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.
A 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.”