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Talk:War on Terrorism


Miscellaneous

This article is very biased towards the view of the US government.


68.232.240.214 is a politically motivated vandal and may be responsible for the damage to this article.--Scuiqui fox 19:36, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

... Iran funding of Islamic terrorist groups include Hezbollah ...

Hezbollah is not considered a terrorist organization by many countries (bar the USA and Australia off the top of my head) and this kind of generalization is exactly what the American propaganda promotes, in fact the entire paragraph about Iran is filled with accusations and no proof.

And I'm sure many in the Ba'ath Party didn't consider Saddam Hussein to be evil. The point of the article isn't to prove that Iran is a terrorist state or isn't. The article is War on Terrorism, and Iran is dicussed in depth since it regularly appears in the State Department's list of States that sponsor terrorism and because it was mentioned as part of the axis of evil. The blurb about Iran is simply to elaborate and explain its inclusion in both lists. As with Hezbollah, you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but (see Terrorism) suicide bombings and attacts on civilians are generally considered to be Terrorism, regardless of whether or not countries with large Arab and Muslim populations have the honesty to state what's plain to see. - Loweeel 16:47, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)


Wow, wrong, even the UN has Hezbollah listed as a Terror organization, as does the European Union and the African Union as does Jordan and Egypt. Where do you get this tidbit of information. I would strongly urge research before making an obvious misstatement like this. --Tomtom 18:04, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This title may be NPOV, as questions might be raised about the precise definition of "terrorism." The phrase "war on terror" is more questionable. But perhaps it is appropriate, because the title in and of itself expresses a POV. --Daniel C. Boyer

Yes the title is NPOV becasue that is what it is called by the great majority of English speakers. --mav
Other, new conflicts, like the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, were created within the framework.

This sentence makes it sound like the US one-sidedly created the Afghanistan and Iraq military conflicts out of thin air. If there is an advocate having this point, we should identify them and attribute this POV to them.

I'm planning to mention in the first or second paragraph briefly that the US attacked the Taliban and began helping to topple Saddam, in response to the 9-11 attack and Iraq's WMD hoarding, respectively. --Uncle Ed 19:35 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

The changes Samizdat made at c. 17:20 on 1/09/04 result in a pithier, more intelligent entry.

Ed, whenever I work with you on an article, I feel like a gerbil on one of those wheel toys: we keep covering the same ground over and over. The causes and buildups for the two US invasions are each discussed at length in the articles on each topic. It is not appropriate to pick out the only cause that you think is legitimate and highlight it in this article. We would not, for example, say, "the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a strategy of encircling Iran", although many people believe this to be the case. So neither should we include your theories as to why they invaded. Also, I'd really appreciate it if you used English in these articles and not the mangled language of the Bush administration. Regime change? "toppled"? DanKeshet 20:25 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for bearing with me, Dan. It's not easy for any of us gerbils to write neutrally while at the same time we retain our various strongly-held points of view. --Uncle Ed 20:38 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)
DanKeshet.. would you be ok with using the words of the Iraqi's to describe the events? Judging from the interviews I've been seeing on TV all day, I think they'd be a little less diplomatic than the U.S. administration. -216.229.90.232
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question (I have no idea what the iraqis you're referring to said, who they are, or what they were speaking on), I'm guessing it would be best placed in the various articles on the iraq war, not here. DanKeshet 22:01 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)
the point was, the Bush Administration's "mangled language" use of the words "regime change" and "toppled" probably doesn't seem that "mangled" to the Iraqi citizens celebrating in Baghdad. The regime is gone. What else do ya call it?

We need a more general article on War on terrorism, because War on Terrorism is a U.S. propaganda invention like The Coalition or War on Drugs or Axis of Evil, and war on terrorism is rather a concept that has been used many different ways. Note this from the Disinfopedia:

'war on terrorism' vs. 'War on Terrorism' vs. September 11, plus another article on the attacks.

