Newspapers ignore reports on Cheney office's push for Al Qaeda-Iraq link
SUMMARY: None of five major national newspapers has reported on a Daily Beast article reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney's office "suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection."
Despite covering questions regarding what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew about the Bush administration's interrogation policies, none of five major newspapers -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today -- has reported on a May 13 Daily Beast article reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney's office "suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection." On the May 17 edition of ABC's This Week, Cheney's daughter Liz, a former State Department official, was specifically asked twice about the report and dodged both questions.
Moreover, those same newspapers have yet to report on a May 15 McClatchy Newspapers article by Jonathan S. Landay highlighting comments made by Dick Cheney in 2004 that detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, provided information confirming Iraq's involvement in giving chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda.
In the Daily Beast article, former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reported: "Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner ... who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection." As Media Matters for America noted, MSNBC hosts covered Windrem's report at least twice on May 14, and at one point hosted Windrem to discuss it. From Windrem's report:
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.
"To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from "some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA)," who thought Khudayr's interrogation had been "too gentle" and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. "They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used," Duelfer writes. "The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature."
Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: "The language I can use is what has been cleared." In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney's office and will post a response if we get one.)
Without admitting where the suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and understood the rationale as political -- and ultimately counterproductive to the overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of finding Saddam Hussein's WMD after the invasion.
In the McClatchy article, Landay wrote that "Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true." According to Landay, Cheney asserted in an interview with The Rocky Mountain News, "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology." Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes reported on the interview, including those comments, in a January 13, 2004, Weekly Standard article (retrieved from the Nexis database). Landay reported: "No evidence of such training or of any operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been found, according to several official inquiries." From Landay's article:
The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam's regime had maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.
"Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney replied.
A Cheney spokeswoman said a response to an e-mail requesting clarification of the former vice president's remarks would be forthcoming next week.
"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back," he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."
No evidence of such training or of any operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been found, according to several official inquiries.
It's not apparent which Guantanamo detainees Cheney was referring to in the interview.
One al Qaida detainee, Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, claimed that terrorist operatives were sent to Iraq for chemical and biological weapons training, but he was in CIA custody, not at Guantanamo.
Moreover, he recanted his assertions, some of them allegedly made under torture while he was being interrogated in Egypt.
"No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred, and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war," a September 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee report said.
Indeed, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's September 2006 report on postwar findings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, al-Libi, who was "the source of reports on al-Qa'ida's efforts to obtain CBW [chemical and biological weapons] training, recanted the information he provided." The report found that al-Libi recanted in January 2004, claiming he had "fabricated information since his capture. ... Al-Libi claimed that to the best of his knowledge al-Qa'ida never sent any individuals into Iraq for any kind of support in chemical or biological weapons, as he had claimed previously." The report concluded: "The other reports of possible al-Qa'ida CBW training from Iraq were never considered credible by the Intelligence Community. No other information has been uncovered in Iraq or from detainees that confirms this reporting." According to the report, as early as 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency had expressed skepticism about al-Libi's claims, at one point stating that while his story was "possible," "it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers."
Media Matters searched the Nexis database for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today since May 12 for the following terms:
- Cheney AND (waterboard! or water board! or detain! or torture! or interrog! or tactic) AND (Iraq! or Saddam or Hussein)
- Cheney AND (Guantanamo or detain! or prison! or terror!) AND (Iraq! or Saddam or Hussein)
- Cheney AND (Daily Beast or Windrem)
- Cheney AND (McClatchy or Rocky Mountain News)
Media Matters searched the Factiva database for The Wall Street Journal since May 12 for the following terms:
- Cheney AND (waterboard* or water board* or detain* or torture* or interrog* or tactic) AND (Iraq* or Saddam or Hussein)
- Cheney AND (Guantanamo or detain* or prison* or terror*) AND (Iraq* or Saddam or Hussein)
- Cheney AND (Daily Beast or Windrem)
- Cheney AND (McClatchy or Rocky Mountain News)
I don't know if it is because the media is so hard wired to the gop that they automatically jump whenever a republican feeds them their latest fantasy story knowing the media will report on it like it's written in stone without fact checking.
