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This story came out last week and is truly a pathetic attempt at censorship by our government:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.

One Pentagon spokesman's excuse for not putting it up on the website, as originally planned, was that initial press reports made it too "politically sensitive." Well, no duh! And yet the report, who's executive summary can be read online here, comes from an exhaustive investigation:

The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.

The study certainly showed that Saddam's Iraq was spending money, time, and effort supporting the Palestinian cause in Israel and the West Bank, in addition to an extensive bureaucracy devoted to terrorizing its own citizens:

"The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq." Saddam's primary aim was self preservation and the elimination of potential internal threats to his power.

but the executive summary clearly states that they found no "smoking gun" as far as a direct link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and yet we have the following statements (lies) by the Bush Administration leading up to and into the war:

"What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network," former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations February 5, 2003.

On June 18, 2004 the Washington Post quoted President George W. Bush as saying: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," Bush said.

"We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's Meet The Press March 16, 2003.

"There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq," former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a interview with Infinity CBS Radio, Nov. 14, 2002.

All lies...

As far as this attempt to squelch the report, as TalkingPointsMemo so eloquently points out, isn't it just a matter of time before the report is just scanned in and posted online anyway?

It's amazing, though, that the Pentagon would so blatantly attempt to keep this report from the public.

Not possible.

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