Jim Lobe Bleats Again

Jim Lobe bleats again in the Asia Times, which must be about the only place outside of Common Dreams and CounterPunch that will carry his vapid bloviations.

WASHINGTON - "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda," US President George W Bush told reporters last week, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda".

This is what logicians call a tautology - a "useless repetition" - but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it is enmeshed.

I think Lobe must've skipped logic, because that doesn't even resemble a tautology, except perhaps at the shallowest level. From Webster

Tautology: a statement that is necessarily true; "the statement `he is brave or he is not brave' is a tautology

Note that Bush said "the reason I keep insisting…". To be a repetitious tautology that would have to finish up with ".. is that I keep insisting" or something similar, not a completely different clause. That's like saying "The reason I keep insisting that the defendant is guilty of the crime is that I have evidence that he's the perpetrator."

Repetition and blaming the media, an old standby - of which Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld are particularly fond, dating back to their service under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 30 years ago - are back in vogue.

The reason for the repetition is that so many in the media are just too dumb to look back at the stories they've run in the past, detailing links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, while insisting that when someone says "no known links" in reference to 9/11, it doesn't mean "no links" on other matters, just as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren't "linked" to Pearl Harbor, yet linked heavily to Imperial Japan.

Thus it was that Cheney, the most aggressive administration proponent of the theory that Saddam had not only been working hand in glove with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for years, but that he was also behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, complained that the New York Times' coverage of the 9-11 Commission's finding that no such link existed was "outrageous" and probably "malicious".

Osama was considered linked to the 1993 attack, as mentioned here, here, here, and many other places. The chief plotter, Ramzi Yousef, stayed at a bin Laden safe house, and documents collected from him indicated a financial link between the two. Additionally, Saddam is often linked to the 1993 WTC attack, as mentioned here by FAS, which says

It is of considerable interest, therefore, that a very persuasive case can be made that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his bombing conspiracies were meant as Saddam Hussein's revenge for the Gulf War.

and here again in USA today, which says

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities in Iraq say they have new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime gave money and housing to Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

Or you could read the same take in Slate or anywhere else. Just Google "Saddam 1993 'trade center'" and you get 44,000+ hits.

Further, the New York Times coverage was outrageous, and the commission members who the Times said "found no link", both Republican and Democrat, immediately came out and said the Times was daft, and that there was no question that there were links between Saddam and Osama.

And thus it was that Rumsfeld charged that media coverage of the abuses of detainees held by the US in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere was not only wrong, but dangerous.

He is correct, and the carelessness and over-wrought coverage of the panty incident was cited as a chief reason for retribution by some terrorist thugs, right before they sawed off the head of Nick Berg.

"The implication that's out there is the United States government is engaging in torture as a matter of policy, and that's not true," he declared, despite the cascading leaks of Pentagon, Justice Department and White House memoranda suggesting ways in which domestic and international bans on torture can be circumvented or ignored in the "war on terror".

There's just one problem with Lobe's logic. If we were sanctioning the use of true torture we wouldn't be sending soldiers to jail for making prisoners form naked male pyramids and wear women's underwear.

And, in a distinct echo of the charges leveled by diehard hawks over the US withdrawal from Vietnam under the Nixon-Ford watch, Rumsfeld suggested that reporters and editors, "sitting in an air-conditioned room some place", not the military (and certainly not the policymakers) would be to blame if Washington lost in Iraq.

And the military says that if they'd have withdrawn from Vietnam two years later the South would've had sufficient training to defeat the North by themselves, and given the outstanding performance of some South Vietnamese units that were outnumbered and surrounded, and still won, the Army is probably correct. Unfortunately South Vietnam was under an arms embargo pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and the South Vietnamese army only had 2.3 rounds per man per rifle per day. They may as well have been using muzzle loaders, though muzzle loading infantry carries more ammunition than that. But I guess that's what happens when the press keeps screaming that we're going to lose, it doesn't start to happen, and politicians try to make sure it happens so they don't have egg on their face.

