Randal Smathers, an editor for the Rutland Herald takes me to task for a piece I wrote a few days ago. He also makes a statement about the blogosphere while he's at it.
...readers, especially readers who are turning to the blogosphere for the "truth" they're not getting from mainstream media (MSM in blogspeak), need to be equally cautious when reading blogs.
Frank's latest on al Qaida and Iraq is a classic example.
Frank starts by citing verbatim transcripts of remarks by Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid and the House Resolution authorizing action against Iraq.
But then he starts to stray from source material to analysis. His citation of the 9-11 Commission Report does not take readers to the 9-11 Commission, but an opinion piece from the National Review
Whether you believe Wm. Buckley's magazine is accurate is entirely up to you, but Frank doesn't say he's using an opinion piece in place of the source material.
OK, fair enough, however there are two things about this:
First, the National Review article does link to the 9-11 Commission's report and second, the NRO piece by Andrew McCarthy quotes the 9-11 commision report and the quote I extracted from that article, specifically "On particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." is, in fact, quoted from the report itself.
However, in my opinion, it was easier to find the quote in this article than it is to find in the 7.4 megabyte pdf file itself. And you get Andrew McCarth's terrific analysis to boot.
Such a deal.
I will additionally point out that I did not quote any of Mr McCarthy's opinion in order to support my argument. I qouted the 9-11 Commision's report itself.
Mr Smathers had a second criticism
He quotes a badly written UPI story that says "The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.
John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."
Why badly written? The story only quotes one panel member on the alleged new intelligence, not "panel members." And what the story says but Frank omits is that another panel member is quoted as saying he hopes the panel gets to see the evidence Lehman is talking about.
Regardless, the papers do exist and while there is great speculation as to who precisely Ahmad Hikmat Shakir (the individual referenced here) is, some things are known for sure. For instance, no one disputes the story filed by Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay in which he reported:
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, the al Qaeda "greeter" in Kuala Lumpur, was an Iraqi, who "was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer."
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer as a "greeter" or "facilitator" for Arabic-speaking visitors at the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In January 2000, he accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al-Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000.
There's no evidence that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir attended the meeting. Four days after it ended, he left Kuala Lumpur.
Several days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Qatar in possession of highly suspicious materials that appeared to link him with al-Qaida.
The Qataris inexplicably released him, and he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was arrested again. The Jordanians freed him under pressure from Iraq and Amnesty International, and he went to Baghdad.
Given that this piece gives voice to those in the intelligence community who do not believe in the Iraq-al Qaida connection, the revelation is interesting. But as Mr. Randal accuses me, this piece by Mr Landay only quotes those in the intelligence community who did not subscribe to the Iraq-al Qaida connection despite having this information.
And even though the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes is referred to as a "staunch administration defender" and a "conservative author" (instead of a reporter), Mr Hayes points out
This account is reason enough for the September 11 Commission to take a good look at Shakir. According to Landay, Shakir was "employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer" and later "accompanied two Sept. 11 hijackers from the airport to a hotel where the pair met with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, who masterminded al Qaida's strike on the USS Cole in October 2000." After his capture in Jordan the Iraqi regime exerted "pressure" and, upon his release, he fled to Baghdad. Landay notes that no major al Qaeda operative has implicated Shakir in the 9/11 attacks and that U.S. intelligence analysts are "highly skeptical" that he played a role.
Landay may be right. There may be an innocent explanation for Shakir's activities in Kuala Lumpur. We may see that explanation in the September 11 Commission's final report later this summer. But that report will be incomplete if it does not attempt to answer the question: "Who is Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?"
As we all know, the 9-11 Commission didn't even mention Shakir in their report except in a note. Stephen Hayes then wonders why.
Ahmed Hikmat Shakir is a shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.
When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman.
These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?
The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. And two of them--Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir--went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center, at least partly because of efforts made on their behalf by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Both men returned to Iraq--Yasin fled there in 1993 with the active assistance of the Iraqi government. For ten years in Iraq, Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing by the regime, support that ended only with the coalition intervention in March 2003.
Readers of The Weekly Standard may be familiar with the stories of Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Readers of the 9/11 Commission's final report are not. Those three individuals are nowhere mentioned in the 428 pages that comprise the body of the 9/11 Commission report. Their names do not appear among the 172 listed in Appendix B of the report, a table of individuals who are mentioned in the text. Two brief footnotes mention Shakir.
Why? Why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention Abdul Rahman Yasin, who admitted his role in the first World Trade Center attack, which killed 6 people, injured more than 1,000, and blew a hole seven stories deep in the North Tower? It's an odd omission, especially since the commission named no fewer than five of his accomplices.
Mr Smather's, too, dismisses Mr Hayes' reporting by saying
...as further proof, Frank cites his own blog, which also bases a lot of its "proofs" on opinions and analysis articles from conservative publications like the National Review and the Weekly Standard
I'm not sure why it is that when someone writes for the National Review or the Weekly Standard you all of a sudden cease to be a reporter but if you write for the New York Times you are. To believe that one is objective simply because one writes for a publication that does not announce its bias is, to me, self-deception.
The question is not what publication do you write for, but rather are you reporting that facts as you know them?
And one does not attack a premise by pointing to ones bias, one does so by undermining the facts that support the premise. To do otherwise engages us in the logical fallacy know as ad hominem (circumstantial); condemning the argument based on the company one keeps.
My original piece cited factual statements by a terrorism expert who claimed that al Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Iraq prior to the invasion.
It cited a consclusion by the 9-11 Commission acknowledging ties between Iraq and al Qaida.
And it cited a number of pieces by Stephen Hayes who did reporting on the Iraq-al Qaida connection.
All one has to do is refute these facts to undermine my argument.
Oh, and then there's this CNN report from 1999 (which would be "before Bush")
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.
Despite repeated demands from Washington, the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden after the August 7 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, demanding proof of his involvement in terrorist activities.
Of course if it's true as some intelligence analysts believe that al Qaida and Iraq would never cooperate, then this story surely must be a fabrication. But the fact is, things are not as clear cut as they seem. From the New Yorker:
The Defense Department had asked Shelton and Carney to reëxamine evidence collected by the C.I.A. about the relationship between terrorist networks and their state sponsors, including Iraq and Al Qaeda, and to re-analyze the data in the manner suggested by Rumsfeld's ballistic-missile-threat commission; that is, to build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse. "If you take thirty movie reviewers and show them the same movie," Feith told me, "they will understand its meaning in thirty different ways, and they will even understand the plot in different ways, and I'm not talking about watching 'Rashomon.' "
The presentation was made in a small conference room, and as many as twenty C.I.A. executives and analysts crowded in, along with the director of the D.I.A., Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, and Tenet himself. According to several people with knowledge of the meeting, Carney and Shelton told the C.I.A. officials that, based on their own reading of agency intelligence, it appeared likely that Saddam's relationship with Al Qaeda was serious and that it dated back to the terror group's early days in Sudan. Bin Laden had his headquarters in Khartoum in the early nineteen-nineties, before moving to Afghanistan, in 1996. "These people weren't hired to do alternative analysis," Feith claimed. "But once they read deeply into the material, which, by the way, was good C.I.A. material, they came up with some fresh connections and ideas and analysis." Feith went on, "When we fed this analysis back into the C.I.A., they were happy to receive it. Tenet understands, as Rumsfeld understands, that an extra set of eyes on intelligence material is a good thing."
Is there absolute proof that Iraq and al Qaida collaborated?
No.
But there's a whole lotta circumstancial evidence.
