Originally posted by Gunslinger
Of course many of you will dismiss this outright because of the source, so be it. You'll never see this in the New York Times because it doesn't make Bush look bad and it's not a closly guarded national secret so newsworthy as it may be it will not garner national attention nore scrutiny.
Bush doesn't need the media to make him look bad; he is an expert on that by himself.
You don't have to invent an industry-wide anti-Bush conspiracy to explain why only Fox is flogging this story; the fact that it is pure conjecture with no hard facts at all would explain that. As for dismissing the source, it is precisely because Fox paints unsubstantiated rubbish like this as significant that people treat them as the joke they are.
Predictably responses: Where's the WMD? This doesn't justify an invasion, this doesn't link iraq qith 9/11 blah blah blah blah
It might be predictable but it's still true
From the very first line of the article in question:
An Arab regime, possibly Iraq, supplied how-to manuals for Arab operatives working throughout Afghanistan before 9/11, and provided military assistance to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Possibly? Well ok. 20 years ago, a lot of arab regimes were actively sending people to train and fight in Afgahistan. The Saudis, Kuwait, Egypt, all supported by Pakistani and multiple western intelligence agencies. How do we know this documentation doesn't originate from that period? In this context, isn't it exactly the sort of material one might expect an Arab regime to be holding?
It amazes me that people would pay more attention to a 9/11 conspiracy that involved Bush/Cheny than they would an Iraqi Air Force officer that *claimed* to have seen chemical containers being flown to Syria prior to the invasion.
You're misinformed. The officer in question, Georges Sadas, has never claimed that he "saw" anything of the sort. That would have been quite difficult since he was dismissed from the Iraqi airforce in 1991 and imprisoned by Saddam. All he has reported is unsubstantiated heresay that happened to coincide with the launch of the book he was promoting and which supports his political position as an aide to another source of WMD disinformation, Iyad Allawi. He has never supplied the names of any his sources and none of these sources have ever come forward despite the obvious inducements on offer. Neither has he explained how these alleged WMD came to exist given the fact that all the required production facilities had long been shut down or destroyed by UNSCOM and that any pre-exisiting materials would have long become ineffective through age.
In other words another uncorroborated non-story, like most of the other "evidence" used to support this invasion.
