--Congress saw the exact same intelligence as the President.

Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information

December 14, 2005

Newspaper Article on the Above Report: Report: Bush Had More Prewar Intelligence Than Congress

--Saddam led a radical Muslim state and worked with al-Qa'ida

James Taranto

    "A new report in the New Yorker magazine suggests that Iraqi intelligence has

been in close touch with top officials in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group for

years, and that the two organizations jointly run a terrorist organization that

operates in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq," the Washington Post reports:

    'The article's author, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he interviewed several operatives

of the group who had been captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a

pro-American Kurdish group that controls one province in northern Iraq. The captives

said that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda run Ansar, that a number of al Qaeda fighters

fleeing Afghanistan have escaped to Iraqi Kurdish territory controlled by Ansar, and

that Iraq hosted a top Egyptian leader of al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992. . . .'

The article also asserted that U.S. intelligence agencies apparently had not adequately

looked into what the Ansar captives have to say and haven't completely debriefed PUK

leaders who have assembled a dossier on the alleged Iraq-al Qaeda ties in Kurdistan.

    The article isn't yet online, but The New Yorker's Web site has an interview with Goldberg,

whose article includes harrowing accounts of Saddam's attempted genocide in the late 1980s,

which included the use of chemical weapons. Goldberg also writes that he found wide support

for American action against Saddam:

    Kurds I talked to throughout Kurdistan were enthusiastic about the idea of joining an

American-led alliance against Saddam Hussein, and serving as the northern-Iraqi equivalent

of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. President Bush's State of the Union Message, in which he

denounced Iraq as the linchpin of an "axis of evil," had had an electric effect on every Kurd

I met who heard the speech. In the same speech, President Bush made reference to Iraq's murder

of "thousands of its own citizens--leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children."

General Simko Dizayee told me, "Bush's speech filled our hearts with hope."

    AFX News reports on CIA director George Tenet's Senate testimony today: "Iraq has had contact

with the al-Qaeda fundamentalist group, with mutual hostility toward the US and the Saudi royal

family suggesting that tactical cooperation between the two is possible, the chief of US intelligence

said."

Selling an Iraq-al Qaeda connection

"Bottom line: U.S. officials claim there is evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection -- but

there is no 'smoking gun.'"

Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed

"The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between

Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq."

--Documents Show Saddam's WMD Frustrations

A haystack with no needles.

This article discusses documents that show Saddam had disarmed and was

exasperated in his attempts to prove it so that sanctions could be lifted.

--Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna Pundits

Bunch of Wankers

This is a collection of statements made during the early stages of the Iraq War, statements which would

prove to be horribly wrong. And idiotic. Case in point:

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000

troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up

a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."

(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)