Robert Novak at Town Hall calls the Zarqawi story an “urban legend,” and says his source at the CIA agrees.
One CIA source puts this aborted Zarqawi raid in the same category as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11,” which spreads such false information as George W. Bush’s conspiring to get Osama bin Laden’s relatives out of the U.S. after the terrorist attacks.
Note that the question I asked yesterday about NBC’s Pentagon officials applies equally to Novak’s CIA source: how do they know? If the decision not to attack was made by the NSC, then there’s a pretty small number of people who can credibly claim to know why it was made. The CIA source might be telling the truth as far as he or she knows, but not be in a position to know very well. In any event, I’d love to hear Novak’s CIA source’s account of why the attack plans were rejected.
One item from the column I hadn’t seen before:
Sen. Clinton on the next day, March 4, called the NBC report “troubling” and asked Gen. John Abizaid about it. The Central Command commander in chief replied, “I would be very surprised to find out that we had a precise location on Zarqawi.” Unsatisified, the senator asked for “further investigation.”
On March 9, Hillary Clinton asked CIA Director George Tenet about the story. Tenet: “I don’t know that Zarqawi was up there at the time, Senator. And I don’t know that the report accurately reflects the give-and-take of the decision-making at the time.” In CIA-speak, that was a “no.”
And, finslly, someone asks the NBC reporter for some follow-up.
Jim Miklaszewski told me he stands by his story, and pointed to House Armed Services Committee hearings April 21. Congressman Snyder brought the NBC story up to retired Gen. John Keane, and asked why the attack was rejected. “No, I can’t help you,” the former Army acting chief of staff replied. “We were looking at it as early as the Fourth of July weekend before we commenced activities against Iraq.”
I’m going to check out the Congressional transcripts Novak quotes to see what else is there.
By the way, one of my initial questions has now been answered. Has there ever been an official denial? Yes, there has.
The character of that official denial seems to be: unless we had 100% certainty that Zarqawi himself was in the camp at any given moment, the failure to attack is not an oddity requiring explanation. It’s been pointed out to me (by a Republican) that this is an odd standard for administration officials to hold themselves to in any event, and that in that sense it’s oddly like the claim “If we had known that terrorists were going to hijack airplanes on September 11 and fly them into buildings, we would have acted.” In wartime, one rarely has perfect information; that neither excuses nor explains inaction.
But both Zarqawi himself and the Ansar al-Islam camp were identified as items in the casus belli. As best as we knew at the time there were ricin prouction facilities and terrorist training facilities at the camp, and the fact that this was so was relevant to the case for war. So simply saying “We didn’t know for sure when he was in the camp” isn’t responsive to the charge that an attack that would clearly have been more than justified as part of the war on terrorism was vetoed in order to preserve a casus belli against Iraq (though it is responsive to the charge that, by letting Zarqawi himself live, the administration became responsible for all his subsequent crimes).
See also David Meyer.
More later today…
Update:
I’m trying very hard to be careful and thorough, and to present new information and new claims as they become available. Apparently I’m not quite succeeding at striking the necessary balance of tone, so let me be explicit. As best as I can judge the available evidence, including the various public statements as well as the various anonymous claims– it seems likely to me that the decision not to attack the Ansar al-Islam camp many months earlier was made fo rreasons that were primarily political rather than primarily logistical or legal. Given what Powell and Bush were saying about the camp and Zarqawi at the time, and what we now know western intelligence agencies knew about them at the time– that is, even without the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of the blood on Zarqawi’s hands since then– it seems to me that there was an extremely powerful case for attacking the camp, especially if we had even moderately good reason to think Zarqawi himself was present in it.
I’m not sure that we yet have (even anonymously) any statements about why the NSC vetoed the attacks by anyone who was in a position to know. And the on-the-record statements by those who were in a position to know have been maddeningly non-committal on every point except that we never knew, with 100% certainty, that Zarqwai was in the camp at any given moment. They have left plenty of room to think that the attacks were vetoed at least in part to preserve a casus belli or to facilitate negotiations on the Iraq war resolution in the Security Council; and they have left plenty of room to think that there were well-developed and credible plans for taking out the camp whose only flaw was that they were not guaranteed to kill or capture Zarqawi. I think we have good reason to think that there is mystification, at best, in the Pentagon about why the attacks were vetoed, and a sense both there and in the Intelligence Committee that no persuasive logistical reason was ever given for not attacking. Neither Novak nor his source nor the public records he quotes provide any such reason. That’s not inherently surprising; even a year after the fact there can be good reason to keep logistical and intelligence details secret from the public. The same doesn’t apply to the Pentagon or the Intelligence Committee.
I don’t myself have any sources. But I’ve checked with a couple of people who do; I wanted to get a sense of whether I was wasting (quite a lot of) my time and my readers’ time on a ghost of a story. What I’ve heard back leads me to keep digging. I won’t waste readers’ time or credulity by talking about what I’ve heard at two degrees of separation; it’s enough to persuade me of a couple things, but I fully recognize that it doesn’t count as sourced reporting.
Anyway, I intend to continue quoting what I can find about the Zarqawi/ Ansar story, and especially to quoting denials, in part because I started this theme off three days ago by talking about the absence of denials and in part because I really do mean to let readers know what I know about this story. But my quoting a denial does not mean that I think the denial is decisive, definitive, or credible. If I read something that really convinces me the charges are untrue, I’ll be entirely unambiguous about that.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to quote and link to the material that’s entering into my sense of the balance of probabilities, while freely, unhappily, acknowledging that my current sense is that Miklaszewski and NBC are somewhere closer to the truth than Novak is.
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