Neocon Lie Finally Debunked: Osama Not in Cahoots with Saddam
Kurt Nimmo, Infowars, March 11, 2008
Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the Pentagon finally admits, a fact understood by many well before the United States invaded Iraq, an invasion at least in part predicated on that neocon spawned lie.
It comes five years and a million plus lives too late: “An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq has found no evidence Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with al Qaeda’s terrorist network,” reports McClatchy Newspapers.
At the time, some of us declared this fallacy to be nothing less than a bad joke, but we were drummed out by a massive tidal wave of absurd noise unleashed by the corporate media, taking its marching orders from the neocons.
In addition to the fairy tale about al-Qaeda, we endured another debunked fallacy — that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Recall Bush’s hare-brained speech in Cincinnati in October, 2002, when he ominously warned “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” another gossamer lie cooked up by his coterie of neocon advisers, more appropriately described as his puppet masters.
“President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” McClatchy continues.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.
"Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence." Or put another way, Powell was repeating neocon lies.
Powell and the neocons did not cite “bogus or misinterpreted intelligence,” they were in fact telling big fat whopper lies.
As Joseph Goebbels knew, the “stupid thick-headedness” of the people, easily frightened into submission by the specter of fantastical demons, made Hitler’s Big Lie possible. Hitler wrote in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that the Big Lie is so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Indeed, the truth was distorted with infamy, not only in the lead-up to the invasion and mass murder spree in Iraq but in regard to the events surrounding September 11, 2001, as well. In effect, the Pentagon’s admission that the neocons had lied — it is euphemistically called “bogus or misinterpreted intelligence” by the conniving corporate media — is a slap in the face, not that most Americans, somnolent at best, feel the sting as the back hand retracts. No longer do they care what the government does in their name, as their name is obviously mud.
As well, the people, suckers by the millions, are unable to grasp the well documented fact that government is a serial killer — not simply killing Iraqis or in the not too distant past Vietnamese, but their own people, who are basically on the same level as countless — and uncounted — victims in far away places most Americans cannot find on a map.
It is not a stretch to conclude that a large degree of the popular belief about our so-called enemies is little more than an implausible myth of gigantic proportion. For instance, numerous scholars and researchers have demonstrated that al-Qaeda was created by the CIA — but most people either do not know this or refuse to believe it, preferring instead to buy the ludicrous fantasy that Osama bin Laden and his supposed gaggle of dour cave dwelling Muslim terrorists not only came into existence all on their own without the assistance of government and intelligence agencies, but also managed to have NORAD stand down and were able to perform impossible aeronautic feats with humongous airliners.
Now that the Pentagon has fessed up to the fact Saddam and Osama did not collaborate — and remember, the neocons told us these two characters plotted to attack America, and that’s why the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq — maybe the CIA can fess up to its lies and misdeeds.
A motley assemblage of religious fanatics were used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, acting as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, and his successors to attack the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.
For those a bit sketchy on history, allow me to repeat a few key points at the risk of redundancy — both what would later become known as al-Qaeda and the Taliban emerged from the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, a motley assemblage of religious fanatics used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, acting as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, and his successors to attack the Soviet presence in that remote corner of the world. Brzezinski and the CIA teamed up with the brutal Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq to spread Wahabi fundamentalism far and wide in Central Asia and the Middle East. In fact, the United States preferred demented religious fanatics over the less mentally unstable.
Norm Dixon writes:
Washington’s favored mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavory “freedom fighter”. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
As Dixon notes, between 1978 and 1992, the United States spent at least US$6 billion — some estimates range as high as $20 billion – for arms, training and funds to keep the murderous mujaheddin factions going like a rabid Energizer bunny. During the mid-1980s, according to journalist Ahmed Rashid, the CIA “committed … support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).” Some of the more promising candidates were sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where they were taught “sabotage skills” of the sort that would come in handy during the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. After these events, the word “al-Qaeda” would appear increasingly in the corporate media.
“Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organization, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with ‘legitimate’ business operations,” writes Dixon, who seems to think Osama bin Laden, as a CIA-ISI operative, went off the reservation after the Soviets were evicted from Afghanistan. Of course, such defections — especially by key personnel involved in multi-billion dollar operations — are the improbable exception and not the rule.
The drug and gun-running KLA teamed up with al-Qaeda in the Balkans.
So useful was al-Qaeda, they were employed elsewhere, most notably in the Balkans. “In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad — featured by the Bush Administration as ‘a threat to America’ — is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organizations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote on September 12, 2001. As it turns out, Osama bin Laden’s CIA sponsored operation, Maktab al-Khidamat, was instrumental in running Jihadists into Bosnia out of its Brooklyn, New York branch, known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, a fact reported by the Associated Press.
Indeed, al-Qaeda served as “a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations” in the United States as well, although such a band of fanatics and demonstrable mental cases would be unable to pull of an operation of the sort that occurred on September 11, 2001. “Planning the attacks was a master deed, in technical and organizational terms,” notes Andreas von Bülow, the former state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defense. “To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and doing so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatuses of state and industry.” For more detail on how the CIA and Pentagon ran the operations of September 11, see the video included here, The Underlying Politics of 9/11.
As should be expected, there is more – much more – to the story and it would take several thick books to spell it all out in detail.
Now that the Pentagon report on the Big Lie concerning the once purported Osama-Saddam link is in the process of undergoing a “painful” declassification review, it is time for the same to happen in regard to the events surrounding September 11, 2001. Let’s begin with a new investigation — this time conducted by people not associated with the Bush crime family.
