Danse Macabre

The front page of the Chicago Tribune print edition has the story, "Report rejects prewar link of Iraq, Al Qaeda". Also NY Times predictable story here, via RCP.

Even as one of its reporters, newly freed from the genocidal Sudanese regime, "dances in the moonlight", another Trib reporter dances to the tune of the MSM beltway crowd on the Iraq war. The Senate report is a shoddy, selective rehash of mostly known information, with particular credence given to new self-serving statements of a jailed dictator, one Saddam Hussein, on trial for murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people.

The Trib does report intelligence committee head Sen. Pat Roberts' statement that both the administration and Congress reviewed the same intelligence at that time:

"The long-known fact is that the prewar intelligence was wrong," Roberts said. "That flawed intelligence was used by policymakers, both in the administration and in Congress, as one of numerous justifications to go to war in Iraq.

Following is a quote from the ranking Democrat on the committee, Jay Rockefeller:

"The Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was fundamentally misleading," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the committee's ranking Democrat. "The administration pursued a deceptive strategy of using intelligence reporting that the intelligence community had already warned was uncorroborated, unreliable and, in critical instances, fabricated."

One of the reasons an earlier report, the comprehensive bi-partisan 9/11 commission report was delayed was that members were uncomfortable about their own statements prior to the vote to go to war, which was lopsidedly in favor. One of those uncomfortable was Sen. Rockefeller himself, who at the time (Oct. 2002) had this to say:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources -- something that is not that difficult in the current world. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
...
...At the end of the day, we cannot let the security of American citizens rest in the hands of someone whose track record gives us every reason to fear that he is prepared to use the weapons he has against his enemies.

As the attacks of September 11 demonstrated, the immense destructiveness of modern technology means we can no longer afford to wait around for a smoking gun. September 11 demonstrated that the fact that an attack on our homeland has not yet occurred cannot give us any false sense of security that one will not occur in the future. We no longer have that luxury.

The good Senator believed it at the time (and probably privately does now), as the threat he outlined from the previous Iraqi regime still resonates, whether it be from Al Qaeda, Iran or its terrorist surrogates. And an attack on our airliners was recently foiled by the diligence of the administration and the British.

The Tribune story goes on to summarize the Senate report which dismisses the the intel on Iraq trying to buy yellowcake in Niger as "apparently fabricated" and that a connection between Iraq and Niger "did not exist". But this intel has been corroborated (see pages 6 and 7 of Podhoretz) by the bipartisan 9/11 commission, and Joe Wilson has been discredited in this and in his accusations that the Bush White House attempted to smear him and out his CIA wife. Even the Washington Post has concluded that Wilson himself is the one most reponsible for outing his wife, and one of their veteran political observers stated Karl Rove is owed an apology. As for the connection between Iraq and Niger, what was Saddam Hussein's top nuclear diplomat doing there?
Having tea? About the only marketable commodity in Niger is uranium, all you have to do is go to Wikepedia for that answer.

As far as the Senate Committee stating that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not have an "established formal relationship" before the war, it adds information from that reliable source of intel Saddam Hussein. And the report ignores other intel that somehow even made it into the MSM. Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, RCP:

The testimony of another former senior Iraqi official is more starkly disturbing. One of Saddam's senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi's ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.

Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that "this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact."

This is not true. Hijazi's best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, "The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them."

Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just "boogie to Baghdad." Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.

So we have the spectacle of a Senate report rife with the spin of criminally clueless Senators and Country Club Democrats, again denying the Islamofascist threat to the civilized world, dutifully swallowed by the Tribune's DC man on the spot. Scoring political points is more important than protecting the country or reporting the news.

That reminds me of a story I didn't read about in the Tribune (or the Sun Times, gee Obama couldn't get in) from just the other day, also about Sudan. (No, it wasn't more about Osama having been harbored there after the Saudis threw him out, before he went to Afghanistan. No, it wasn't about Bill Clinton having been offered Osama by the Sudanese government and deciding it was too much trouble). The story was about shadowy figures in Sudan beheading a journalist.

How could anyone have known this could happen?

Guess the terrorist who killed him wasn't wearing a tux--- after all they hadn't been "formally introduced".

UPDATE: VDH, via RCP, on "paradise loving enemies" who will not be deterred.