For his continuing effort to disrupt the mainstream media’s narrative that the Bushies foisted lies and misleading innuendo about an Iraq – al-Qaeda connection on an overly trusting American public, The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes should be regularly congratulated.

July 5/12 WS: “Bill Clinton Was Right…There was a Saddam-Osama connection and we’re learning more every day.”

Meanwhile the men at the top of the administration [former State Department spokesman James P.] Rubin worked for — Bill Clinton and Al Gore — have come down with [a …] striking case of political amnesia.

On June 24, Katie Couric interviewed President Clinton on NBC’s Today Show. She asked, “What do you think about this connection that Cheney, that Vice President Cheney continues to assert between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?” Clinton pleaded total ignorance. “All I can tell you is I never saw it, I never believed it based on the evidence I had.”

The same day, former Vice President Al Gore went much further in a vitriolic speech at Georgetown University law school. “President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. If he is not lying, if he genuinely believes that, that makes them unfit in battle against al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.”

Gore also distorted the significance of the recent 9/11 Commission Staff Statement. He called the statement an “extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan” 9/11 Commission that found “there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind.” In fact, three 9/11 Commission sources tell The Weekly Standard that the one paragraph of the staff statement about the relationship was not intended to be a definitive pronouncement on the issue. In any case, “no meaningful relationship” was never the view of the Clinton/Gore administration.

On February 17, 1998, President Clinton, speaking at the Pentagon, warned of the “reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.” These “predators of the twenty-first century,” he said, these enemies of America, “will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Later that spring, the Clinton Justice Department prepared an indictment of Osama bin Laden. The relevant passage, prominently placed in the fourth paragraph, reads:

Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.

Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney involved in the preparation of the indictment, testified before the 9/11 Commission. He said the intelligence behind that assertion came from Jamal al Fadl, a former high-ranking al Qaeda terrorist who before the 9/11 attacks gave the U.S intelligence community its first intimate look at al Qaeda. According to Fitzgerald, al Fadl told his interrogators that bin Laden associate Mamdouh Mahmud Salim (Abu Hajer al Iraqi) “tried to reach a sort of agreement where they wouldn’t work against each other–sort of the enemy of my enemy is my friend–and that there were indications that within Sudan when al Qaeda was there, which al Qaeda left in the summer of ’96, or the spring of ’96, there were efforts to work on jointly acquiring weapons.”

Several months later, after al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in East Africa, numerous Clinton officials cited an Iraq-al Qaeda connection as the basis for retaliatory U.S. strikes against the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

On August 24, 1998, the Clinton administration made available a “senior intelligence official” who cited “strong ties between the plant and Iraq.” The following day, Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state for political affairs and one of a handful of Clinton officials involved in the decision to strike al Shifa, briefed foreign reporters at the National Press Club. He was asked directly whether he knew “of any connection between the so-called pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and the Iraqi government in regard to production of precursors of VX” nerve gas.

Yeah, I would like to consult my notes just to be sure that what I have to say is stated clearly and correctly. We see evidence that we think is quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq. In fact, al Shifa officials, early in the company’s history, we believe were in touch with Iraqi individuals associated with Iraq’s VX program.

Five days after that, U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson appeared on CNN and pointed to “direct evidence of ties between Osama bin Laden” and Sudan’s Military Industrial Corporation. “You combine that with Sudan support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan’s leadership support for Osama bin Laden, and you’ve got a pretty clear-cut case.”

Sandy Berger, then Clinton’s national security adviser and now a top adviser to the Kerry campaign, made the connection in an October 16, 1998, op-ed in the Washington Times. “To not have acted against this facility would have been the height of irresponsibility,” he argued. The Clinton administration had “information linking bin Laden to the Sudanese regime and to the al Shifa plant.”

Berger explained that al Shifa was a dual-use facility. “We had physical evidence indicating that al Shifa was the site of chemical weapons activity,” Berger wrote. “Other products were made at al Shifa. But we have seen such dual-use plants before–in Iraq. And, indeed, we have information that Iraq has assisted chemical weapons activity in Sudan.”

Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official under both Clinton and Bush, confirmed this in an interview with the Washington Post on January 23, 1999. Clarke said the U.S. government was “sure” Iraq was behind the VX precursor produced at the factory. The story continued, “Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at al Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to al Shifa’s current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts, and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.”

More recently, former Clinton defense secretary William Cohen affirmed the Baghdad-Khartoum connection in testimony before the September 11 Commission on March 23, 2004. Cohen told the panel that an executive from al Shifa had “traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program.”

