MTP--Cheney's mendacity on Saddam and al-Qaeda: An October04 WSJ

[ProgressiveEconomist]

story exposed some very discordant facts; NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski had broken the story on NBC News earlier that month.

On MTP Sunday, Cheney split hairs about the difference between a Saddam connection with 9/11 and an Iraq connection with al-Qaeda. NEITHER allegation has any shred of evidence behind it. And IMO both Cheney and Russert MUST have known precisely the facts that made what Cheney said bald-faced Orwellian 180-degree lies.

Back in mid-October 2004, NBC Nightly news ran a Jim Miklaszewski piece that has ALMOST disappeared down the "memory hole". JM reported that the Bush administration in 2002 passed up THREE opportunities to take out Zarqawi's camp in the Halabja Valley of the Northern Protected Zone in Iraq. Sure the camp was in Iraq, but it was in an area outside Saddam Hussein's control. Because the US Air Force patrolled the area as part of its "No Fly Zone" after Poppy Bush's Gulf War, it would have been more accurate to say that THE US was harboring al-Qaeda there, rather than Saddam Hussein. There was blog speculation at the time that Dubya was holding back just so there'd be just enough of a connection between "Iraq" and "AQ" for fim to lie the country into a "war" he wanted for reasons he's never disclosed.

Yet on Meet the Press Sunday, Dick Cheney continued to repeat the long-discredited lie that Saddam was harboring al-Qaeda, and Tim Russert did not correct him.

Miklaszewski's story once was on MSNBC.com, but googling just now showed me it is long-gone. Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly still has an archived column briefly referring to it, and a site I'd never heard of before today has snippets from an October 25 2004 Wall Street Journal story by Scott Paltrow:

From http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001237.html :

"As the toll of mayhem inspired by terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi mounts in Iraq, some former officials and military officers increasingly wonder whether the Bush administration made a mistake months before the start of the war by stopping the military from attacking his camp in the northeastern part of that country. The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West. . . .

But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn't take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began. . . .

Some former officials said the intelligence on Mr. Zarqawi's whereabouts was sound. In addition, retired Gen. John M. Keane, the U.S. Army's vice chief of staff when the strike was considered, said that because the camp was isolated in the thinly populated, mountainous borderlands of northeastern Iraq, the risk of collateral damage was minimal. . . . Gen. Keane characterized the camp "as one of the best targets we ever had," and questioned the decision not to attack it. . ."

[teach1st]

1. The MSNBC article is still up...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/

‘People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of pre-emption against terrorists.’ — Roger Cressey, Terrorism expert

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. Many thanks! I forgot about the ".msn" in the new sitename