To begin with ...

This whole conversation began with a comment by John Quiggin reading as follows:

And, as all Fox viewers know, the links between Saddam and bin Laden were proved by the mountains of documents captured when Baghdad fell, confessions from leading Baath operatives and so on.

A couple of things creep in here. The first, which near as I can tell began with an article that I want to say was first published by either the AP or my former employer Knight-Ridder more or less claiming that supporters of the Bush administration are more or less living in a fantasy world because they think that Iraq was allied with al-Qaeda or that Iraq had WMDs prior to the war. Seeing how I was one of the people who fits into the former of those two categories (though I didn't reach my full opinion on WMDs until after the Duelfer report was published), I find the whole idea of labeling people who hold to certain opinions on these kind of issues of national security as kooks as being extremely condescending and possibly even dangerous given that if you had walked into the CIA back in 2002 and told them that Iraq definitively didn't have any WMDs they would have laughed you right out of town. Treating opposing views as though they are illegitimate, after all, is one of the main criticisms that anti-war types have made of supporters of the war: that their views are regarded as illegitimate simply because they dare to question Bush's senseless warmongering.

Anyways, after the election someone, I wanna say that it was Eric Alterman, formulated for the first time in print that all of Bush's supporters were living in a fantasy world concocted by Fox News, talk radio, et al, whereas Kerry's supporters formed the "reality-based community." This idea caught a lot of traction within online Democratic circles, many of whom quickly came to the conclusion that though they were beaten, it was only because Satan Bush or perhaps Rove was able to fool all of those dumb Huns out in the Midwest (myself, one assumes, included) into believing his lies in order to get him reelected. Intelligence, not legitimate opposing views, was what determined the election. I'll let you derive what you like from the fact that these same people appear to be taking on an increasing amount of (shrill) intellectual satisfaction at their own defeat.

Of course, there's the small problem that the self-styled "reality-based" community also has more than a few loose screws in its collection. How many Kerry voters, one wonders, might have believed the following:

• That Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a loyal US client throughout the 1980s up until the Gulf War.

• That Iraq under Saddam Hussein (i.e. Baathist-controlled) had not a whiff of Islamism inside of it and that those elements that did exist were quickly suppressed by the state.

• That Iraq under Saddam Hussein has never supported any Islamist groups whatsoever.

If you took those statements part and parcel to members of the "reality-based" community, I'd wager you'd find more than a few of them agreeing with such sentiments. Unfortunately, they are all inaccurate: Iraq was a Soviet client all through the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was quite the Islamist following the first Gulf War and even put al-Qaeda clerics on Iraqi state TV, and he has a track record of sponsoring both Hamas and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. So my point to all the folks out there in the "reality-based" community is that even if you believe that what I'm about to say is completely inaccurate, go look in the mirror before you start complaining that those of who hold to those opinions you regard as being inaccurate are to a man irrational and utterly beyond the pale of legitimate discussion.

Now as for Abhishiktananda, who for the record engaged in none of the practices I mentioned above, lemme take the opportunity to address this point made in reply to AMac:

Anyway, I checked out the Dan Darling information, and quite frankly, there is a lot of conjecture in there.

That's quite true. A lot of it is analysis and deduction and until I get the necessary security clearance and access to all the Iraqi documents they have down in Qatar, it's going to stay that way. The same, as I hope to demonstrate, is also true of many of the critics of such a connection.

I found little to suggest that the criticisms of the claims of a link were invalid.

I have tried to address criticisms where and when they comes up, particularly on the nature of Abu Musab Zarqawi's ties to bin Laden. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong, but I do try as best as possible to answer the various arguments that have been brought up in certain quarters to try and discredit claims concerning the nature of such a link.

As I tried to convey, I'm more concerned with the cavalier manner in which many in the "Link" crowd tend to dismiss all criticism of the claim about Iraq sponsoring terrorism.

I think you mean Iraq sponsoring al-Qaeda, as it's pretty much agreed upon that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. Similarly, most people, the sainted 9/11 commission included, don't deny that there were if nothing else contacts and links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The issue is the nature of such contacts, which is where the majority of the debate in policy circles lies.