Of course, this will not happen, not without a fundamental change in the government, in fact a radical change within the government. Dare I say practically the entire government would need to be replaced for this to happen? It is an unlikely prospect, especially considering a large number of people believe a man such as Barack Obama represents change. Incidentally or not, Obama has enlisted the help of the above mentioned Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who dreamed up al-Qaeda.
In the meantime, I’m going to wish for a pony.
_________________ "The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell.
Pentagon Attempts To Memory Hole New Report That Dismisses Al Qaeda-Saddam link Cancels plan for broad public release of report that debunks Neocon lie
Steve Watson, Infowars.net, Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Pentagon has blocked the scheduled release of a definitive report that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The report, which is based on 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces, was due to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website late yesterday, and was to be followed up by a background briefing with the authors. However, the report will now only be made available to those in the media who request it.
Of course, given that the mainstream media is more concerned with the myspace page of the Spitzer hooker than iron clad proof that the Bush administration lied its way into a still ongoing war, we are unlikely to hear much more about this report.
Asked why the report, which was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."
Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive.", reported ABC.
Translation: With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war approaching on March 19, and the White House attempting to hold support for a continued large U.S. troop presence there, those who have not yet realized they were monumentally deceived by their own government on this issue may finally wake up to the truth.
reminder of the lies that took the country to war:
''There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq,'' - Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Infinity CBS Radio, Nov. 14, 2002.
"What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network," former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, United Nations Testimony, February 5, 2003.
"We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization," - Vice President Dick Cheney, NBC Meet The Press, March 16, 2003.
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," - President George W. Bush, Washington Post, June 18, 2004.
The lies have not stopped either. As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie Al Qaeda to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.
Last Summer also saw Dick Cheney doing the rounds in high schools, giving speeches in which he repeated the claim of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link.
Although the new report is the first "official" admission of neocon war lies, there have been many previous accounts that corroborate the deception.
As reported by the NY Times, "The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein" [6/27/03].
According to national security officials, "In the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between Iraq and Al Qaeda…Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two highest-ranking Qaeda operatives in custody, have told investigators that Mr. bin Laden shunned cooperation with Saddam Hussein" [NY Times, 7/20/03]
Even the 9/11 commission report, famed for its numerous omissions, undercuts claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.
Fast forward to April 2007 and a separate Pentagon Report, based on interrogations, dismissed any link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
It was also revealed last Summer, via Stephen Hayes’s biography on Dick Cheney, that the current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell appears to side with “those who believe that the administration manipulated intelligence on Iraq for political purposes before the 2003 invasion.”
McConnell decried the “secondary unit” established within the Pentagon to “reinterpret information” prior to the war. An internal Pentagon investigation released in February revealed that former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith utilized the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group within the Pentagon to create and promote false links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Specifically, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz “asked Feith’s analysts to ignore the intelligence community’s belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam’s secular dictatorship were unlikely allies.” Subsequently, Feith “disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship…to senior decision-makers.”
_________________ "The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell.
Saddam Hussein had no direct ties to al-Qaida, says Pentagon study
* Elana Schor
* guardian.co.uk,
* Thursday March 13 2008
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday March 13 2008. It was last updated at 00:35 on March 13 2008.
A US military study officially acknowledged for the first time yesterday that Saddam Hussein had no direct ties to al-Qaida, undercutting the Bush administration's central case for war with Iraq.
The Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 documents recovered after US and UK troops toppled Hussein in 2003, discovered "no 'smoking gun' (ie, direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida", its authors wrote.
George Bush and his senior aides have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terror in their justification for waging war against Iraq.
Wary of embarrassing press coverage noting that the new study debunks those claims, the US defence department attempted to bury the release of the report yesterday.
The Pentagon cancelled a planned briefing on the study and scrapped plans to post its findings on the internet, ABC news reported. Unclassified copies of the study would be sent to interested individuals in the mail, military officials told the network.
Another Pentagon official told ABC that initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive".
As early as 2002, military intelligence analysts discounted the administration's claim that the Hussein government had trained al-Qaida members to employ chemical weapons. But Bush aides continued asserting that the intelligence they received showed a link.
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush said in 2004.
Government memos examined by US military researchers showed financial support given to "suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank", the study continued. The Hussein regime also recorded its development of car bombs and explosive vests in detail.
Despite those findings, the admission of no direct ties between the deceased dictator and al-Qaida makes the study a potential flashpoint for the Bush administration as it tries to play up signs of improving security in Iraq. Next week marks the fifth anniversary of the invasion, and several high-profile remembrance events are planned in Washington.
The Pentagon's independent auditor released a report last year that chastised an internal military office created by Bush allies for promoting a link between Hussein and al-Qaida despite intelligence showing that none existed. Even after that report, however, vice president Dick Cheney continued saying that al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi collaborated with Iraq.
Al-Zarqawi "took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene," Cheney told conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh in April.
The documents used for today's study came from the so-called Harmony database, an expansive catalogue of al-Qaida evidence maintained by the military.
The Pentagon's treatment of the report today echoes its response in 2005 to a study prepared by another research arm that chastised the White House for failing to prepare for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. Military officials deemed those conclusions "of a limited value" and decided to keep the study secret, the New York Times reported.
Authors of the study-conducted by the Institute for Defence Analyses, the military's non-profit research arm, found evidence that the Hussein government supported some Palestinian terrorist groups but largely focused their attention on internal terrorist acts.
"The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq," the study's executive summary concluded.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Chat
Usergroups
Calendar
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
