Virginian Pilot Tries – and Fails – To Cover Its Ass

What constitutes a relationship, the deluded chimps at the Pilot ask.

Trying a comeback from its lying headline” No “ON IRAQ: No Links to al-Qaida”(June 16, 2004) the Pilot’s editorial board is reduced to parsing the term “relationship.”

Now, I’ll put my cards on the table: I have been impatient with the administration’s statement that while there is a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda, there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11. To this point, we have not discovered papers that showed Saddam meeting bin Laden in an Afghan cave to plot the highjackings. We have, however, plenty of evidence that they cooperated in terrorist training, providing safe havens for terrorists, proving funding for terrorist activities in the Middle East, conspiring to destabilize the Saudi government and a number of other activities. There is peripheral evidence that is beginning to surface that Saddam knew of the 9/11 plot before it happened.

WE also have the testimony of Russian President Putin that Saddam, all by himself, was going to attack the U.S. here or abroad. Meanwhile, the press is playing word games.

The critical point is that while there has been cooperation and coordination we have not documented its extent.

The hapless fools at the Pilot apparently had the misfortune of putting this editorial in print before they had a chance to read the latest revelation from the NY Times, a paper whose editorial position the Pilot seeks to imitiate. Andrew McCarthy who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman click here
Has the lowdown on this latest admission of the media’s willful editorial lying.

A week ago, the New York Times reported, in a screaming page-one headline, that the 9/11 Commission had found "No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." Today, in a remarkable story that positively oozes with consciousness of guilt, the Times confesses not only that there is documentary evidence of at least one tie but that the Times has had the document in question for several weeks. That is, the Times was well aware of this information at the very time of last week's reporting, during which, on June 17, it declaimed from its editorial perch that the lack of a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's terror network meant President Bush owed the nation an apology.

Today, the Times concedes that the Defense Intelligence Agency is in possession of a document showing that, in the mid-1990s, the Iraqi Intelligence Service reached out to what the newspaper euphemistically calls "Mr. bin Laden's organization" (more on that below) regarding the possibility of joint efforts against the Saudi regime, which was then hosting U.S. forces. To be clear, the document records that it was Iraq which initiated the contacts, and that bin Laden finally agreed to discuss cooperation only after having spurned previous overtures because he "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative[.]"

Why does it matter who was enticing whom? On June 17, when, despite having this document, it was trashing the whole notion of an Iraq/Qaeda connection, the Times asserted without qualification that: The 9/11 Commission had found that any collaboration proposals had come from bin Laden's side; all such proposals had been declined by Saddam; and this scenario undermined the Bush administration's rationale for deposing the Iraqi regime. (The Times on June 17: "As for Iraq, the commission's staff said its investigation showed that the government of Mr. Hussein had rebuffed or ignored requests from Qaeda leaders for help in the 1990's, a conclusion that directly contradicts a series of public statements President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made before and after last year's invasion of Iraq in justifying the war.")

Even now, the Times feebly endeavors to minimize the importance of the collaboration evidenced by the newly reported document. It says the information indicates "that Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and that a request from Mr. bin Laden to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered. There is no further indication of collaboration." (Emphasis added.) Nevertheless, the reader who has the patience to wade through several paragraphs of the Times disingenuously letting itself off the hook for refusing for weeks to report on this document will learn that what the newspaper really means when it says bin Laden's suggestions "went unanswered." In actuality, "the document contains no statement of response by the Iraqi leadership under Mr. Hussein to the request for joint operations[.]" Translation: Maybe there was a response and maybe there wasn't, but this document does not tell us one way or the other.

Why is this important? Because it is the continuation of a pattern — another instance of an effective but misleading tactic repeatedly used by the Times, the intelligence community, the 9/11 Commission staff, and all the Iraq/Qaeda connection naysayers. To wit: When they can't explain something, they never say they can't explain it; they say it didn't happen — even if saying so is against the weight of considerable counterevidence.

Best example? The 9/11 Commission staff, as gleefully reported by the Times last week, has concluded that there was not a meeting between top-hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi Intelligence Officer Ahmed al-Ani in Prague five months before the 9/11 attacks. There is an eyewitness (a watcher for Czech intelligence) who says he saw them together, and there is substantial corroboration (including an entry in al-Ani's appointment calendar that he was to meet with a "Hamburg student," a pair of highly suspicious trips that Atta undoubtedly made to Prague in 2000 right before coming to the United States, and the fact that no witness has been found who can say he saw Atta in the U.S. when the Czechs say he was in Prague). Did the 9/11 Commission staff actually interview the eyewitness? No. Did the staff or the Times discuss the corroboration that supports the occurrence of the Prague meeting? No. Did either of them grapple with what is to be inferred from Atta's trips to Prague in 2000? No — not a word about them. Just a flat conclusion that the meeting never happened.

Since it's Clinton week, maybe it's best to put it this way: For the Times and its allies, Iraq and al Qaeda are like the former president's trysts: If there ain't a blue cocktail dress, it never happened. If there isn't a photograph of Atta and al-Ani poring over diagrams of the World Trade Center, we just conclude that they never saw each other, and we see no reason to acknowledge that there's considerable evidence that they probably did.

This morning's report is more of the same. We know there were numerous contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after the collaborative proposals discussed in the newly reported document. How does the Times know that Saddam never responded to bin Laden's overtures? It doesn't. Neither do I. Neither do you. That's why it's called an investigation. The idea is to keep digging until you know. To the contrary, the Times's idea is: bury it, pretend you don't even know the things you do know, grudgingly admit the bare minimum, and use the enormous weight of your own inertia to make the whole thing go away. Thus we get hilarious paragraphs, like this one in today's story:

Members of the Pentagon task force that reviewed the document said it described no formal alliance being reached between Mr. bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence. The Iraqi document itself states that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."
(Emphasis added.)

That's a good one: a "formal alliance" between terrorists to terrorize. Did the Times expect a signing ceremony? What next? "The FBI's organized crime unit concluded today that there probably is no Mafia because the evidence does not describe any formal alliance between shadowy figures who, Vice President Dick Cheney claims, refer to themselves as 'Gambinos' and 'Bonannos'...."

And then of course we have years of testimony from the Clinton administration.

Just two examples: during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.

And there you have it.

The Pilot says “Meetings and contacts, however, hardly constitute a relationship in all but the most narrow technical definition of the word. By that standard, the United States has a relationship with North Korea, or even al-Qaeda, thanks to intelligence contacts, but we certainly don’t do business with either of them.”

To suggest that this is the sort of relationship Saddam and al-Qaeda had is as bizarre as the accusation of former Vice President Gore that his opponents are Brown Shirts, or the accusation of Judge Calabresi that President Bush is a Hitler or a Mussolini.

The Left has become unhinged in their hatred. And that is dangerous for any society.