That is to say, it might be debatable, but it sure isn't rock solid. More importantly, given the above, it is woefully inadequate as grounds for war, especially considering that terrorism is slippery enough to not need state sponsorship, and that toppling allegedly compliant regimes does nothing to guarantee a terror-free environment. It seemed and seems so dubious.

A couple of points here, not the least of which being that you are almost never going to get "juridical" standards of proof with intelligence the way you might when it comes to say, a court of law. And if you want a case in which the US intelligence community thought they did have juridical proof with respect to war, look no further than the issue of Iraq's WMDs. As far as what fits the necessary criteria to justify war, that is a decision for the policy-makers to make and I think is best done by a case-by-case basis. Would you consider intercepted communications between Iraqi regime figures talking about terrorist connections to be "clear-cut," for example? Because that's exactly what happened on the whole issue of WMDs.

Onto the critics ...

I really hoped that the war in Iraq could have stayed outside these kinds of tribal partisan boundaries when they first came up, but I think that it's worth saying given that criticisms such as this are bound to come up:

Much of the Stephen Hayes stuff, along with the (*gasp*) Washington Times "proof" has been trenchantly assailed by many sources whose arguments seem tighter than those of the Hayes-types slithering around the public discourse.

Actually, I don't believe that the Washington Times article that Yehudit linked to was actually refuted in any of the sources that you linked to. I certainly hope that it wasn't, since the Times is more or less summarizing the Butler report that served as the British inquiry into the UK's pre-war intelligence on Iraq. If any of the Butler report's claims concerning Iraq/al-Qaeda ties have been definitively rebutted, I'd honestly like to see them.

Moreover, many of the links provided with the intention of "rebutting" Hayes leave much to be desired.

Spinsanity

Beginning with the point that Bryan Keefer is not looking into the accuracy of the information contained in the memo so much as he is how it was being used rhetorically by pundits, let me take note of the following:

A number of pundits have seized on the memo to suggest that, as Hayes puts it, "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans." Yet these sweeping conclusions vastly overstate the implications of the memo as reported in Hayes's article.

Not truly, if the information contained in the memo is accurate. Take for example:

26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.

27. According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia.

31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel.

37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi’s procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.

Now as I said, if all that is true (which one can assume in good faith Hayes believes, otherwise he and the Standard wouldn't have printed it), it makes his statement quite sensible under the circumstances. The fact that some of the evidence is indirect or involves meetings doesn't change the fact that those entries that don't, if true, make a great deal of sense.

Moreover, there are questions about the reliability of the information contained in the memo. The Defense Department released a statement which describes "[t]he items listed in the [memo]" as "either raw reports or products of the CIA, the National Security Agency or, in one case, the Defense Intelligence Agency," and says that the memo "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions." (According to reports, the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 also indicated that those contacts had not precipitated any lasting relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.)

Concerning the Washington Post article linked, it is actually Spinsanity that is engaging in a little bit of spin here by citing the sources in the Post article as genuine. Compare the following claims in the Post to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC) report on US pre-war intelligence:

"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."

There is a difference, however, between a difference of opinion and what is the consensus of the US intelligence community. According to the SSIC report, Powell's speech at the UN (which, truth be told, went a lot further than anything Bush had ever said in public prior to that point about ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda) was cleared by the CIA and did not differ in any substantial way from how the relevant information had previously been characterized.

Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.

Nor did Powell's, which was cleared by the CIA and did not differ in any substantial way from how the relevant information had previously been characterized.

The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps.

That was at least the opinion of a lot of people in (or, I should say, formerly in) the CIA analysis directorate, who decided to spare Bush the trouble by leaking any and all opposing views to a variety of friendly press outlets.

Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein.

The SSIC report also says that Saddam was not adverse to augmenting al-Qaeda's capabilities, even to the point of giving them expertise in unconventional weaponry.

While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said.

Except, per the SSIC report and other media reporting, about the meetings with Farouk Hijazi in Afghanistan during the late 1990s.

The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.

That canard has been floating around for quite awhile now. It also conflicts with the definitive statements made concerning Zarqawi in both the SSIC and the UK Butler report.

