A few weeks back, we discovered that the Bush administration refused Pentagon plans to go after Abu Musab Zarqawi in Kurdish-controlled portions of Iraq, because they
needed him in place as a rationale to invade:
With Tuesday's attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself -- but never pulled the trigger.
. . .
The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late -- Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. "Here's a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we're suffering as a result inside Iraq," [former National Security Council member Roger] Cressey added.
At the time of that story, it was estimated that close to 700 deaths since the cancelled plans were attributable to Zarqawi.
Well, the news just got worse.
Via Hesiod, the AP is reporting that Zarqawi was
likely behind the Madrid attacks that cost the lives of 190 Spaniards:
Investigator Jean-Charles Brisard said Spanish officials told him some suspects held in the March 11 attacks were in contact with al-Zarqawi as recently as a month or two before the bombings, which killed 190 people and wounded more than 1,800.
"They believe today he was the mastermind," Brisard, who is probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, said in a telephone interview from Geneva, Switzerland.
No wonder the administration is trying so hard to discredit Richard Clarke. Once the floodgates are open, the rest of their incompetence will become part of the public consciousness.
But really, this transcends politics (are you listening, Sen. Frist?). Here we have a concrete example of how the administration's failures have resulted in hundreds of innocent deaths.
"The world is safer without Saddam", indeed.
(posted also at The Diary of the Lying Socialist Weasels)