catapult magazine

Here’s an article claiming Bush’s strongest support (for fighting terrorism) is unfounded. It raises some interesting (and valid) points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/opinion/16KRUG.html

AQ has, I believe, claimed responsibility for the attack. Regardless, Spanish intel says that AQ was behind it – even though every Spaniard’s first reaction was to think it was ETA a Basque terrorist group resembling the IRA.

The attack occurred two days before the national election – not a coincidence. Prior to the attack, the party that had supported the war in Iraq led the polling. After the attack, Spaniards flip-flopped and voted for the party in opposition to the war in Iraq. Obviously Spaniards didn’t ignore the connection.

I know the media reported the attack as a message to Spain for supporting the war, I don’t know if there was communication directly from AQ saying: “We did this because. . .” Based on the circumstances, did they really need to spell it out any more?

Spain, because of its support of the Bush administration, was among the nations threatened by bin Laden in one of those fancy tapes of his. So, Dave, if you are arguing that there is a connection between Iraq and terror now, you’re absolutely right. Terrorists are all over Iraq, and terrorists are targeting nations that are helping the US occupy it.

But if you are saying that the bombing in Madrid proves that Bush was right in asserting that Iraq and al Quaida were buddy buddy before, you’re walking on thin ice. Iraq had nothing to do with 9—11, period. Now that Bush has antagonized the entire Arab world, yes, Iraq has everything to do with terrorism.

By the way, the Spanish people are not just dumb cowards who “flip flop” because terrorists scare them. The biggest reason why the government lost the election was because it tried to pull the wool over its people’s eyes. The government did all it could to play up the ETA evidence and all it could to cover up the evidence pointing to al Qaida. Well, that backfired. People don’t like being duped.

An interesting article about recent discoveries in Iraq. Anyone know anymore about this? Dan…Laryn?

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/8/6/105528.shtml

I actually expected they would find some sort of WMD in Iraq. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still turned up. My beef has always been that the war was essentially unilateral and illegal. It would be a real coup for the Bush administration if some WMD turned up now, because so much has been made of their absence by Democrats.

Here’s a paragraph from a NY Times article about Chalabi that is related to this. I especially like the bit where he says “what we said before is not important:”

Mr. Chalabi has no regrets about any information, however misleading, that he passed to the Americans before the war. “We are heroes in error,” Mr. Chalabi told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in an interview last month. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/26/international/middleeast/26CHAL.html?hp

jabirdv, thought i had heard something about that last year. i think i remember hearing that they (or some of them) were pretty much useless because of sand damage—which i thought was funny. i did a little googling and came up with these links—apparently these planes were unearthed last july and announced by rumsfeld in august.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp

http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_247.shtml

regardless, it doesn’t seem too relevant to this discussion as it doesn’t tie alqaeda to iraq or show how the administration was tough on terrorism against the u.s.

dan, i expected them to find something, too—though not anything as profound as they had been claiming—but now i have to admit the lack of evidence and the storie that have come out lead me to believe otherwise. besides, even if they did find something, it would just be dumb luck for them—as obviously whatever intellgence they were basing their case on was not strong enough.

someone sent me an email today that quoted an april 30, 2001 cnn report wherein the bush administration was asked about the downgrading of coverage in the annual terrorism report of osama bin laden, and a “senior bush state department official told cnn that the u.s. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin laden.” that seems to contradict what they are saying now. unfortunately i couldn’t find an archive on cnn that went back that far. we’ll see if that gets picked up by any news outlets (let them do the research). :)

Someone sent me the link yesterday, and I figured it best to find out (from the forum) if there was any basis to the article or not. Thanks!

I’m not looking to get into a debate about whether there are or aren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, your comments indicate a presumption that the gathering of intelligence is an exact science.

Try as hard as we can, intelligence is never 100 percent. It’s relying on the best and most recent information we have. President Bush wasn’t the only person to “think” Iraq had WMD, but I’ve quoted people from both sides of the aisle in a previous post, so I’ll move on.

I think it’s interesting to compare the current intelligence about WMD with the infamous intelligence surrounding the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. President Roosevelt’s administration had such promising “evidence” by mid-1940 of Germany’s nuclear-weapons program that Allied scientists stopped publishing their results and continued their research in secret to prevent the Germans from using their findings. The mere POSSIBILITY of Hitler getting his hands on a nuclear weapon drove the U.S. Manhattan Project. Of course, when WWII ended, we learned that our intelligence was faulty – that Germany wasn’t as close to a nuclear weapon as intelligence experts had thought.

The interesting difference between then and now is that back then there weren’t politicians and journalists criticizing war strategy or the atomic bombing of Japan. Americans were happy we got the bomb first and used it to end the war. Criticism came decades later, when history was easy to rewrite.

Should President Roosevelt have waited for unambiguous proof of the Germans’ possession of a nuclear bomb (which would have been the bombing of an Allied country)? Rhetorical question. I don’t want to debate the use of the A-bomb. That’s not my point.

Should President Bush have waited for unambigous proof that Saddam had nuclear-chemical-biological weapons? It’s easy for us to come up with our own adamant answers to that question, but the reality of making decisions based on intelligence isn’t black and white.

Neither acted in a vaccum devoid of information. Like I said, it’s not an exact science and the alternatives – be they real or imagined, we’ll never really know – are what get weighed and are what propel decisions.

if my comments seemed to suggest that intelligence was an exact science, let me clarify.

whatever intellgence they were basing their case on was not strong enough

by this i mean that the intelligence they used was not strong enough to justify the invasion, or to tie iraq to al qaeda. i do not mean to imply that it needed to be exact—just strong enough.