Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

March 17, 2008

Saddam’s Terror Ties, and the New York Times’ Lies

A review of more than 600,000 documents seized from the possession of Saddam Hussein has concluded that Saddam did indeed have significant contacts with various terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. Just like President Bush said before the liberation of Iraq in 2003.

If you read the New York Times, you don’t know this is true. In fact, you think the opposite is true, because the Times wrote a story about the report that can only be described as a complete lie.

Here is how the Times headlined its story: “Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie”

Here is the lead:

There was no direct operational connection between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda before the war in Iraq, says a Pentagon-sponsored study released Wednesday.

This might be described as a Clinton truth – technically true but designed to mislead. But it’s too generous to give the Times a pass and call this a Clinton truth. The Times lied. That’s all there is to it.

If a newspaper is going to do a story about a government report, the story should tell you the relevant information in the report.

Bush’s case was always that Saddam supported global terrorism, including Al Qaeda, but Bush never based this part of the justification for war on the requirement that Al Qaeda must be part of the package. And yet it was. The report details how Saddam’s regime worked with various terrorist groups.

That included Al Qaeda, as we learn on Page 40:

An example of indirect cooperation is the movement led by Osama bin Laden. During the 1990s, both Saddam and bin Laden wanted the West, particularly the United States, out of Muslim lands (or in the view of Saddam, the "Arab nation"). Both wanted to create a single powerful state that would take its place as a global superpower.

That seems kind of relevant, don’t you think? The New York Times didn’t.

The report goes on to explain that Saddam and Osama hardly trusted each other, but shared enough common objectives that they couldn’t help but cooperate on some level:

The Saddam regime was very concerned about the internal threat posed by various Islamist movements. Crackdowns, arrests, and monitoring of Islamic radical movements were common in Iraq. However, Saddam's security organizations and bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims, at least for the short tenn (sic). Considerable operational overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the regional groups involved in terrorism. Saddam provided training and motivation to revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists in the region. Osama bin Laden provided training and motivation for violent revolutionary Islamists in the region. They were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historical narrative that promised a return to a glorious past. That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean they saw themselves in that light. Nevertheless, these similarities created more than just the appearance of cooperation. Common interests, even without common cause, increased the aggregate terror threat.

Finally, there’s this:

For years, Saddam maintained training camps for foreign "fighters" drawn from these diverse groups. In some cases, particularly for Palestinians, Saddam was also a strong financial supporter. Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.

Now, it may be technically true that there was no “smoking gun” proving “operational ties,” to Al Qaeda, but that is as far from the point of the report as the east is from the west. Bush’s case was that Saddam supported many terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. This report backs up everything Bush said. Everything.

The New York Times apparently could not bring itself to tell us that, so it ran a piddly four-paragraph story giving none of the details of the report, focusing only on the one caveat sentence that they could twist beyond recognition to make the story say what they wanted it to say.

That is a lie, pure and simple.

Perhaps it’s getting old to write columns lambasting the Times. Perhaps the people who gave us Jayson Blair, Vicki Iseman and the Terrorist Assistance Story that blew the cover off the NSA’s electronic surveillance program have more than revealed themselves to be a journalistic joke.

But does a newspaper face any accountability whatsoever when it just blatantly lies to its readers? Especially on matters of war and national security?

There are many newspapers with biases, which are still solid journalistic organizations. The Washington Post is as liberal as the day is long, and it takes truth and good reporting seriously.

The New York Times is a dishonest, propagandist disgrace. But don’t take my word for it. Download the report and read it for yourself:  

http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf

This is Column # DC159.  Request permission to publish here.