As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed.

Except for the fact that it was also in Powell's speech, which per the SSIC report was cleared by the CIA and did not differ in any substantial way from how the relevant information had previously been characterized.

"We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives.

The point being? He said as much in his 2003 State of the Union address!

Now then, returning to Spinsanity, Hayes also spends quite some time in his book dealing with the various attempts by Isikoff and Hosenball to "debunk" the Feith memo in the first chapter of The Connection. The short answer is that it's quite clear that neither they nor their sources never actually saw the memo in question or were familiar with its contents.

I do, however, agree with the following:

n such a heated debate, commentators must note caveats about such information and fairly represent it to the public rather than making sweeping claims that distort the facts.

Unless, of course, you're an anonymous intelligence official, in which case you can pretty much say any damned thing you want without fear of reprisal.

California Yankee?

Near as I can tell, this doesn't refute much of anything - it's simply an index of posts on the subject of the Feith memo and discussion therein.

Newsweek

You can read my own critique of this particular article here as well as a leak to Hayes's own rebuttal of their information. Bottom line - the guys at Newsweek were told things by people who clearly weren't familiar with either the memo or its contents and just dismissed the whole thing as rubbish. They also got burned for it.

Media Matters

For the record, I normally consider Media Matters for America (MMA) to be essentially a propaganda (in the sense of one-sided, not in the sense of selling falsehoods, though it seems to do a good deal of that too) factory for those in search of embarrassing quotes by and cheap shots at right-leaning figures. The profile of Stephen Hayes, whom I know, has done remarkably little to change that opinion.

Despite vigorous critiques that have undermined the credibility of Hayes's contention, conservative pundits have embraced Hayes and his book in order to, in the words of Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Daniel A. Benjamin, "shore up the rickety argument that Baathist Iraq had posed a real national security threat to the United States."

Maybe they thought his arguments held more water than those of his critics. One can have disagreement over such matters, though that's probably some form of thoughtcrime to Media Matters.

Questions surrounding Hayes's journalistic credibility have been documented by Media Matters for America. His book, which largely relies on the leaking of a discredited Defense Department intelligence memo, was released by the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins and has been vigorously promoted by Hayes in the pages of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard.

Actually, The Connection relies on a lot more than just the Feith memo, which we never actually get to read in full in the book. And here again, to argue that the entire memo was discredited would be very difficult for MMA to prove given that we don't know the full extent of what is actually in it ...

On February 17, the British daily newspaper The Guardian published a report of Murdoch's support for the Iraq war and the resulting bias in Murdoch-owned media outlets.

The Guardian, of course, being the crown jewel of all that is good and holy in the journalistic pantheon. That being said, MMA still hasn't discredited Hayes or his claims yet, it's simply using the genetic argument fallacy that Murdoch = evil, the same kind of fallacy that many liberals often criticize Bush for applying to Saddam Hussein.

In addition, the Murdoch-owned New York Post on June 27 gave Hayes's book a glowing review. The review was written by Kenneth R. Timmerman, a senior writer for the conservative Washington Times' sister publication, Insight on the News; in April, Media Matters for America documented Timmerman's assertion in Insight on the News that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq but that the media has chosen to let the story go unreported.

I suspect that the reason Timmerman wrote such a glowing review was because he agreed with the contents of The Connection, not because of any kind of conspiracy among conservative news outlets. Then again, just because there's no proof seems to mean that it's a well-planned conspiracy rather than an absence of one to the good folks at MMA. As for Timmerman's article in Insight or his beliefs, erroneous or otherwise, concerning Iraqi WMDs, I don't see how this has any real bearing on Hayes or the validity of his claims. More genetic argumentation here, just the kind I suspect that MMA would be quite angry to seen thrown back at someone of a center-left persuasion.

A June 2 Washington Post review by professor and former FBI counterterrorism analyst Matthew A. Levitt took a different tack: "A constellation of suggestions, however, still is not a convincing argument. 'The Connection' raises several important questions, but it left me unconvinced."

