SSCI Leaks

Update: Jeff is correct. This is not the SSCI report, it’s a second report, sponsored by the Pentagon.

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network. The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. 

Which pretty much invalidates what I’ve said below. Thanks for straightening me out, Jeff. 

Boy, you guys sure like to talk about smutty governors, don’t you?

I’m still watching all the leaks coming out about the SSCI report–everyone with decent intelligence sources seems to have gotten a leak. I’m interested in the focus Warren Strobel gives to the story; he focuses very closely on the lack of any real ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

I wonder whether this is getting leaked now in another attempt to pre-empt Cheney’s attempts to game declassification.

You see, in one of the earlier reports on Iraq the SSCI did, Cheney’s office twice prevented information pertaining to Cheney’s claims about Mohammed Atta and Iraq from being declassified. While I don’t have the report in front of me (you’ll have to take my word, for now), it had to have been since 2006, because the Democrats put a big note next to the redaction saying something to the effect of, "Dick Cheney won’t let us declassify this even though it is not technically classified."

Given that, in the past, Cheney was particularly anxious to have his lies about Al Qaeda’s ties to Iraq be hidden, I wonder whether he isn’t already chumming up Kit Bond to make sure it happens again. Of course, SSCI will look even stupider if they don’t declassify this than they did when they offered the telecoms immunity, because the news that Cheney lied will have already been all over the news.

Or it would have been, if Eliot Spitzer could have just stayed away from the high priced call girls.