A great article in the Weekly Standard, today, by Thomas Joscelyn [1] that should put to rest all the naysaysers about how involved Saddam was in terror. He lists several points of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s so called “phase two report” that I’ve mentioned here in the past. Then says he:
These conclusions should not be surprising. In his book At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet provided a number of details concerning the safe haven al Qaeda members received in Saddam’s Iraq. For example, Tenet wrote that two of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s top operatives, Thirwat Shihata and Yussef Dardiri, received safe haven in Baghdad. Tenet says that there was “concern that these two might be planning operations outside Iraq.”
The first report on the uses of prewar intelligence published by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 2004 also found that Zarqawi freely roamed around Iraq and Saddam’s goons must have been aware of his presence. The authors of the Butler Report, the British government’s investigation into prewar intelligence, found roughly the same. Even other al Qaeda members have, on occasion, been open about the relationship between Zarqawi, other al Qaeda operatives, and Saddam’s regime in prewar Iraq.
Despite all of these findings, however, the myth that Zarqawi and other al Qaeda operatives lived in Saddam’s neo-Stalinist state without receiving at least the dictator’s tacit support has lived on. But now, even in a partisan report designed to attack the Bush administration’s credibility, the Senate Intelligence Committee has admitted that Bush and his officials were right to argue that Saddam was harboring al Qaeda fugitives. Both prewar and postwar intelligence assessments confirm their view.
But no one should take the Senate Intelligence Committee’s word one way or another on these issues. In fact, the only reason that we know the committee got the story of Saddam’s safe haven for al Qaeda members right is because so many other sources have already confirmed it. And while the Senate Intelligence Committee got this issue right, it got many others wrong. The report is not even internally consistent and the committee simply ignored numerous pieces of information that got in the way of some of its conclusions.
Go and RTWT.
It’s not hard to figure out what the motivations of the Democrats who are running the Senate Intelligence Committee, are. Theyve been trying to spin this thing to their political favor for years, now. But the fact is that Saddam was harboring and aiding al-Quieda terrorists. And that means that (Big shock, this… brace yourselves) The Democrats have been lying to us so as to win political power.