Levitt's review, IIRC, also dealt with the fact that Hayes had failed to make a convincing argument even given the suggestions he raises. This view, which seem to be more or less in line with Abhishiktananda's own, is directly counter to that of MMA. So just who should we be listening to here as far as the validity of the material contained in the Feith memo?

Skipping past the mention of Shakir as a colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen ...

Coincidentally, a June 21 article by Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder Newspapers and a June 22 article by Washington Post staff writers Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen have called into question this very claim. The first chapter of Hayes's book, as well as an entire Weekly Standard article by Hayes that is adapted from his book, tells the story of how Christopher Carney, deputy to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, discovered that the name (Ahmed Hikmat Shakir) of an airport greeter for Al Qaeda in Malaysia is the same as that of one of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen personal militia officers. Hayes wrote, "The Shakir story is perhaps the government's strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11." But Landay, as well as Pincus and Eggen, reported that, according to a senior administration official, the story was most likely the result of "confusion over names."

Actually, the CIA also seems to have investigated that possibility as well according to the SSIC report. There is still a lot that remains unknown with respect to Mr. Shakir, whether or not he was a member of the Saddam Fedayeen. I also think that there is a somewhat chimerical strategy on behalf of these intelligence officials to know full well that the al-Qaeda Shakir does not = Saddam Fedayeen Shakir but to withhold that information (especially given how quick they were about "rebutting" other pieces of Hayes's work in the form of media leaks) until after The Connection is published and then hold up the straw man argument that Shakir not being Saddam Fedayeen refutes any suggestion of Iraqi ties to the man.

The Department of Defense subsequently issued a press release downplaying the memo's significance and undermining the conclusion reached by Hayes: "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions."

Most intelligence reporting isn't analysis, though the Feith memo apparently contains some according to the published excerpts. And as far as drawing any conclusions from the annex is concerned, Hayes's opinion was that the general public could read the annex, read his conclusion, and then decide their own. It seems that MMA already has ...

As for Pat Lang:

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], said yesterday that the Standard article "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

Probably because the ideological friction that people like Lang frequently cite as a rationale for why no such relationship could have possibly occurred.

Another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather "data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."

Okay, can you identify which ones aren't and which ones are for those of us without security clearance?

Having already dealt with that particular Isikoff/Hosenball article:

n December 2003, Daniel A. Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, criticized the so-called "Feith memo" in Slate.com: "[I]n any serious intelligence review, much of the material presented would quickly be discarded."

Again, if Mr. Benjamin could be so kind as to identify which parts, we could end this charade and move on ...

The fact that Hayes's work failed to "[break] new ground" did not stop CNN host Wolf Blitzer on June 3, before Hayes appeared as a guest on his CNN show Wolf Blitzer Reports, from announcing that Hayes had "[n]ew information ... about an alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." Though Blitzer added, "Doubts remain [about the connection]" in the teaser for the interview, Blitzer failed to question Hayes about critiques of the Feith memo or Hayes's Weekly Standard article.

My guess would be that he wanted to lay Hayes's case out before he assumed the role of devil's advocate, as is done with most authors. I notice that nobody has yet to bother to ask Dick Clarke about al-Shifa even as he assumed his role as a media darling and that what criticism of Joe Wilson that took place was always extremely low-key. MMA probably figures that those were good things, though ...

Days earlier, on the May 30 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert, Hayes appeared as a guest on Russert's panel. When questioning Hayes about his book, Russert also failed to mention any criticism of Hayes's work.

As can be said of the other folks I just mentioned.

Hayes also appeared to discuss his book on the Murdoch-owned FOX News Channel program The O'Reilly Factor on June 2; on CNN's American Morning on June 10; on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on June 16; on NPR's Talk of the Nation on June 17; as well as on CNBC's Capital Report, on FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, and on the National Rifle Association's NRA News radio show on June 18.

I know, he's being allowed to appear on TV even though his opinion clashes with that of MMA. It's scary isn't it?

Hayes's appearances continued unchallenged, despite the questions surrounding his assertions and despite, perhaps more notably, the release on June 16 of the 9-11 Commission's "Staff Statement 15PDF," finding that there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Media Matters for America has documented other distortions of the commission statement here and here.

