YEEEeeeHAAAW! Raise the Banner and bring the boys home! We caught another "number two"! Mission accomplished!

What a dumbass ... is there any number two that junior won't eat?

Al-Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist until AFTER we invaded Iraq.

Who should we put on trial?

The following is from a response I posted on March 16, 2008 to counter Rachel Maddow's and Thom Hartmann's dishonest and deliberately misleading blatherings about Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Last week, Rachel Maddow and the surrogate for Thom Hartman, who was in Darfur, loudly announced on their radio shows that after reviewing 600,000 captured Iraqi documents, the Pentagon found no "direct operational link" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. After doing so, said pundits smugly stated how such findings proved yet another of Bush's reasons for invading Iraq - an Iraqi/Al Qaeda nexus - to be a lie.

Not a bad story were it not for the fact that the claim, itself, is another leftist lie and one about which Maddow and her ilk were so excited to broadcast they probably almost urinated on themselves to do so. Excerpts from an article summarizing the Pentagon study prove what I mean.

Saddam's Dangerous Friends

What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us.

For example, this is what Maddow and the rest of the leftist media reported:

On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service first reported that the new Pentagon study was coming. "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network." McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves many of America's largest cities. The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence.

Strobel quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the report" who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a "direct operational link" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration's prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism.

Now, here's what the report truly said:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

...

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime."
Among the study's other notable findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.
For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."
In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

There is much, much more. Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination. In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as "under the wings of bin Laden." Although the organization "is an offshoot of bin Laden," the fact that it has a different name "can be a way of camouflaging the organization." The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to "priorities previously established."

In describing the relations between the Army of Muhammad and the Iraqi regime, the authors of the Pentagon study come to this conclusion: "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda--as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."

Conclusion: Knowing how an honest reporting of this study would undermine its propaganda about the lack of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda link, the left (1) (like the McClatchy News Service, Rachel Maddow, and Thom Hartman's stand-in stooge) did the only thing it knows how to do: It lied, claiming there was no link, when, in fact, there was one.

So yet again, the lies of the dishonest left proves how it could really care less about this country, its citizens, and freedoms. Instead what it proves is how the left will lie, mischaracterize, spin, use half-truths, and do whatever else is necessary to support its ethically absent, morally bankrupt, backward, dishonest, and regressive ideology, even if it means spreading the terrorist's propaganda for them, and, in effect, becoming their allies for doing so.

One last excerpt from the article sums it up best:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Indeed, the phrase "no amount of evidence to the contrary..." also describes the left as it desperately seeks to keep its lies about the war in Iraq alive, despite overwhelming evidence exposing the left's statements for the lies that they are.

No one wants your racist vote.

Lets just ignore the troll. He is not a liberal or a democrat. He is a poser who will soon be banned for his racist comments.

This is my last direct response to him.