I very much agree. The term 'War on Terror' is but a propaganda term, a smokescreen, the justification for scaring US citizens into supporting Bush's militaristic Empire. Many observers have identified it as such a propaganda term, even though the mainstream US media refuse to criticise their government in such a way. It has nothing to do with making the use of terrorist tactics less likely. The obvious proof is that -as predicted!- al-Qaeda is stronger, more influential and more popular than ever, and this is a direct consequence of the "War on Terror".
The very word 'War on Terror' is designed to deceive rather than elucidate. In my opinion the meaning which the US government give to this word should therefore be rejected here, as it contradicts the purpose of an encyclopedia. Since some people here will object to this, I propose that a note is included immediately at the beginning of the entry, drawing attention to its propaganda value.
pir - 12. September 2003
I don't know how I feel about the S-11 Terrorist Attack vs. S-11 Attack issue, but I see no problem with having a "War on Terrorism" article. If people feel that the article does not duly emphasize the propaganda aspect of the term, by all means amend the article to do so. However, it describes a real concept and real policy and is the name used by the U.S. government - I wouldn't know what else to call the article describing the U.S. operation. Is anyone aware of any -other- "war on terrorism" (called such) that would justify having separate pages? Graft 16:17, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

---

Here's hoping that the war on terror is more successful than the war on drugs. What is really needed however is a War on Unilateralism. We all badly need to understand WHY people are committing such atrocities, they don't do it out of boredom!! No good just digging one's heels in and making war on people, it is necessary in a truly democratic society, and not a token democratic society to make these people feel confident enough that their views are heard without resorting to violence, to be able to sit around a table and express their grievances rather than just rejecting out of hand all that is is not understood and therefore feared.Then Do something constructive, i.e concessions not destruction. How about a War on fear, or a war on ignorance or a war on exploitation or a war on war, all are doomed to failure as the perceived 'enemys viewpoint is not understood yet alone respected.Norwikian 16:28, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What *is* fundamentally wrong about the title of this particular entry is now that it is attributing any war on terrorism to just the united states. The article even has a specific mention to *another* US-introduced war against terrorism, so why isn't that discussed (in a separate page, perhaps)? The war on terrorism, in its most modern context, is US-inspired, no doubt, but other countries have made similar efforts to deter terrorist action. This page should be rather a directory of links to the action plans of as many countries as is known, rather than a tribute to the ingenuity of george w. bush and his cronies in bombing all of afghanistan for a stupid bearded man who may never be found.

What is essentially wrong about calling this page the US War on Terrorism? The principle applies to the US Invasion of Afghanistan. Wikipedia is a US-centric encyclopaedia, sure, but we shouldn't go out of our way to make sure it is.

Samizdat made changes to the article at c. 17:20 and 17:30 Pacific on 1/09/04 resulting in a pithier, more intelligent, and more neutral entry.


The list of cities where protests took place on 15. February is important because it illustrates the emergence of what the New York Times (I believe) called a second superpower, opposing this form of US imperialism. About 11 million people demonstrated on the 15. February, the biggest such event in history. In each city, demonstrators were very conscious about what was going on in other cities, raising the question of the interconnectedness of what's local and what's global. The list charaterises the diversity and breadth of this new movement. Anyway, it makes no sense to remove this list but leave a list of German cities. pir 02:12, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

pir: The list is mostly a duplicate of Global protests against war on Iraq (pre-war), isn't it? I'd rather see your comments about the relevance of the protests in the "war on terrorism" article than the list of cities. 213.20.137.112 12:08, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


it's good that some NPOV is being addressed. can we really say the patriot act takes away civil liberties? does it? i haven't read it, and i don't trust any "i heard on the news that it _______" arguments. are there any law scholars here that really do know? --Iosif 04:00, 28 May 2004 (UTC)

Read for yourself on Wikipedia! - USA PATRIOT Act Ian 15:45, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
why that's a wonderful idea. let's call it boot-strapping. --Iosif 22:37, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

news item

is this news item useful to anyone here? Kingturtle 17:04, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Field Day

There probably won't ever be a concensus on this, and the ridiculous POVs being thrown back and forth are doing nothing to help create an accurate article. There needs to be extensive, indexed representation of all POVs here, not some farcical "war on error" to create a "neutral" article, especially considering the intense speculation that every "fact" (big or small) even remotely related to this topic is currently under. --Mymunkee

i concur, and some people have been trying. --Iosif 22:06, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

My POV?