Many of these same officials now disclaim any knowledge of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship [….]

July 09 WS: “”The Unvarnished Facts”: Carl Levin distorts and exaggerates intelligence on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. The Bush administration was careful with its words, the Michigan senator is not.

No one in the Congress has had more to say about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection than Levin. And no one has been as misleading.

Here is Levin, in an appearance on CNN on July 8, 2003: “There is some evidence that there was an exaggeration by the intelligence community about that relationship,” he alleged. “We need them to be credible. That means no exaggeration. That means they have to give the unvarnished facts to the policymakers.”

That claim–the intelligence community exaggerated the Iraq-al Qaeda connection–were a dilation of comments Levin had made in a June 16, 2003, interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “We were told by the intelligence community that there was a very strong link between al Qaeda and Iraq.” [emphasis added]

By February 2004, Levin was saying precisely the opposite.

“The intel didn’t say that there is a direct connection between al Qaeda and Iraq,” he told John Gibson of Fox News. “That was not the intel. That’s what this administration exaggerated to produce. And so there are many instances where the administration went beyond the intelligence . . . I’m saying that the administration’s statements were exaggerations of what was given to them by the analysts and the intelligence community.”

Why did Levin shift the blame? Only he knows. But developments between his contradictory assessments seem relevant. Initially, of course, the Bush administration was accused by critics of pressuring intelligence analysts to shape their findings to fit predetermined policy goals. Just days before Levin refocused his critique, chief weapons inspector David Kay testified that he had seen no evidence of such pressure. “I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated,” Kay told the Senate on January 28, 2004. “And never, not in one single case, was the explanation, ‘I was pressured to do this.'”

The new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee apparently confirms this. Here is how the July 8, 2004, New York Times reported the findings.

The unanimous report by the panel will say there is no evidence that intelligence officials were subjected to pressure to reach particular conclusions about Iraq. That issue had been an early focus of Democrats, but none of the more than 200 intelligence officials interviewed by the panel made such a claim, and the Democrats have recently focused criticism on the question of whether intelligence was misused.

What’s a senator to do? […]

[…] when reporters from Newsweek asked President Bush whether Iraq was involved with the September 11 attacks, Bush was direct: “I cannot make that claim.”

Bush made this comment on January 31, 2003, two months before the Iraq War. Such facts are rather inconvenient for Levin, so he simply omits them. Some might be inclined to call that cherry-picking.

If Carl Levin had trouble understanding these rather straightforward statements, the man he supports for president did not. Said John Kerry, on October 9, 2002, in explaining his vote to authorize war in Iraq: “And while the administration has failed to provide any direct link between Iraq and the events of Sept. 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons [of mass destruction] to slide off to one group or other in a region where weapons are the currency of trade?” Sounds positively Wolfowitzian.

Perhaps Levin believes, as do many administration critics on the left, that the conspiracy was far more subtle: Tell the public that Saddam Hussein was not involved in September 11, but continue to invoke those attacks to justify the war in Iraq.

It must have been a vast conspiracy. Again, to John Kerry’s October 9, 2002, speech:

In the wake of Sept. 11, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that the weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater, a nuclear weapon, than reinvade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further the ambitions to be the pan-Arab leader or simply to confront in the region and once again miscalculate the response, to believe he is stronger because he has those weapons?

Levin’s continuing attempt to discredit the administration on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is meeting resistance from unexpected quarters. The New York Times’s Thom Shanker reported on the connection on June 25, 2004. Shanker wrote about an Iraqi Intelligence document discussing potential Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration in Saudi Arabia.

Among the stunning revelations in the document: bin Laden “requested joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia; that Iraqi Intelligence officials sought to maintain the “relationship” after bin Laden left Sudan; that “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement.”

Those words–“joint operations” and “the relationship” and “cooperation”–come not from the Bush administration, but from Iraqi intelligence. They expand on our understanding of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection and, if anything, suggest that the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community may have actually understated the relationship.

Levin’s preemptive report is indeed revealing, but not in the way he intends. We have a much clearer picture of who, exactly, is exaggerating intelligence to score political points.

protein wisdom is very interested in the connections between al-Qaeda and rogue nations — which until very recently included Iraq. He encourages others to put aside partisanship and unbridled powerlust and join him in his search for understanding. And yes, left-liberal Democrats, I’m talking to you specifically.

Oh. And tell your ticket, too.