Enemies of America the world over see hugely successful terrorist attacks on 9/11 and go, “We should think about trying some of that.” Saddam’s Iraq, being one such enemy, holds some meetings on the issue but doesn’t get too far in the way of planning, if for no other reason than these things take time. The meetings are leaked to Russian intelligence as, “Holy shit! They’re going to attack the USA!” but without any further details because there aren’t any.
So the big news is that Saddam would have wanted to attack the U.S. with the latest successful strategy, but nothing firm planned. Thanks a lot, Pooty, what would we do without you. :rolleyes:
The Bush administration could not bring this information out without the left starting the “Liar’s chorus” from Handels “Messiah”.
“Heeee’s a liar
He’s a liar
He’s a lair…”
Nothing that GWB or his administration says or does will ever be believed by the hard liners. That’s why he just goes about his business and doesn’t even try to satisty them. Because he knows he can’t. Ever.
I went through and checked the Russian source, and the translation seems accurate enough for me (though I may be a bit rusty).
It seems that this is the case:
The Russians approached Bush with this information before the Iraq war, in a backdoor diplomatic move. The information was about plots of Saddam, apparently rather vague, to attack the US. These had no connections with the 9/11 or any other (unspoken: Al Qaeda) attacks. Putin retains his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. It seems that he himself was unaware of the details of the information.
My analysis so far is that Putin is playing for a few things - power over a rogue part of his intel staff, and power with Bush, which has been waning. He desperately needs continued US investment and support, but at the same time, he needs to portray the NATO/EU encroachment as bad for Russia, so has to distance himself publicly.
It should be noted that Putin, while a psuedo-dictator, does not have a terribly strong hold on Russia.
I think the lesson of the Iraq war is that our intellegence services receive a lot of data, and that without the will to honestly analyse this data, one can “cherry pick” to make it support just about anything. For example, Hitler’s FBI file is full of reports of Hitler citings after 1945, thus one could honestly say that the US has received numerous reports that Hitler is alive and well in Argintina. In the Hitler case, the public has access to the overwelming amount of information that suggests Hitler is dead, and we can form or own analysis, but not in cases of recent intelligence where we’re forced to trust the judgement of those who have all the data. Similarily, I don’t doubt that Russian officials have received reports of everything under the sun, but we dont get to find out who told them. Notice Putin doesnt call them ‘creditable sources’ or anything of that nature, he just seems to be throwing a piece of data out as a sound bite.
The reason Im skeptical of this is that I think if the circumstances around which this intelligence was gathered gave it credibility, we would have heard about it by now. But not only have we not heard about this specific item, at no time in the lead up to the war can I remember any administration officials ever claiming that Saddam was actually planning terrorist attacks of his own against the U.S. Considering the support that this possibility would have raised for the war effort, both here and abroad, and the rather low level of skeptisicm the gov’t showed in vetting evidence that painted Iraq as a danger, I can’t imagine this would have been kept under a bushel
I assume that this is true.
It’s easy to believe that “Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing ‘terrorist acts’ on the United States and beyond its borders.” Seems entirely likely and possible that Russian intel was told this.
It’s also easy believe that “[t]his information was passed on to [their] American colleagues.”
Note though that Putin provides almost no description of the info’s reliability. The closest he comes to commenting on the reliability of the info is to point out that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam’s agents had been involved in any particular attack.
It’s hard to believe that this went uninvestigated and was left unanalyzed by either the Russians or the Americans.
The most has already been made of the info.
And lastly, and pos’bly most pertinently, any number of the attacks on CF in Iraq could be said to be the result of “the official services of the Saddam regime… preparing ‘terrorist acts’ on the United States… beyond its borders.”
Ditto plus ultra. Just as you note, we have lots of these guys in custody, lots of thier papers, etc. Now, just imagine for a moment that you are a loathesome slimebucket of an Iraqi intelligence operative. You have information that could corroborate the Bushivik’s claims, verifiable solid gold intelligence. Saddam is toast, he has zero potential for retribution.
On the other hand, you know for a fact that the Americans will give you a gazillion dollars, a “green card” for yourself and everybody in your family, unto the seventh generation, and a Starbucks franchise or a liquor store in Bakersfield for each and every one, and a lap dance from J. Lo for the information you posses.
Question: will the velocity with which you get to the phone exceed the speed of light?
It’s simple. Since Saddam’s regime is now toast, I can’t imagine what harm there would be in releasing the details of the plots. The administration certainly hasn’t been shy about publishing (now discredited) evidence about the WMD program.
Such a revelation would have a huge effect on public opinion. I’ve opposed the “damn fool war” from the start, but credible evidence that Saddam really was planning an attack against the U.S. would cause me to reassess my position.
(Whether I would actually flip into the pro-war camp would depend on knowing the details of the actual level of the threat. But I would think about it.)
But Putin coming forward at this late date and saying “he was gonna do it … i can’t tell you any details … but trust me … he was gonna do it” does not count as credible evidence.
02-09-2002 (I had to select all and copy the page to a word processor to see this text. It’s under the heading “Economics drives Russian diplomacy” at the bottom of the page.)
What if we launched an invasion of a country on false and knowingly trumped up charges, and then found out afterwards that said country was really planning something entirely unrelated, but still threatening. Is the invasion justified? I liken it to the old police analogy. If they just (or did, not sure how this works under the Patriot Act) randomly grab a person off the street, put him in jail for a month, and during that time find out that he was a drug dealer, is that admissable?
I don’t think that is what Putin is doing at all. I’m scanning everything I can find on Russian sites, but I just can’t find much discussion about this. On one site, it was placed underneath a story about Madonna, about halfway down the page. He made it very clear that his position on the war is unchanged, in the Russian speech, as well (somehow, that tidbit escaped some of the American reports).