"This much is certain," Cheney said. "Coalition forces cannot be defeated on the battlefield. The only way this effort could fail is if people were to be persuaded that the cause is lost, or that it's not worth the pain - or if those who seem to measure progress in Iraq against a more perfect world convince others to throw in the towel."

Exactly so, as we've already had the big and dreaded "uprising", with less total casualties over two months than an average day in WW-II.

The tactic the administration appears to have chosen to deal with what is clearly an unraveling of whatever shred of credibility it retains is simply to insist - as it has for so long anyway - that it never made mistakes or exaggerated or misrepresented or lied about anything in any way, and to hope that if it repeats itself sufficiently loudly and often, people will come to believe it.

Actually, that's the position of the press. They obviously knew, and had reported on, innumerable connections between Saddam and Bin Laden, but when offered a chance to sacrifice their reputations for a cheap political shot that wouldn't survive a single day's scrutiny they went ahead and did it anyway. Yet still they keep harping that we haven't found WMD (we did, both sarin, mustard, and many strains of other organisms), that Saddam presented no threat to his neighbors (his long range ballistic missiles are still turning up in scrap yards in Jordan, Kuwait, and Holland), and that Saddam never had yellow cake uranium, despite an entire village up north being poisoned with it when they empty out barrel after barrel of the stuff.

"At this point, the White House position is just frankly bizarre," Daniel Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official in the administration of Bush's predecessor Clinton told the Los Angeles Times in response to Bush's declaration about al-Qaeda and Saddam. "They're just repeating themselves, rather than admit they were wrong."

Well no wonder we were losing the terrorism war under Clinton, if a "senior counter-terrorism" official is unaware of ties between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. The latest news the commission is investigating is whether a Lt. Colonel in the Fedayeen Saddam attended the primary 9/11 planning meeting in Asia. In 1998 the Justice Department even indicted Osama, and one paragraph of that indictment says this

Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

So the Clinton administration didn't think there was cooperation, eh? Then I wonder why they alleged it in an indictment?

Bush, of course, was responding to the finding by the bipartisan 9-11 Commission that while bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" when he was based in Sudan through 1994, "Iraq apparently never responded", and no "collaborative relationship" was ever established.

Unfortunately, that's not a finding by the Commission, it's some dreck penned by an out of control staffer, and the statement was completely disowned by the people on the Commission. I guess Lobe missed that little nugget.

Proceeding from his tautology, Bush insisted "this administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda."

Well, since Lobe doesn't even know what a tautology is in the first place, it's not surprising that he would make a fool of himself by re-using his mistaken theme. What Mr. Bush said was exactly correct, once again. Just because groups collaborate on some things doesn't mean they collaborate on everything, a nuance obvious to a small child but lost on Jim Lobe.

That rendition, of course, raises a host of questions, among them definitional - does the existence of "numerous contacts" amount to a "relationship", particularly when one side fails to respond to the other?

I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is. There's no question that Saddam supported terrorists of all stripes, paying $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers, while allowing the likes of Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, on top of the all-expense-paid trip to Baghdad for a senior bin Laden aid, so the aide could meet with Iraqi intelligence.

"When I was 15 and kept asking Mary Beth for a date, and she would always politely refuse, I think I would have been hard put to describe that as a 'relationship' as much as I wanted to brag about one," suggested one congressional aide.

And if they truly refused then why does the listing of ties extend for several pages?

But more important, Bush's statement simply flies in the face of the record. Just before invading Iraq, for example, the president asserted that Iraq had sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to "work with al-Qaeda" and also "provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training" - a relationship that goes far beyond mere "contacts".

Well what about the statement of Mr. Tenet, a Clinton appointee?

As for suspicions of a partnership between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Mr. Tenet said those feelings are based on a solid foundation of evidence from many sources.

Iraq has in the past provided training and document forgery and bomb-making to Al Qaeda, Mr. Tenet told the Armed Services Committee. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two Al Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship be forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

So apparently such things were widely believed at one point.