Or that the media has an interest in the diversion because of their own behavior during the run up to war and afterwards in regards to the Bushies (they were the biggest cheerleaders) and the torture stuff only highlights how they failed to ask hard questions or investigate the administration, instead preferring to play lap dog.
Or if the Pelosi story gives them the chance to preen before the camera hyperventilating about the 'big mystery' of who and what, blah blah. Rather then chase down a story that requires fact checking, talking to real sources and doing real work.
Maybe it's all three.
But, the media has totally failed again in doing real reporting on the Cheney torture stories that keep coming out.
by the way: polling shows that the people are not listening to media and their push to make Pelosi guilty. Most think the CIA lied to her.
A long time poster here had an analogy for the way the Press is so easily distracted by the Republicans. He referred to them as puppies chasing a ball. I always found that comparison amusing... and accurate.
Seeing his mug on the teevee is like the residue of a nightmare.
I for one firmly believe that Cheney would eat his own grand-kids if he knew it would further his sick twisted need to never be proven wrong... or seriously questioned!
Following came a near blackout of news in the United States. No wonder. Reporting on the dynamite Downing Street Memo (meeting notes) would point up years of news media complicity in the ginned-up war.
In those days, though, MSNBC was part of the cover-up. Today Matthews, Schultz, Olbermann and (especially) Maddow are airing the Big Story, while on the morning shift conservative Joe Scarborough is going nuts over Nancy Pelosi. (Nothing done
wrong, but it's all the House speaker's fault.)
Thus the story today has legs. I doubt the cable networks, broadcast networks and non-McClatchy newspapers can ignore it much longer. Ultimately, though, the guilty will be adjudged too big to jail.
Jerry Elsea
The only thing I will say about Joe Scarborough is to simply leave this --> LINK <-- (I wonder what the results would have been if not for Chandra Levy and then 9/11 on whether Jow would have the MSNBC gig??)
Of course, "actionable intelligence" need not have been true or even remotely accurate as long as it was useful for Cheney’s purposes. Torture (especially repetitive torture) was uniquely suited to fabricating "actionable intelligence" as Cheney’s victims eventually learned to create whatever sort of details the Torturer in Chief sought (such as a link between 9/11 and Iraq).
There's a word for this anti-citizen corporate-government alliance: FASCISM.
You support this whenever you vote for a corporate-funded political party, even if it's the less-fascist one.
The Green Party accepts no corporate money, and represents citizens' interests. A 5% Green Party vote would get them Federal funding, and put the corporate politicians on notice that their pro-fascist enabling will cost them votes.
If you vote for a corporate-funded party, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
Whether you're trying to build the Green Party, or work within the Democratic Party (or Republican Party, for that matter), you're part of the solution. We've had enough demonization, thank you very much.
Uhhh ... Maybe because the article isn't very convincing.
If there's one thing we've all learned in the last eight years is that claims from unnamed "U.S. intelligence officers" (who? what agency? how long? worked for whom?) are not always reliable.
A 2008 Pentagon-sponsored study analyzed papers seized from Saddam's Iraq during the war. The report says about these papers,
It also stated, "[C]aptured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda."
Saddam had nothing do with 9/11, of course; but yes, people, there was an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Cheney was right.
Sorry to burst your bubble, folks.
^
I didn't realize "was willing to use" means there was a connection between the 2, or that it is a just case for a war.
Americans have ex leaders like Cheney who have destroyed our credibility around the world to blame for the unjust war in Iraq.
Thousands of lives have been lost and our economy left in shambles.
Bush and Cheney should be made to explain to the American people why they betrayed the trust of so many.
Since when did the daily beast infection become a leading news source for anyone, even media matters (for very little)?
Maybe, a couple of decades ago, the idea was to wait fifty,(50), years and history will tell the story. No one anticipated the WWW, to be so instantaneous. I think it great!