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Sept. 15, 2006 Before I get into my commentary on Dr. Mick’s pronouncements, I want to outline three separate chains of events that provide the background. I’ll call them Items 1, 2 and 3, just to keep them separate and straight: ITEM 1 The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a report issued September 8, 2006, pronounced false the oft-repeated assertions that there was an operational link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. One of the more interesting items from the report concerns George Tenet’s admission that he was pressured by the White House to support the administration’s case for the invasion of Iraq : “Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration's case for war despite his own agents' doubts about the intelligence it was based on.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060909/ap_on_go_co/iraq_report_43ç If my memory serves me correctly, and I apologize otherwise, at some time in early summer of 2003, George Tenet said that he had sent a memo to the White House about the falsity of the WMD claims. Subsequently, George W. Bush denied that he had personally seen the memo, and Tenet accepted the blame for not making Bush personally aware. In such a circumstance, one would naturally suspect that pressure was applied behind the scenes. Now comes the admission that there indeed was pressure on this other count, that of the supposed Osama-Saddam link. So it sounds as if Bush had not been so much misled by independently researched, but erroneous, intelligence, as it does that he demanded tailor-made skewed information to justify a preconceived plan. So anyone who cites the unreliability of the CIA’s intelligence as an excuse for Bush’s misbegotten invasion ought to realize that if the information was false, it was probably Bush himself who falsified it. ITEM 2 Another matter that annoyed me for a long time was Richard Cheney’s constant harping on the Prague Connection, that is, the supposed meeting between Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi official in Prague , in the Czech Republic , in 2001. Though I personally could not know whether such a meeting did or did not take place, it seemed self-evident to me that Cheney’s puling was a mere attempt to clutch at any little scrap of evidence, however tenuous and doubtful. Finally, though, Cheney had to admit, in a very roundabout way, that he had been dead wrong: “Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a proponent of the theory that Atta had met al-Ani in Prague , acknowledged in an interview on March 29, 2006: ‘We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague , Czechoslovakia . And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down now at this stage, that that meeting ever took place.’” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atta_in_Prague#Cheney.27s_position_changes So I would be hesitant to rely on the utterances of the Vice President. The Prague Connection is but one of several allegations that got “pretty well knocked down”. ITEM 3 The third item I wish to bring up is merely a repetition of one of the strands of my argument in Brookswatch, Part I. It concerns the pronouncements of one Laurie Mylroie, an ardent propagandist on behalf of the Bush adminstration who continually argued for the existence of an Osama-Saddam link, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and now clearly in contradiction of the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee cited above, in Item 1: "Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence[the U.S.] bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it." http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle11162005.html CONCLUSION In response to my article, “Brookswatch, Part 1” , Dr. Mick has posted the following “rebuttal”: “1) I would rank the trustworthiness of Bolton, Mylroie, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, and Bush a great deal higher than that of Wikipedia, Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Intelligence, Joe Wilson, Clinton, or the CIA. That's just based on a reasonable observation of error rates and recent clear evidence. If the CIA is reliable to Mr. Keyes, then would he agree that there were WMD in Iraq before the war? The CIA is rather clearly involved in anti-Bush operations and disinformation campaigns. If Joe Wilson claimed Cheney and Rove "outed" his wife, how is it that Armitage was the culprit and that his wife was not covert and thus couldn't be outed? Clinton is a known pathological liar, not debatable. Lost his law license and is banned from presenting cases before the US Supreme Court. And that Mr. Keyes trusts Iraqi Intelligence and Saddam Hussein over Americans may just be telling. But don't tell anyone. 2) I'm an American and libertarian. Party loyalty plays no part in a diligent search for the truth. Just as taking a poll of scientists doesn't prove there is man-made global warming, either. The truth is the truth. 3) Considering someone a conspiracy theorist doesn't make them one. There is considerable factual evidence behind Mylroie's conclusions. Launching ad hominem attacks is a sign of something, folks. I am reminded of the old legal advice: If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. In neither is on your side, pound the table. I would add, "while you are pounding the table, call the adversary names." 5) I wonder what Sandy Berger had stuffed in his underwear and socks? Will it ever come to light? Perhaps "Playgirl" Magazine could entice him to drop his drawers. Who ordered him to steal documents from the National Archives and why? Could it have something to do with the attempt to force ABC to modify their 9/11 dramatization? Could it have anything to do with deliberate refusals to pursue terrorists or gather intelligence? Just why did Jamie Gorelick wish to keep the intelligence and criminal investigations separated? And why was Gorelick, one of the foxes in the henhouse, on the 9/11 Commission in the first place? She had much to hide, and I suspect she was still charged with hiding it. We report, you decide. Events will unfold. In Dr. Mick’s first paragraph he cites Bush, Cheney and Mylroie as reliable witnesses, though the Senate’s findings show them all to have uttered false statements. My article had nothing to do with Joseph Wilson. Dr. Mick is just flailing about angrily and lashing out fatuously. I certainly did not say that I considered Saddam Hussein and Iraqi intelligence reliable. The whimsical doctor makes all kinds of wild, silly allegations, just so we won’t have to admit he was wrong. Will he now say that he trusts Mylroie more than the Senate Intelligence Committee? What’s this nonsense about global warming in the doctor’s second paragraph? I didn’t say a word about global warning. What does that have to do with Iraq ? If Dr. Mick is not a partisan apologist, why was his original article aimed at Democrats, instead of culpable individuals? Why does the balmy doctor mention Sandy Berger at all? Dr. Mick addresses everything but the subject. Dr. Mick accuses me of making an ad hominem attack on Laurie Mylroie, but the very question was that of her credibility. I think the instanced quotation shows that Mylroie had built a case against Iraq out of thin air. Then the doctor goes on to call Jamie Gorelick “one of the foxes in the henhouse”. That is a gernuine ad hominem attack on someone not even mentioned in my article. I’d like to see Mylroie’s factual evidence. Why is it that Dr. Mick doesn’t mention Adbul Rahman Yasin, the subject of my article, at all? The simple reason is that there is nothing he can say. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. 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