And although he denied his administration had ever suggested Saddam's connivance in the September 11 attacks themselves, his March 19, 2003 letter to Congress officially informing it that hostilities had begun asserted that the war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001".

Any other moonbats have tried that strained reading, and Lobe conveniently leaves out the all important modifying word, "including". It's kind of hard to argue that the entire justification for war was only revealed in a strained reading of one sentence in one document, and one that requires the strained interpretation to be contrary to the thousands of other statements.

Cheney, always the most aggressive in asserting a link between Saddam and both al-Qaeda and September 11, repeatedly made similar charges, and last fall endorsed the contents of an article in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard - consisting largely of excerpts of a classified document prepared by the Pentagon's shady Office of Special Plans as "the best source of information" - that concluded: "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003."

Actually, that's incorrect. Cheney repeatedly said, prior to the war, that there is no conclusive proof of a link between Iraq and 9/11, but we have a bit more potential evidence, now. Yet Jim Lobe still seems unable to grasp that fact that a "relationship from the early 1990s to 2003" doesn't necessarily entail anything about 9/11. More interesting is how Lobe dismisses the report as a product of a "shady" office, but the one thing the report didn't do was give conclusions, unlike what Lobe claims. Those were only in the last paragraph of the Weekly Standard article. From Slate we have this article, in reference to the leaked memo that was the basis of the infamous Weekly Standard article.

Everybody knows how the press loves to herd itself into a snarling pack to chase the story of the day. But less noticed is the press's propensity to half-close its lids, lick its paws, and contemplate its hairballs when confronted with events or revelations that contradict its prejudices.

I'd say Lobe is coughing up some pretty big hairballs on this one, just like the rest of the press has on the recent 9/11 Commission's clarifications that yes, indeed, there were ties between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, possibly including 9/11.

The Slate piece goes on to note that the mainstream press wouldn't touch the story with a stick, saying "Holders of such rigid views tend to reject any new information that may disturb their cognitive equilibrium." I don't think most of them have a cognitive equilibrium to disturb, given that they always walk around making circles to the left.

Under pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon later issued a release describing the article's conclusions as "inaccurate".

The article's conclusions were "inaccurate" in the original memo was based on raw intelligence and drew no conclusions, merely enumerating fifty ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. And that same Slate story put the Pentagon release a bit differently.

The Department of Defense evinced more critical interest in the leaked memo than most of the press with a Saturday, Nov. 15, press release, confirming the memo's authenticity but claiming—without naming Hayes or the Weekly Standard —that it had been misinterpreted: "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions."

The DoD objection is a bit of a red herring. Except for the Weekly Standard's grandiose title "Case Closed" (it should have been titled "Case Open"), the Hayes piece works assiduously (until its final paragraph, at least) not to oversell the memo. Hayes' ample quotations from the memo preserve much of the qualifying language that fudges any absolute case for the Saddam-Osama connection.

But the actual Pentagon press release said "news reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq ... are inaccurate," which is certainly true, because in the report there wasn't any "new information" confirmed. It was all old stuff. But the funniest analysis is from Jim Lobe himself, back when the article appeared. Oh, he was in a dreadful huff, spouting one crazy thing after another in this Asia Times article, called "The Truth Leaks Out". In it Lobe merely expresses outrage that the administration would leak such vital national security information, while of course coming up with one conspiracy after another on the who, what, and why of the critical leak. But let's stay focused on his current tripe.

Cheney, along with neo-conservative members of the Defense Policy Board, Wall Street Journal editorial writers and the Weekly Standard, also has been the administration's biggest champion of the single-sourced Czech intelligence report of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, five months before the attacks.

And the Czech police have never backed down from their claims of a meeting, although their government has backed off, because the evidence just isn't conclusive enough.

The meeting, according to the commission, which had access to contemporaneous video shots of Atta, his cell phone records and the testimony of the Iraqi official, who has been in US custody since last July, never took place.