I have my own problems with the staff statement in a whole host of areas entirely unrelated to Iraq. If their claims about the al-Qaeda/Liberia stuff being bunk is also true, it also rather discredits the UN tribunal that is currently trying to pry Taylor's sorry butt out of Nigeria. Of course, the 9/11 commission has accorded ex cathedra power by the press for reasons I don't entirely understand. The same commission's final report, interestingly enough, also says that there are indications that Iraq was supporting Ansar al-Islam.

Many conservative commentators and pundits have unconditionally embraced Hayes's work even after the release of the 9-11 Commission findings. On the June 27 edition of FOX Broadcasting Company's FOX News Sunday, guest host Brit Hume called Hayes, "who writes for The Weekly Standard, a political journal owned by the parent company of this network", an "authority" on the subject of the possible connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Probably because he's done more research on it from a supportive perspective than 90% of the journalistic community and as a writer for the Standard is in a good position to get in touch with people at both the Pentagon and the White House.

On the June 20 edition of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown, conservative author and columnist Christopher Hitchens plugged Hayes's book: "I don't think anyone who hasn't read this or doesn't read it can be taken seriously if they say there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This is the book to beat if you fall for that propaganda." Hitchens has also promoted Hayes's book and its claim of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in non-media venues. On June 8, American Prospect writing fellow Matthew Yglesias wrote about a publicity event for Hayes's book that was held at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, where Hitchens sought to bolster Hayes's contention of a Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda connection.

I was at that event (as was Robi), which was an AEI event with a full panel, which included two hostile witnesses, and that isn't what happened. Hitchens wasn't even on the panel - he simply asked a question for the purpose of pointing out that whether Zarqawi received leg or nasal surgery while in Baghdad was irrelevant to the point about what he was doing there.

And in a June 16 transcript of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, titled "Believe Hayes, Not 9/11 Commission," Limbaugh promoted Hayes's book and his contention of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Limbaugh also featured Hayes's book on his online "Limbaugh Library."

Newspapers and columnists, too, have pointed to Hayes's work as a source for bolstering the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection argument. A June 17 New York Post editorial noted, "[A]s Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard, the conventional wisdom in Washington long before George W. Bush took office was that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in terrorism."

A June 18 Washington Times editorial, seeking to rebut claims that no connection existed, also added, "In his new book, 'The Connection,' Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard details a series of ties between Saddam and al Qaeda dating back nearly a decade."

And in a June 23 United Press International (UPI) column, UPI national political analyst Peter Roff, writing in support of the contention that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were connected, noted, "Journalist Stephen Hayes, writing in The Weekly Standard, has documented several more instances of contact and cooperation that should be enough to close the case."

It sounds distinctly as though all these individuals disagreed with the findings of the 9/11 Commission and didn't regard them as gospel. Heretics to a man, no doubt ...

Since the June 16 release of the 9-11 Commission Staff Statement No. 15PDF, The Weekly Standard has published no fewer than six articles by Hayes challenging the commission's findings.

Is this a crime? Should he not be allowed to do so, or be banned from major media outlets because he does so? If that's the case, then maybe MMA wants to extend the same standard to all those who disagree with the findings of the SSIC report that there was no intelligence pressure whatsoever with respect to the administration's interactions with the intelligence community during the run-up to war. Any takers on that one?

Editor and Publisher

Concerning the criticisms leveled in this piece, my best advice would be to read the first chapter of Hayes's book, as he deals with the issue of the DoD press release quite adequately. Like it or not, it was more or less a classic Washington "non-denial," in contrast to the very real denials of many of the views advanced in these articles contained in the SSIC report.

And on that ...

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am now on hiatus shortly to deal with pressing academic and financial issues do not know when I will be able to resume blogging. But before I do that, let me say that given how much time and effort I've spent on Iran that I don't think it's right to leave without pointing you to this piece that does an exceptional job as far as outlining likely US policy towards Iran in the immediate future. And with that I depart for now, wishing all of my readers, colleagues, and in particular Joe a very fond farewell. I promise to return if circumstances permit, but for now everything is rather fluid and I have to take each day as it comes. I will still try to answer e-mail as often as possible.