It's hardly POV to dispute Michael Moore's movies as documentaries. Given the myriad problems with them and devices that HONEST filmmakers eschew (splicing together different events so they look like a single one, STAGING events for the camera and saying that's how they are rather than a reenactment or dramatazation) ensures anything BUT POV that he's actually a documentarian. Polemicist? Yes. Filmmaker? Definitely. Political filmmaker? also definitely. But Documentarian? Hardly - he merely presents his films as documentaries, when in fact they're highly fictionalized, and employ elements that documentarians would never stoop to use. Both "faux-documentarian" and "documentarian" are POV (which was the point I was trying to make)... how's "self-styled documentarian" or "filmmaker"? --Loweeel

"propagandist"? --Iosif 06:32, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

"Documentary" does not imply that a film makes pretense to '"objectivity". "Documentary" does not mean "nature special". It means that a film is a piece of non-fiction. The non-fiction genre includes editorial opinion works and even propaganda just as much as it includes works of news, science exposition, history, or what-have-you. Triumph of the Will is a documentary. The Atomic Cafe is a documentary. --FOo 01:14, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Split?

I think that this article should be for the War on Terror(ism), and that there should be a seperately-linked article for Criticisms of the War on Terror(ism). That would not only improve the flow and readability, but would also help resolve the POV dispute, as criticisms can be more critical than an article, especially given the message "WARNING: This page is 45 kilobytes long. Please consider condensing the page and moving the detail to another article so it is not approaching or in excess of 32KB." when trying to edit the page.

Also, it's one thing to REPORT on what the criticisms are, and yet another to actually write from that POV in the article and in making criticisms. Let's try to keep the 2 distinct. --Loweeel

Disambiguation?

While we're at cleaning up this article... What do you think of creating a disambiguation page? IMHO this article is a case of primary topic disambiguation. I hear the phrase war on terror(ism) almost exclusively in the context of US-led military activities following Sept. 11. Actually I have never used this phrase in any other context. OK, there are historical, mostly regional, precedents, but few would call them war on terrorism. So when I look up war on terror(ism) in Wikipedia I expect to find something about the global war The US and selected friends against "terrorists" all over the world with keywords Sept 11, AUMF, Afghanistan, Feb 15, Iraq, axis of evil, Saudi-Arabia, you name it. On the other hand I'd also expect to find references to other uses of the phrase. If Bush's war on terror somehow builds on Reagan's war on terror, I expect to find the link explained in the article. If both presidents used the same phrase more or less independently, a link on War on Terrorism (disambiguation) would be fine. Same with the British in Palestine or Russians in Chechnya. Actually I'd expect links to some of these conflicts in the see also: section at the end of the article or the disambiguation page. Note that the phrase war on terrorism for non-military activities is rarely used outside the US. Even organizations like NATO and UN don't use the phrase war on terrorism for their actions to reduce terrorism in the world. So I'd say the article war on terrorism should refer to US-led military acitivities as authorized in the AUMF (9/18/2001). I cannot think of any other use of the phrase war on terrorism that matches the impact of this global war that has been going on for 2 1/2 years -- with no end in sight. --145.254.51.34 09:28, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

CNN, June 29, 2005

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said that Saddam was a dangerous man, but when asked about Hayes' statement, would not link the deposed Iraqi ruler to the terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. "I haven't seen compelling evidence of that," McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN.

...

The 9/11 commission, appointed by Bush, presented its final report a year ago, saying that Osama bin Laden had been "willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq" at one time in the 1990s but that the al Qaeda leader "had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army." The 520-page report said investigators found no evidence that any "contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship." "Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States," it said.

President Bush said in September 2003 that "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 [attacks]."

