Just How Much Digging Did Media Do?

Yesterday, I wondered just how much digging did the Senate committee do in its research and publication of a report that the media claimed found no links between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Today, I wonder just how much did the media read of that same report. Ed Morrissey has gone through a searchable pdf of the report and found that the media missed quite a bit. Like the fact that Saddam Hussein retained the ability to produce biological weapons, and while large scale production ceased after 1996, the ability to ramp up production was retained.

Saddam also refused to accept limitations on missile ranges.

Postwar findings of the ISG confirm the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Iraq developed the Al Samud II and Al Fat’h (formerly Ababil- 100) missiles with procurements prohibited by UN sanctions, or subject to UN verification, and the missile ranges exceeded 150&m, in violation of UN prohibitions. The ISG found numerous instances where Iraq disregarded UN prohibitions and sought to improve its missile capabilities. The ISG found that Saddam did not consider ballistic missiles to be WMD and he never accepted the missile range restrictions imposed by the UN, although in late February 2003, he ultimately acquiesced to UN demands that the Al Samud II inventory be destroyed. Additionally, flight test data recovered by the ISG confirm that both the Al Samud II and the Al Fat’h had ranges in excess of 150~km. These findings support the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Iraq was developing and testing SRBMs which were capable of flying beyond the UN-administered 150~km range limit.

AJ Strata also takes the media to task for their reading comprehension skills. The report states that there was no way to definitively ascertain the terrorist links and that it did not have the capability to investigate the situation in post-war Iraq. Big Lizards further notes the careful parsing of AP articles on the report and makes the following observation that can be easily distilled to the enemy of my enemy is my friend:

I am utterly persuaded that Saddam Hussein saw al-Qaeda, and especially Musab Zarqawi up in Ansar al-Islam, as a "threat" to his regime. But that does not mean Hussein made any attempt to remove Zarqawi, nor that he did not harbor Zarqawi, nor even that he did not have an operational relationship with Zarqawi.

For heaven's sake, many Americans in the 1940s saw Communism as a threat to the United States (though the president did not)... but that did not stop FDR, with the support of the entire political establishment, from allying with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. There is an old proverb: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Thus, the central dichotomy of the AP story is a canard: there is no inherent conflict between fearing an enemy and allying with that same enemy.

Just because some intel revealed that Saddam thought al Qaeda as a rival or potential enemy doesn't mean that they didn't work together at both the micro or macro levels of politics. It's not as though Democrats don't work with Republicans in Congress even though they're rivals. It's not as though FDR and Churchill worked with Stalin despite their knowing that Stalin had earlier alligned himself with Hitler. It's not as though that we repeatedly see the US alligning itself with shady regimes, including Saddam's Iraq in the early 1990s because of who else was in the neighborhood (Iran).

The report was a political document, and the media picked up only those bits that satisfy the political edge, not those inconvenient bits that show the US was right to be concerned about Iraq's ongoing violations of UN resolutions, the 1991 cease fire agreement, and support of terrorism.