Surprise! MSM Misses the mark on Saddam-al-Qaeda report

A new Pentagon report on Iraq and Terrorism has the news media buzzing. An item on the New York Times blog snarks, "Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link." The ABC News story that previews the full report concludes, "Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda."

How, then, to explain this sentence about Iraq and al Qaeda from the report's abstract: "At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust"? And how to explain the "considerable overlap" between their activities which led not only to the appearances of ties but to a "de facto link between the organizations?" (See the entire abstract below.)

And what about this revelation from page 34? "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." (The example given in the report is the Army of Muhammad in Bahrain, a group the Iraqi Intelligence Service describes as "under the wings of bin Laden.")

The above is from The Weekly Standard's Stepen Hayes who literally wrote the book on Saddam and his connection to terrorists. Stephen found other nuggets from the study that prove - incredibly - that the MSM completely and totally either deliberately misrepresented the conclusions or are too dumb to have picked up on what Stephen found.

I choose a little of each. I have pointed out in several articles for AT that there are many people with a vested interest in not finding a link to al-Qaeda from Saddam's Iraq or finding that there were not WMD's in Iraq prior to our invasion. People are deliberately burying their heads in the sand to avoid the truth at all costs. And the release of this report confirms as much in the MSM.