3 for 3!

Posted by Chad on 25 August 2005 @ 10am

Yep me too. Are there really people out there who pay “close attention” to what they say on Fox? Sheesh.

Posted by Malena on 25 August 2005 @ 12pm

Maybe you should give yourselves credit for just two out of three. Here’s some evidence for that Iraq-Al Qaeda connection:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/152lndzv.asp
http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html

BTW, even if you don’t believe Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, his connections with other terrorist networks — including direct financial support of Palestinian suicide bombings — have been widely known for years.

I don’t get news from TV, so no Fox News for me. You guys should probably watch it more often, though.

Posted by Tim Hulsey on 25 August 2005 @ 10pm

I can sympathize with all kinds of diversity of perspective and viewpoint, but Iraq-al Qaeda connections are far, far outside of the realm of logic. If there was any connection between Iraq al Qaeda, I’m certain that President Bush would have made sure we knew about it, probably shortly prior to the last election.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 25 August 2005 @ 10pm

“[...] President Bush said, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 [attacks].”

“The independent, bipartisan panel that investigated the attacks released its final report July 22. The 9/11 commission found there were numerous contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda in the 1990s, but it said those contacts did not result in a ‘collaborative relationship.’”

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/12/kerry.powell.iraq/

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 26 August 2005 @ 10am

Tim:
Do you have some substantiating evidence of Jerry Kilgore’s assertion of the
Al-qaeda/MS-13 link?

I saw in the Washington Post today that 19 members of MS-13 were Indicted yesterday, but there was no mention of Al-qaeda. Could you hook us up here, or does Jerry Kilgore
owe the commonwealt an apology for spreading fear and lies?

Posted by Josh Chernila on 26 August 2005 @ 11am

Waldo: President Bush did tell us about those Iraq-Al Qaeda connections, in mid-June of 2004. It was a pretty big story.

Janis: I don’t know where you got the idea that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were one and the same thing. It’s sort of like saying that a bank robber is the same as a bank robbery, or that a murderer is the same as a murder. In all likelikhood, Saddam didn’t order or plan for cross-country jets to fly into the Twin Towers. In that sense, Hussein wasn’t responsible for the 9/11 attacks, nor did he have a “collaborative relationship” with Al Qaeda. (Which also means that the invasion of Iraq was not a simple act of vengeance, but a real foreign policy decision.) But you’ve taken these conclusions several steps further, claiming that because we found no collaborative link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, we’ve found no link at all. That’s quite false, of course. Several years ago, the Clinton administration sniffed out a link, though probably not a close one, based on the “numerous contacts” cited in your own post. (On a different but related note, we also know that Iraq supported other terrorist networks like Hamas, and that Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers for attacks against Israelis out of his own pocket.)

Josh: You’re raising a different issue. If Kilgore can’t support his inflammatory claims with hard evidence, then common decency requires the man to recant and apologize, at the very least.

Posted by Tim Hulsey on 26 August 2005 @ 7pm

President Bush did tell us about those Iraq-Al Qaeda connections, in mid-June of 2004. It was a pretty big story.

No, what he did was point out that individuals who were thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda had visited Iraq. From CNN:

Bush reiterated that the administration never said that “the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated” between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

That was the very same day that the September 11 commission reported that there was no collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda about anything, ever, under any circumstances. Like President Bush, they concluded that bin Laden considered working with Iraq, but he couldn’t even get his phone calls returned.

Iraq is “linked” to al-Qaeda in the same way that I’m “linked” to Kevin Bacon by four degrees of separation.

President Bush and the September 11 Commission — an organization established expressly for the purpose of determining how September 11 happened — both say that there was no meaningful link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. If you’ve got some sort of special information, I imagine that Congress would like very much to hear from you.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 26 August 2005 @ 7pm