Wishful thinking, from Saddam then, and the Bush administration now.
It is very likely that Saddam planned for it, but then again, there are AFAICR plans for the US to confront a future belligerent united Europe, millitary forces allways plan even for the unlikely. What counts in the end for me is the MEANS to do it, ever since WMD were found missing, the very idea of Iraq planning to attract America was, at best, a wish Saddam had in mind. We now know he was a toothless tiger in this regard. So, in conclusion, I put the Russian revelation as being obtained from the same sources that mislead the US into a foolish war.
As I said, it would depend on the revelations. In the case you described, no, I wouldn’t change my position on the war.
But say, for example, that Russian intelligence was good and the U.S. really was in imminent danger. Bush and crew have known about it all along (hence their righteous certitude), but for whatever reason haven’t been able to talk about it up until now. (Maybe the intel was passed on with the condition that it couldn’t be made public – why, I can’t imagine, but we’re exploring hypotheticals here.) And now Putin decides, for whatever reason, to go ahead and reveal it.
Okay … I’m willing to listen to new facts if they surface. But Putin hasn’t given us any new facts. And the Bush administration has been wrong about so much in this war that I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Basically I’m saying to the pro-war crowd: You want to convince me? Show me the money. But secret evidence isn’t good enough. Tell me what they were plotting, who was involved, and how many people it would have killed if it had worked. And if you can’t produce the goods, shut up about how this cryptic news blip now justifies the “damn fool war”.
Welcome to the SDMB, Mr. B. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis.
I am, of course, open to more definitive evidence about Saddam’s plans in this regard. But this is only a “smoking gun” if all you’ve ever seen are water pistols.
Putin now claims that Russian intelligence forwarded this “information” well over a year ago. Yet:
The U.S. never used this clear evidence that Hussein was planning an attack to justify our “pre-emptive” strike on Iraq, despite the fact that such information would have pretty much given Bush a legitimate reason to invade;
The U.S. never went back to Russia on the Security Council with the information and publicly asked “Why do you oppose the invasion when you provided our justification”;
Putin has only made a mention of this “fact” at a time when he has gone on a very public campaign to see Bush re-elected. As you already noted, “He is a Russian and Rooskies do things for devious reasons.”
When Putin provides the actual information and someone in the U.S. intelligence service provides evidence that the same information was both accurate and provided to us between September, 2001 and February, 2003, then we can consider that Putin’s claims might have some basis in fact. (Although we would then be faced with the question “Why was the Bush administration so incompetent that they repeatedly fed the Security Council transparent lies when they could have secured a supportive vote with genuine evidence of an actual threat?”.)
Given that Putin is relying on Bush to keep quiet about the suppression of Chechnya along with a number of economic deals that Bush has worked out, it seems far more probable that Putin simply fears the need to re-work such agreements with Kerry, and is simply working to elect Bush.
Well, since all we have at this point is Putin’s statement, we’re all engaging in rank speculation. So in that spirit, I’ll add my own:
First, if Putin told Bush about this before the war, it’s entirely possible that Bush couldn’t release the information. If the info came from Russian sources in Iraq, releasing the info could engander them. Also, Russia was officially opposed to the war, so there may have been a quid pro quo here - Putin may have offered the information on the condition that it could not be publically disclosed.
Also, it’s important to remember that Russia almost certainly had much better human intel inside Iraq. Russia was much more involved in the Russian economy, they had tons of deals going, and the KGB was not laboring under the same kinds of intelligence restrictions the CIA had.
This may also explain why Cheney and Bush have insisted on ‘terror links’ in Saddam’s Iraq, despite the paucity of public evidence.
Why disclose the information now? Well, it depends on why the information was witheld in the first place. If it was witheld to protect sources, perhaps those sources no longer need protection. Or perhaps it’s part of some new deal - maybe the Bush administration leaned on Putin or offered him something in return in exchange for the public disclosure.
Zagadka said:
Well, that assumes that the invasion WAS launched for the ‘wrong reason’. You guys against the war have long said that WMD was a mere pretext for some more nefarious purpose. Well, what if it was a pretext because the real reason couldn’t be disclosed? If another country says to you, “We have some information you need to hear, but we will not give it to you unless you agree not to disclose it”, then if you accept the info, you stand by your word or you’ll never get info from that country again.
In any event, this reinforces what I’ve been saying for months - there is information that is very relevant with regards to evaluating this war that we simply don’t have. Facts are still being discovered on the ground (like the missile engines and dual-use materials found in European scrapyards), and we’re still discovering that the U.S. had information about threats that we didn’t know they had.
It’s important for everyone to maintain an open mind - both for and against the war.
Putin does not claim he told Bush; he claims that the Russian intelligence service shared the information with U.S. services, so Bush is not part of the equation.
The “endangered sources” routine has a limited credibility when the agents are still there, but becomes irrelevant the minute the U.S. has occupied the country. The U.S. never “bothered” to release this information even after Bush declared that we had won. Given all the challenges to the war from moderates and some on the Right, this would have been a huge trump card to play. (Yet the administration could not figure out that it was a good idea to play it?)
I suppose one might write a scenario where we trade secrets for silence, but it seems spectacularly less than likely. What does Russia get by U.S. silence? Why not simply do then what Putin is doing now: share the info, then claim it is insufficient to justify war? Putin is breaking the silence and still opposing the war, so the agreement should be null and void. Why isn’t Condi Rice out trumpeting, “See! We couldn’t tell you before!”
Yeah, I know that it is all speculation, but this does not seem to be very plausible speculation.