Who Woulda Knowed?

Except, you know, everybody who was against the War at the time. Atrios points back to Fred Clark at the Slacktivist:

Friday, February 07, 2003

POWELL'S EVIDENCE LOOKING SHAKY.

No smoking gun, lots of smoke and mirrors.

1. The aluminum tubes. The IAEA keeps pointing out that these tubes are not suitable for enriching uranium for a weapons program, as Powell and Bush assert. The U.S. response has been that with lots and lots of money and American high-tech science, the tubes could be altered for this purpose. This is evidently true, but it's also the opposite of Bush's original assertion that the tubes were part of an Iraqi effort to create a cheap-and-dirty weapon. The whole aluminum tubes business smells like the now familiar Bush pattern of deceit.

2. "The fine paper that United Kingdom distributed." Complete and utter hogwash. This casts suspicion on everything else Powell said before the Security Council -- including "and" and "the."

3. Powell asserted an Iraqi connection to al-Qaida. The cornerstone of this assertion is a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. (Northern Iraq, of course, is not under Saddam Hussein's control so it seems rather beside the point -- but let that pass.) The U.S. says it has months of satellite photography monitoring this hive of al-Qaida activity. This raises an obvious question: why is that camp still there?

Right now America is already at war. Remember the "war on terrorism"? (It's easy for civilians to forget about this war since the president only mentions it when it's politically expedient to do so.) The great difficulty in the war on terrorism is finding the enemy. Well, here they are. What are we waiting for?

Lawmakers raised this very question with Colin Powell yesterday and the answers -- the non-answers -- are deeply troubling. Here's the Los Angeles Times' report by Greg Miller:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where Al Qaeda affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.

But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?

Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the United States has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the Al Qaeda terror network.

The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration to explain its decision to leave the facility, which it has known about for months, unharmed.

"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"

Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.

"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said.

Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested that the administration has refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.

"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence committee, said she and other members have been frustrated in their attempts to get an explanation from administration officials in closed-door briefings.

"We've been asking this question and have not been given an answer," Feinstein said. Officials have replied that "they'll have to get back to us."

A White House spokesman said Thursday he had no comment on the matter.

The administration's handling of the issue has emerged as one of the more curious recent elements of the war on terrorism. Failing to intervene appears to be at odds with President Bush's stated policy of preempting terrorist threats, and the facility is in an area where the United States already has a considerable presence.

U.S. intelligence agents are said to be operating among the Kurdish population nearby, and U.S. and British warplanes patrol much of northern Iraq as part of their enforcement of a "no-fly" zone.

We are at war with terrorism, and here is a military target -- an enemy base camp allegedly linked to "the men who brought these buildings down." Yet Bush apparently leaves it unscathed so that it's existence can be used in support of an assault on Iraq that will involve massive bombing of cities (i.e. nonmilitary targets) and the civilians therein. You're not allowed to kill civilians...

The BBC follows up on the earlier Channel 4 report that the dossier supposedly written by British intelligence -- and commended by Colin Powell in his UN slide-show -- was actually plagiarized from a graduate student's 12-year old paper and two magazine articles.

This is the best the United States of American and the United Kingdom can come up with? A slapdash amalgam of somebody's thesis and a couple of articles from Jane's? This isn't intelligence -- it's not even competent Googling. It's an embarrassment and an insult to the Security Council. Was somebody actually paid to cut-and-paste together this irrelevancy?

You're not allowed to kill civilians. Especially when the "civilians" include Princes of the Royal House of the Capo di Tutti Capi , who are helping Dear Leader scam his own country.