President Bush continued to insist Monday that there was an operational link between former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida despite reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the commission that's investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no evidence that Saddam and Islamic terrorists collaborated to kill Americans.
(Jonathan Landay and William Douglas, Knight Ridder Newspapers, July 12, 2004) [Emphasis added]
THAT SENTENCE IS FALSE. It was the lead passage in a story about President Bush's speech Monday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee. Bush did not claim an "operational link" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He could not have "continued to insist" on such an "operational link" because he has never done so before. And, finally, neither the September 11 Commission nor the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that there was "no evidence that Saddam and Islamic terrorists collaborated to kill Americans."
Other than that, the sentence was accurate. The complete text of Bush's speech is here.
By Wednesday, Knight Ridder had posted a correction. "President Bush's comments about terrorism were incorrectly reported in that saying the president insisted there was an operational link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The president suggested that such a link existed, but didn't explicitly make that connection."
The correction is incorrect. The president never even "suggested that such a link"--the referent is an "operational link"--existed.
The sentence was hardly the only problem with the story, which ran under the headline "Bush Again Tries to Link Saddam, al Qaeda." Knight Ridder is the second
largest newspaper chain in the United States. Its stories run in major metropolitan daily newspapers such as the Miami Herald, the Charlotte Observer and the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to a company press release from May 5, 2004, Knight Ridder "publishes 31 daily newspapers in 28 U.S. markets, with a readership of 8.7 million daily and 12.6 million Sunday."
The authors continue:
In its report, the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed CIA analyses that found that while there had been contacts between al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence officials during the 1990s, "these contacts did not add up to an established relationship."
Again, not true. The report is misquoted. According to Conclusion 93 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report the "contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship." [emphasis added] How many terrorist groups have "established formal relationships" with their state sponsors? State sponsors often--but not always--prefer to keep their terrorist connections loose and informal so that they might avoid detection, deniability being a major goal of states that use terrorists to do their dirty work.
The Senate Intelligence Committee language is important for another reason: Documents from the Iraqi Intelligence service do suggest an "established relationship," just not "an established formal relationship." A report in the June 25, 2004, New York Times, was based on an internal Iraqi Intelligence document: When bin Laden left the Sudan in 1996, according to the Iraqi Intelligence document, Iraqi Intelligence began "seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of [bin Laden's] current location." The report also indicates that bin Laden "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative" and that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."
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