Newsweek, Feb 9, 2005


In the summer of 2002, USA Today reported White House lawyers had concluded that establishing an Iraq-al Qaeda link would provide the legal cover at the United Nations for the administration to attack Iraq. Such a connection, no doubt, also would provide political capital at home. And so, by the fall of 2002, the Iraq-al Qaeda drumbeat began . . .It started on September 25, 2002, when Bush said, “you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam.” This was news even to members of Bush’s own political party who had access to classified intelligence. Just a month before, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda ‚ I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda." . . .To no surprise, the day after Bush’s statement, USA Today reported several intelligence experts “expressed skepticism” about the claim, with a Pentagon official calling the president’s assertion an “exaggeration.” . . . In October 2002, Knight Ridder reported, “a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in [Bush’s] own government privately have deep misgivings” about the Iraq-al Qaeda claims. . . . .Soon, an avalanche of evidence appeared indicating the White House was deliberately misleading America. In January 2003, intelligence officials told the Los Angeles Times that they were “puzzled by the administration’s new push” to create the perception of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection and said the intelligence community has “discounted—if not dismissed—information believed to point to possible links between Iraq and al Qaeda.” One intelligence official said, “There isn’t a factual basis” for the administration’s conspiracy theory about the so-called connection. . . .In August 2003, three former Bush administration officials came forward to admit pre-war evidence tying al Qaeda to Iraq “was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.” . . .a March 2004 Knight Ridder report quoted administration officials conceding “there never was any evidence that Hussein’s secular police state and Osama bin Laden’s Islamic terror network were in league.”


MIDDLE EAST POLICY COUNCIL JOURNAL, Summer 2004

Col. Lang, former defense intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): The overwhelming view within the professional U.S. intelligence community was (and is) that there was no Saddam Hussein link to the 9/11 terrorists. Admiral Bob Inman, who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations as head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Director of the National Security Agency and Deputy Director of the CIA, bluntly stated, There was no tie between Iraq and 9/11, even though some people tried to postulate one . . . . Iraq did support terror in Israel, but I know of no instance in which Iraq funded direct, deliberate terrorist attacks on the United States.

AP, June 18, 2005

On March 25 <2002> Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law. "If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida."

...

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war. "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo.

New York Times, Oct 22, 2004

As recently as January 2004, a top Defense Department official misrepresented to Congress the view of American intelligence agencies about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to classified documents described in a new report by a Senate Democrat. The report said that a classified document prepared by Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, did not accurately reflect the intelligence agencies' assessment of the relationship, despite a Pentagon claim that it did. . . . .Among the findings in the report were that the CIA had concluded by June 2002, earlier than has been previously known, that it was skeptical that a meeting had taken place in April 2001 between the Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official. But Feith and other senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, continued at least through the end of 2002 to describe the alleged meeting as evidence of a possible link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. . . .The CIA's corrections applied to numerous entries in Feith's summary, including some of the reports that claimed the most direct and potentially threatening connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda (i.e. training in bombmaking and meetings between senior Al Qaeda members and intelligence officials).

Village Voice, Sept 2004

Look at what the U.S. State Department was saying two months after 9-11: A "Network of Terrorism" web page called "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated", posted November 10, 2001, and still on the official government site as of this afternoon, lists 45 countries, but not Iraq—or Syria, for that matter.

Reuters, July 2004

The Sept. 11 commission, which reported no collaborative links between Iraq and al Qaeda, said on Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no more information than commission investigators to support his later assertions to the contrary. The 10-member bipartisan panel investigating the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington said it reached its conclusion after reviewing available transcripts of Cheney's public remarks asserting long-standing links between the former Iraqi president and Osama Bin Laden's Islamist militant network. "The 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," the commission said in a statement.

Knight-Ridder, June 21, 2004

Defenders of President Bush's charges that Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaida have been citing what they say is new evidence that could help substantiate one of the administration's main justifications for invading Iraq. They say the evidence is the name of a paramilitary officer in captured documents that appears identical to that of an Iraqi who met two Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia nearly two years before the attacks in New York and Washington. But U.S. officials told Knight Ridder on Monday that U.S. intelligence experts were highly skeptical that the Iraqi officer had any connection to al-Qaida. On Sunday, John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the independent commission that's probing the attacks, cited the documents as "new intelligence" on Iraq's links with al-Qaida. "We are in the process of getting this latest intelligence," Lehman said on NBC. "Some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaida. This still has to be confirmed." The U.S. officials said the lieutenant colonel's name is different from that of the man who met the hijackers in Malaysia. The man who met the hijackers wasn't in Iraq at the time the documents were dated and he's never been implicated in the Sept. 11 plot by any top al-Qaida operatives in American custody.

