One Argument Destroyed
One of the common arguments heard all the time from the people who really don't like Bush is that Saddam had no ties to terrorists.
Well, this article pretty well demolishes that particular piece of meme. Since I don't speak or read Arabic, I can't confirm or refute the article. I would assume that the authors would not publish something that was false if there was any chance of it being publicly refuted. Since the translation is up for all to see, I suspect it is likely true. Search here for the translations.
Please do not start the "Yeah but Bush Lied" crap – read the damned documents.
By Kubrik, April 9, 2006 @ 12:31 am
“Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam’s terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam’s spy service, innocuously listed as CMPC-2003-006430. It makes for interesting reading.
Check it out. Don’t be put off by the fact that the first page is in Arabic; the remaining seven are not. Notice anything odd about it? Well, one might ask: what’s that big “FAS” banner at the top? Wouldn’t any official Iraqi document be in Arabic, not English? And when you get the the bottom, the mystery deepens: you are actually asked to join “FAS”, whatever it is. Luckily, there’s a helpful url: if you type it into your browser, you get here, where all is revealed: you’ve reached the very document you were just looking at, and it turns out to be not a top-secret Iraqi intelligence file, but a public web page about Iraq from the Federation of American Scientists!
So the Federation of American Scientists gave Saddam’s Mukhabarat its “marching orders”. Who knew?
You can find a list of the FAS’ top secret publicly available sources on the web page, as well.Iraqi intelligence notes the appearance of the document on the internet in 1997, and laments that it is very basic ['does not do more than'] and then notes with some amusement how out of date it is (with the implication that Western intelligence on Iraq must be pretty bad). The “out of date” comment probably refers to the Western document’s preoccupation with WMD, which Iraqi Intelligence would have known was gone by then.
The New York Times piece on the Iraqi documents brought this bit of analysis to my attention:
On his blog last week, Ray Robison, a former Army officer from Alabama, quoted a document reporting a supposed scheme to put anthrax into American leaflets dropped in Iraq and declared: “Saddam’s W.M.D. and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!”
The Times reporter notes that “the anthrax document that intrigued Mr. Robison, the Alabama blogger, does not seem to prove much. It is a message from the Quds Army, a regional militia created by Mr. Hussein, to Iraqi military intelligence that passes on reports picked up by troops, possibly from the radio, since the information is labeled “open source” and “impaired broadcast.”
All true. But I noticed something else. The English translation does indeed say “impaired broadcast,” but the Arabic original says “itha’a sawa.”
Which could mean “impaired broadcast”, I suppose, but also sounds an awful lot like… Radio Sawa. Which is, of course, the name of the American government run Arabic language radio station which began broadcasting in 2002. Which could, hilariously enough, mean that the al-Quds Division document was actually reporting propaganda picked up from an American radio station. Which an enthusiastic conservative blogger then, in turn, embraced as evidence. In a word, blowback!
By Gauis Arbo, April 9, 2006 @ 6:04 am
Which is why they are calling for formal investigation of the articles. As I stated, I can’t read the language, so I can’t judge for myself. It seems odd they’d publicly endorse something if it is easily disproved – IBD are not exactly idiots, right>