Wait. Since the Commission has made clear that it didn't review what was released as the now infamous "Commission Report", which was actually just something thrown together by overzealous staffers, there's no way you can say that the Commission said anything about Atta. What most have concluded is that the evidence for the Atta meeting is insufficient to build a case on, but in no way has it been disproved, including the eye-witness testimony and numerous other problems detailed here.

Yet Cheney said last Thursday that he was still not convinced, suggesting cryptically that he may have access to intelligence the commission was not able to see. "That's never been proven," he said. "It's never been refuted."

And he is correct, since nobody as yet been able to actually refute it, as opposed to dismissing it for lack of sufficient evidence.

The 9-11 commission co-chairs, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have challenged Cheney to come forward with evidence relevant to Atta and the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection he alleges. They also said that they had asked Cheney about the connection when they interviewed him, so the implication is that he had a chance to inform the commission about his special insights, but declined to do so for whatever reason.

They also said

MATTHEWS: Governor, what about that long talk about meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, who was the main character and the main bad guy in this attack on the United States, the lead pilot, you might say, and the Iraqi intelligence official in Prague? Did that occur five months before 9/11?

KEAN: We have no evidence that that occurred. In fact, we have some evidence that we think Mohammed Atta was actually in this country at that time.

MATTHEWS: That's the paper trail evidence, right?

KEAN: Yes.

And unfortunately the paper trail evidence isn't at all conclusive, nor are phone records, since a US cell-phone would prove useless in Europe, since they use a different encoding system over there. Muhammad would've left his phone behind unless it was one of the extremely expensive multi-band world phones.

Of course, Cheney's treatment of this issue gets us right into the epistemological puzzles in which Rumsfeld specializes - that "there are known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", which are those "we don't know, we don't know'' - speculations that seemed increasingly appropriate in light of revelations by the group Human Rights First that Washington is holding an unknown number of detainees in as many as a dozen facilities in the Middle East, South Asia, aboard naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere, whose existence has not been disclosed to either the International Committee of the Red Cross or to Congress.

Now how the heck is the issue of what we know about Muhammad Atta's whereabouts prior to 9/11 related to the issue of where Al-Qaeda prisoners are kept? And by this I mean connected in a real way, as opposed to mere verbal cleverness and obfuscation on the issues.

Indeed, Rumsfeld's angry admonitions against the dangers of media coverage of torture and abuses in US-run prisons came at a press conference in which he admitted that one Iraqi prisoner - one of 13 so-called "ghost detainees" tracked by Human Rights Watch - had been kept off prison rosters for some seven months, apparently to keep the Red Cross in the dark about his whereabouts.

And showing a bit of circumspection before slapping the photos all over the front pages would hurt whom, exactly? The press coverage has certainly got Americans and many scores of Iraqis killed, so how can they express outrage over a guy forced to wear women's underwear while blithely ignoring the fact that probably a hundred outraged simple folk may have run out in anger and got their brains blown across the sands, just because of the unnecessarily graphic nature of their reports, merely designed to boost readership?

If true, that would constitute a clear violation of Article 75 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, according to Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First. Rumsfeld assured reporters the detainee in question had been treated "humanely" at all times.

Well heck, just putting women's underwear on their head is a violation of Article 75, 2, (b) "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault;"

Pressed by the White House, the Republican leadership in Congress prevented Democratic lawmakers from issuing subpoenas for some of the administration's memoranda on its interrogation and detention policies and its contention, in at least two leaked memos, that the president can overrule international conventions, US laws and even the US constitution in his war-making powers as commander-in-chief.

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed, go the moonbats. Meanwhile, car bombs go off all over the place.

Such unconstrained power is, of course, entirely consistent with the notion that a relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam existed because the president says so.

And there we have Jim Lobe in his paranoid little world, oblivious to over fifty connections known long ago, which he himself reported on. He's oblivious the the 9/11 Commission coming out loudly and forcefully to say that of course there are numerous connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Hell, even Al-Qaeda leaders talk about the connection. Everybody knows about it but Jim Lobe, because he so desperately wishes it weren't true that he'll simply stick his finger in his ears and start singing "La la la la la…"