AP, June 17, 2004

Bush denies linking Saddam to 9/11. Panel investigating Sept. 11 attacks can't find links between Iraq, Al Qaeda. “This administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda,” he said. . . .The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said Wednesday that no evidence exists that Al Qaeda had strong ties to Saddam Hussein, a central justification the Bush administration had for toppling the former Iraqi regime.


BOSTON GLOBE, June 16, 2004

. . .a former top weapons inspector said yesterday he and other investigators have not found evidence of a Hussein-Al Qaeda link. At various times Al Qaeda people came through Baghdad and in some cases resided there," said David Kay, former head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, which searched for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. But we simply did not find any evidence of extensive links with Al Qaeda, or for that matter any real links at all." Kay has gone through piles of documents to look for such links.

The Guardian, May 30, 2004

Allawi and his Iraqi National Accord are also - in other ways - as controversial as his long-time enemy in Ahmad Chalabi and the rival Iraqi National Congress, which has dramatically fallen from grace in Washington amid accusations that it knowingly fed incorrect intelligence to the US to bolster the case for war. The INA itself has been accused of providing the notorious intelligence to MI6 that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction against Britain in 45 minutes, and Allawi himself has attempted to assert that Saddam and the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, were working together.

MSNBC, May 15, 2004

According to former White House counterterrorism expert Roger Cressey, there was no direct link between Zarqawi and al Qaeda. He stated, "I think some of the administration's claims of direct links between Zarqawi and al Qaeda as we knew it, frankly, are not true."

CNN, March 22, 2004

The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.” - Condoleezza Rice

KNIGHT-RIDDER March 3, 2004

Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings produced an operational relationship, American officials said. That verdict was in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence that was updated in January 2003, on the eve of the war. "We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida," a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House. . . . .

. . .

Powell. . . was so unpersuaded by the claims of Iraq-al-Qaida contacts that he rebuffed efforts by Cheney's office, the Pentagon and the White House's National Security Council to include a lengthy listing of them in his February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council. Instead, Powell limited himself to a few sentences.

Knight-Ridder, March 2, 2004

Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Saddam's links with al-Qaida, and several key parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly doubtful. Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league.

New Zealand Herald, February 6, 2004

The claim that Saddam and al Qaeda terrorists were linked was pushed by Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister of Iraq. On CNN's American Morning on 12/31/04, he claimed Saddam always had links with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, before the war. Allawi has amassed a greatest hits list of false and discredited claims. He is responsible for the claim that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within forty-five minutes of an order, which was proven false. He pushed the theory that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had trained in Iraq, also debunked. He also "authenticated" the memo showing that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger, a document which later turned out to be forged.

New York Times, Jan 15, 2004

CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam.

National Journal, August 8, 2003

As criticism over the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction continues, a new wave of accusations seems ready to break - this time, over complaints that in its efforts to sell the war, the White House also hyped claims about the links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies. The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction as being definitive or rock solid. "Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated." . . . ."Anyone who followed al Qaeda for a living would not have considered Iraq to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about," said Roger Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top aide to cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke. . . .And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the Qaeda connection. "After September 11, there was a concrete effort by policy makers, particularly in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, to come up with links between al Qaeda and Iraq.". . . .

. . .

the key classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq making the rounds in the Bush administration presented a more nuanced and less alarmist view. For instance, according to a recent Washington Post account, Bush didn't mention a key conclusion of the intelligence report: that although high-level contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, these contacts had not been followed by any significant ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. Similarly, intelligence sources have said that the claim that Bush made about Iraq training Qaeda members in bomb making or poison gas use had not been fully verified. "There wasn't the kind of link between Iraq and al Qaeda that people wanted," said one Bush administration alum. The CIA, he added, had "some measure of intellectual responsibility and didn't come up with a case."

