Military finds no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda

ABC News reports:

ABC News has obtained a comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism. The study, which is due to be released Wednesday, is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

The headline: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."
whj
Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.
[Highlighting mine - editor WTF-o]

Compare this to the statement from Doug Feith (reported by Ricks and DeYoung of the Washington Post) defending his belief that the peremptory invasion of Iraq was the correct decision

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was "politicizing" intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

Doug Feith is clearly one of the conservative "true-believers" who will resist acknowledgment of the truth even when it is shown by overpowering evidence. Feith is representative of the decision-makers in the Bush administration who initiated the Iraq war and occupation, demonstrating their mindset.

Consider this in support of my earlier speculation about why the Bush Administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq from day one of Bush's inauguration and why it is realistic to believe that they would consider any actions they took, no matter how despicable, to be justified in invading Iraq. They simply don't let facts interfere with what they believe.

With such an attitude, it is no surprise that they have great disdain for the CIA and the Intelligence Community and why Doug Feith set up his own Intelligence evaluation unit inside his Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon, from which Feith's own warped views of what raw Intelligence reports meant were "stovepiped" (so that they could not be contradicted by others with better judgment and more facts) to the Office of Vice President Cheney. Dick Cheney, also a committed conservative true-believer, had a similar disdain for the CIA and the Intelligence Community, for the same set of reasons. They kept contradicting his strongly-held but inaccurate conservative-dogma-based beliefs.

Doug Feith clearly wanted to get out ahead of his critics and present his side of the arguments before they did. Unfortunately, real research conducted by the military debunks him at every step. General Tommy Franks was correct. Doug Feith really is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth. This new military report - not something from Feith's "enemies" in the CIA - demonstrates that conclusively.

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Addendum March 13, 2008 4:27 PM
The report that the Bush administration decided at the last minute yesterday was too explosive to release can be found in .pdf form here on the ABC News site.