More flat out lies by the left wing media.F'n unbelievable.

PatPatriot · Jun 18, 2004

Friday, June 18, 2004 9:21 a.m. EDT
9/11 Chair Hamilton Slams Media Distortions

Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton blasted the mainstream press yesterday for distorting the Commission's findings on links between Iraq and al Qaida, saying those findings actually support Bush administration contentions.

"The sharp differences that the press has drawn [between the White House and the Commission] are not that apparent to me," Hamilton told the Associated Press, a day after insisting that his probe uncovered "all kinds" of connections between Osama bin Laden's terror network and Iraq.

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Hamilton's comments followed a deluge of mainstream reports falsely claiming that the 9/11 Commission had discredited the Bush administration's claim of longstanding links between Baghdad and bin Laden.
But the Indiana Democrat said the press accounts were flat-out wrong.

"There are all kinds of ties," he told PBS's "The News Hour" late Wednesday, in comments that establishment journalists have refused to report.

"There are all kinds of connections. And it may very well have been that Osama bin Laden or some of his lieutenants met at some time with Saddam Hussein's lieutenants."

Hamilton said that while his probe had failed to uncover any direct operational link between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terror network in attacks on the U.S., there's no question that "they had contacts."

Editor's note:

xpanda · Jun 18, 2004

While you see your media as being left-bent, I see it as being hysterical. Blame it on the advent of 24-hour news stations with not enough to talk about, but CNN made Saddam/911 inferences and shows you daily what the terror alert level is in the US. It loves all that fear-*****ring crap. Tying Saddam to 9/11 was simply too juicy for anyone to pass up, even the so-called liberal media.

PatPatriot · Jun 18, 2004

Hugs and Kisses

The Tie That Binds (Iraq, Al-Qaida Link)
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY ^ | Friday, June 18, 2004 | Editor

Terrorism: "Panel Says No Signs Of Iraq, Al-Qaida Link." That Reuters headline bears a striking similarity to many others that led the world's front pages on Thursday.

But that headline, and those like it, are wrong. They are at best lazy and intentionally misleading, and at worst, politically malicious — a cheap swipe at President Bush.

It's hard to know where to begin. Because the ties between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida are so numerous, it seems silly to dispute it at this point.

Bush on Thursday made the most basic case: "This administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. For example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with (Osama) bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida, in the Sudan."

The media have treated Bush's statement, and a similar one by Vice President Dick Cheney earlier in the week, with a skepticism verging on disdain.

In doing so, they ignore the known record of al-Qaida's ties with Saddam. It's a long one — and highly suggestive of deep links between the oil-rich dictator and the fundamentalist fanatics that killed 3,000 people on 9-11. Here are just a few:

• Last year, a leaked Defense Department memo detailed over 50 contacts between top Iraqi officials and members of al-Qaida. The contacts went back to the 1980s. That memo also provided evidence that Iraq's chief of intelligence, Ahmed al-Ani, met with lead 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and provided him with funds.

• According to a Nov. 11, 2001, report in the London Observer, two Iraqi defectors claimed they helped train Islamic terrorists to seize a plane using only small knives at Iraq's Salman Pak training facility. The facility's existence was later confirmed by CIA satellite photos — and reconfirmed by a personal visit by Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq after David Kay.

• Judge Gilbert Merritt of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, on a trip last year to Iraq to help set up a new justice system, stumbled across documentary evidence that Saddam had ongoing ties with bin Laden through Iraqi intelligence officer Abid Al-Karim Mohamed Aswod. Aswod worked in Iraq's Embassy in Pakistan, and was "responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group," Merritt found.

• After President Clinton warned on Feb. 18, 1998, of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals" in Iraq, Saddam's intelligence agencies began strengthening their ties to bin Laden, according to documents found in April 2003 at Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by two journalists.

We've just scratched the surface here. There's a huge, and growing, pile of evidence suggesting ties between Saddam and al-Qaida.

Of course, any one bit of evidence can be false or misleading.

But taken together, the weight of the evidence suggests one thing: Saddam had extensive ties not just to al-Qaida, but to other terrorist groups, too. The media's wishful thinking won't make it otherwise.

Excerpted - click for full article ^

xpanda · Jun 18, 2004

And proving why you bombed the shit out of a country after the fact is reprehensible. I would have alot more respect for the admin's actions if they just told people outright that it's to be the Biggest, Baddest and Strongest.

Ola, to you too.