. . .

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was "extremely unlikely" that Saddam would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there's a "much stronger" argument to be made that "the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue."

Boston Globe, August 3, 2003

. . . .current and former intelligence specialists caution that such meetings occur just as often between enemies as friends. Spies frequently make contact with rogue groups to size up their intentions, gauge their strength, or try to infiltrate their ranks, they said. The United States sometimes seeks such contacts, they said. While there have been a number of promising intelligence leads hinting at possible meetings between Al Qaeda members and elements of the former Baghdad regime, nothing has been yet shown demonstrating that these potential contacts were historically any more significant than the same level of communication maintained between Osama bin Laden and ruling elements in a number of Iraq's Persian Gulf neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait, said Evan Kohlman, senior terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington think tank credited with compiling the largest archive on Muslim militants.

Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2003

Like their professional counterparts in the United States, British intelligence agencies don't believe there is an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection . . . .BBC had obtained a top-level report from British intelligence that stated flatly that there were no current ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. "The classified document ... said here had been contact between the two in the past, but it assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies," reported London's Independent newspaper.

AP, Feb 1 2003

. . .while Al Qaeda and Palestinian militants, some backed by Iraq, share a hatred of Israelis and Americans and use similar methods, such as suicide attacks, Israeli intelligence sources say no link has yet been conclusively established between Saddam and Al Qaeda. . . .Boaz Ganor, an Israeli counter-terrorism expert, said he knows of no Iraqi ties to terror groups, beyond Baghdad's relationship with Palestinian militias and possibly Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2002

U.S. allies have found no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Europe's top investigator, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, said at the time, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever."

The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2002

"Bush's Efforts to Link Hussein to al Qaeda Lack Clear Evidence": In public statements, senior officials have referred repeatedly to intelligence about al Qaeda-Iraq links that remains largely unverified...," going on to point out that, far from having a co-operative relationship, "Mr. Hussein, in fact, appears to be the type of secular Arab leader -- like the Saudi royal family and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- whom Mr. bin Laden and his Islamic followers would most like to see overthrown, with strict Islamic law imposed on Iraq's relatively nonobserving population."

Baltimore Sun, Oct. 8, 2002

While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war. These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East. They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.

WASHINGTON POST, SEPT 11, 2002.

CIA fails to find Iraqi link to terror. As it makes its case against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has for now dropped what had been a central argument used by supporters of military action against Baghdad: Iraq's links to al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations. Although administration officials say they are still trying to develop a case linking Saddam Hussein to global terrorism, the CIA has yet to find convincing evidence, according to senior intelligence officials and outside experts with knowledge of discussions within the US Government.

CNN, August 26, 2002

So far, suspicions of a Saddam-bin Laden synergy are just that. The same few data points are periodically recycled. Most of the suggestive clues come from unconfirmed charges repeated to journalists and U.S. officials by a few defectors in the hands of the opposition Iraqi National Congress and prisoners held by pro-U.S. Kurdish factions--all of whom have a vested interest in feeding anti-Saddam propaganda. CIA officials, while not ruling anything out, say meaningful ties between Saddam and bin Laden are tenuous at best. Members of Congress who have been well briefed have seen no smoking gun. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a Foreign Relations Committee member who has warned against a pre-emptive strike, insists, "Saddam is not in league with al-Qaeda. Of course he cheers and encourages them. But I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda." . . . .Other items the hard-liners like to list seem even longer on speculation. They point to a visit bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri supposedly made to Saddam in 1992. But Zawahiri was then the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and had not yet hooked up with al-Qaeda. Nor has the CIA been able to verify a Saddam-Zawahiri meeting, especially at a time when Baghdad was trying to improve relations with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Zawahiri's prime target.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, March 14, 2002

Sources knowledgeable about US intelligence say there is no evidence that Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, nor that he has been or is currently aiding Al Qaeda. Yet the White House appears to be encouraging this false impression, as it seeks to maintain American support for a possible war against Iraq and demonstrate seriousness of purpose to Hussein's regime.

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