven't been getting help in the past. This is actually another piece of evidence that the claims Bush was making--that Al Qaeda supported SH in the past--is bogus.
    3. No one is willing to claim this document is authentic. It smells like the papers conveniently found indicting a British MP of a relationship with Saddam, or the papers showing Russian collaboration with Saddam, or some paperwork that suggested there was ongoing WMDs. Or that silly letter claiming Iraq was shopping for uranium in Niger. All of these pieces of propaganda were proven to be false with relatively little effort.

    by emptywheel on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:56:46 AM PDT

•  Another pathetic

  attempt by safliar to justify the war. Some of his charges have already been repudiated.

  by SteveLCo on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:11:06 AM PDT

•  Silly

  Safire has turned into a nut. This topic was addressed in the diaries yesterday.  This CD proves nothing about Saddam and al Qaeda's connections before the invasion.  As discussed yesterday, it is a plea from Ansar al-Islam for al Qaeda operatives to come to Iraq now.  What is Safire's problem?  And even if there was a connection, this doesn't help the Dork anyways - Iraq is a mess.

  by John Masotti on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:12:19 AM PDT

•  What's Sad...

  Is that somewhere there is a talented, intelligent newspaper writer who can't get a job with a major news outlet because people like Safire are clogging the biggest newspapers with journalistic plaque.  This is why blogs are becoming the news media version of heart bypass surgery.

  He couldn't win the war with ego. - Kate Bush

  by PSoTD on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:13:07 AM PDT

•  Authenticity yet to be established

  Rumsfeld yesterday, talking to reporters at the Pentagon:

  "I don't know if it's authentic," he said. "People who've read it think it is, but I haven't read it."

  General Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

  He says the question of its legitimacy is still undergoing study. "Authenticity is still being evaluated," he said.

  But he says if it is genuine, then it demonstrates al-Qaida links to the ongoing insurgency.

  "But the al-Qaida is clearly involved if that letter is authentic," he said.

  Asked if defense officials in Washington, by raising questions about the document's authenticity, were backing away from the more confident pronouncements made earlier in Baghdad, General Myers says that is not the case.

  "No, I'm just trying to tell you what I know," he said.

  by jbrjake on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:43:58 AM PDT

  •  Confusion Reigns Supreme

    They're really having script problems these days, aren't they?

    And Rummy says he hasn't read it?  Did they ask him if he plans to?  Maybe he's ticked off because he realizes this supports the argument that overthrowing Saddam would open Iraq up to al-Qaeda, not close it off.

    "L'enfer, c'est le GOP!" - JJB, from an idea by oratorio

    by JJB on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:57:04 AM PDT

•  Safire

  Safire's been trying to prove the connection for over two years now to justify his PNAC, Likud uber alles world view.  Nothing to see here.

  by Paleo on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:44:15 AM PDT

•  Smoking Gun?

  Safire's Smoke and Mirrors is more like it.

  The man is a propagandist for the GOP.  His ties to Nixon go back to the late 50s at the very least (he helped to stage manage the "kitchen debate" between Mad Dick and Khrushchev in 1959), was resonsible for turning Agnew into a sort of Lewis Carroll version of Joe McCarthy ("effete corps of impudent snobs," "nattering nabobs of negativism," "pusillanimous pussyfooting," and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" were put into Spiro's mouth by Safire), and he labored hard to keep the Whitewater affair going long after it was obvious that there was no evidence to suggest there was anything to investigate.  Every now and then he'll publish someting that deviates from the approved Republican script, but only to give himself a tiny measure of objectivity that he promptly squanders with a column such as this one.

  He wants a signficant and more or less permanent American military presence in that part of the world, and he'll tell any lie, print any fable, to help ensure that outcome.
  

  "L'enfer, c'est le GOP!" - JJB, from an idea by oratorio

  by JJB on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 10:53:56 AM PDT

•  Operation Backfill

  I posted a diary yesterday on various attempts (including one by Colin Powell) to backfill a link between Saddam and Osama and have today sent the following letter to the NYT editor:

  I find William Safire's "Found: A Smoking Gun" rather odd. He argues that the electronic document recently discovered in Iraq proves there was a "clear link between world terror and Saddam" and cites as support Dexter Filkin's February 9 front page Times article, "U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict." However, Mr. Filkin explicitly noted that the document "does not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists." Further, his article indicates that the document is a plea for al Qaeda's assistance. In short, not only does the document fail to establish a pre-war connection between Saddam and world terrorism, it also suggests that current links between Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda may be rather weak and provisional. Mr. Safire might want to reread Mr. Filkin's article, starting with the headline.

  by JVictor on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 11:13:02 AM PDT

  •  Excellent

    Great letter.  I particularly like the last sentence.
    

    "L'enfer, c'est le GOP!" - JJB, from an idea by oratorio

    by JJB on Wed Feb 11, 2004 at 11:56:15 AM PDT