From the press conference held today by Gen. Petraeus: (via PJM- Michael Ledeen), when asked to comment on Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency:
The Iranian involvement has really become much clearer to us and brought into much more focus during the interrogation of the members — the heads of the Qazali network and some of the key members of that network that have been in detention now for a month or more. This is the head of the secret cell network, the extremist secret cells. They were provided substantial funding, training on Iranian soil, advanced explosive munitions and technologies as well as run of the mill arms and ammunition, in some cases advice and in some cases even a degree of direction. When we captured these individuals — the initial capture, and then there have been a number of others since then — we discovered, for example, a 22-page memorandum on a computer that detailed the planning, preparation, approval process and conduct of the operation that resulted in five of our soldiers being killed in Karbala. It also detailed — there are numerous documents which detailed a number of different attacks on coalition forces, and our sense is that these records were kept so that they could be handed in to whoever it is that is financing them. And there’s no question, again, that Iranian financing is taking place through the Quds force of the Iranian Republican Guards Corps.
Petraeus was pressed on the “how high up the Iranian line does this chain of command go? And he repeated that we know that some of the people we’re interrogating report to General Sulemaini, the head of the Qods Force, but beyond that we don’t know.As I’ve said before, this is lawyer-talk, not intelligence talk. And of course the journalist’s question betrays the usual lack of knowlege of the Iranian chain of command. The Revolutionary Guards, of which Qods is the foreign arm, report to the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), NOT to the president. So the reference to Ahmadinejad shows the journalist’s ignorance. But to believe that a Qods campaign is being conducted without Khamenei’s approval is as silly as the belief that a Special Forces campaign could be conducted without White House approval. No way.
Senator Lieberman went public in a big way today, with an op-ed in the Washington Post , which included his rejoinder to Harry Reid:
When politicians here declare that Iraq is "lost" in reaction to al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks and demand timetables for withdrawal, they are doing exactly what al-Qaeda hopes they will do, although I know that is not their intent.Even as the American political center falters, the Iraqi political center is holding. In the aftermath of last week's attacks, there were no large-scale reprisals by Shiite militias -- as undoubtedly would have occurred last year. Despite the violence, Iraq's leadership continues to make slow but visible progress toward compromise and reconciliation.
But if tomorrow Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were to achieve the "political solution" we all hope for, the threat of al-Qaeda in Iraq would not vanish.
Al-Qaeda, after all, isn't carrying out mass murder against civilians in the streets of Baghdad because it wants a more equitable distribution of oil revenue. Its aim in Iraq isn't to get a seat at the political table; it wants to blow up the table -- along with everyone seated at it.
And Lieberman's floor speech from the Senate today was powerful. Please don't miss this.
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Proving the validity of the theory that if you repeat a lie often enough it will come to be regarded as the truth, the AP, in a story about congressional investigations of the Bush administration, ran this whopper:
By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration's claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.
I initially saw this linked by CQ, and was surprised that the statement went unremarked by Ed, (although one of his commenters landed on it). Because of course the finding that Iraq sought to purchase uranium in Africa has never been "discredited". Not by Joe Wilson, nor by anyone else. Wilson's debriefing by the CIA upon his return from Niger left the Agency more convinced than before that Saddam had indeed been trying to buy yellowcake there, and British intelligence has never backed down from their multiple-sourced report on the matter.
In any event, Taranto was all over it today, citing the non-partisan Factcheck.org as the authority. Even their take on the issue sounded as though they had bought into Wilson's Big Lie, and were surprised to find out that Bush's famous "16 words" in the 2003 State of the Union Address were truthful. These are the first words of the Factcheck summmary: (emphasis mine)
The famous “16 words†in President Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address turn out to have a basis in fact after all, according to two recently released investigations in the US and Britain.
The "after all" of course refers to the constant repetition in the media of the "Bush lied" meme, alongside the celebration of Joe Wilson as a whistle-blower, when in reality Wilson has been exposed as a partisan liar and a shameless publicity hound....after all.
Posted by dan at April 26, 2007 9:33 PM