Thursday, June 17, 2004

State Department Backs Up 9/11 Commission's Take

More on the deliberately deceptive conflation of Iraq and al Qaeda. Below is a quote from Eric Alterman's Think Again piece from the Center for American Progress:

"According to the State Department's annual report on the general subject, titled Patterns of Global Terrorism, Baghdad had no ties to al Qaeda or, for that matter, to any of the 'al Qaeda–type organizations' operating in the Middle East and Africa. Although the report finds that Iraq has assisted 'numerous terrorist groups,' those outfits are all secular and 'Marxist' or 'socialist' in ideology—in other words, 'infidels,' the insult used by bin Laden to describe Saddam. That same report, released last year, notes that the "main focus" of Saddam's terror expenditures has been on "dissident Iraqi activity overseas." [emphasis added]

So of the State Department's own report on the Patterns of Global Terror comes to the conclusion that Saddam had no ties to al Qaeda or to any of the 'al Qaeda–type organizations' operating in the Middle East and Africa, and that the terrorist groups he funded were all secular, anathema to the radically Islamist Bin Laden and al Qaeda, then why didn't anyone tell the White House? Shouldn't they have read the report regardless?



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