He's not just standing in the Bushes

I know reading the first few paragraphs of any story is difficult for say, Suzanne Malveaux. Hell, I'm sure her reading is limited to "The Politico"; "The Washington Times"; and James Taranto or Fred Hiatt editorials before she gets her White House emblazoned 3x5s. Nevertheless, she might want to stuff these into her copious cranial space as they are on the Post's front page:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June...

...The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than cooperating operationally.

The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

But the contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office -- and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war -- were publicly praised by Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a circumstance the Pentagon report cites in documenting the impact of what it described as "inappropriate" work.

I've noticed the Bush Administration has never whined about leaks to 'The Weekly Standard' (which to be fair should be known as the 'Weekly Well Below Expected Statistical Deviation'). Go figure. My guess is that this information was so dodgy even Judy Miller and Michael Gordon wouldn't take it.

One more thing, as it will be a defense by the enablers:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

In fact, pre-invasion, Zarqawi operated in the Northeast corner of Iraq with Ansar al-Islam in an area that wasn't controlled by the Iraqi government and was in the de facto control of the Kurds (though to be fair they didn't really dare control that area either). Zarqawi was also, while definitely a terrorists, pointedly not affiliated with Al Qaeda until well after the American invasion of Iran, and even then it was more "branding" then anything else.

And once again, though this article is rife with errors about Zarqawi, the allegation that the United States passed up a pre-war opportunity to attack him and his minions is an indictment of how he was used as a tool to drum up the war against Iraq.

Finally, as the WaPo article hints at, and Juan Cole reminds us, documents the United States captured in Iraq that show that Saddam's security forces were a) afraid of al-Qaeda and Zarqawi and b) were trying to capture him once they heard he was in Iraq.