What do you make of this Zarqawi story?

[ProSense]

April 30, 2006

ZARQAWI STORY CONFIRMED....Two years ago, Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News reported that a few months after 9/11 the Pentagon drafted multiple plans to hit the camp of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terrorist who had taken up residence in Iraq's northern no-fly zone, outside Saddam Hussein's control. George Bush, however, refused to authorize a military strike.

I've written about this multiple times (I used to jokingly call it my "monthly Zarqawi post"), but Miklaszewski's story always had a big problem: it was based on anonymous sources, which made it easy for the White House to ignore. Today, however, the Australian show Four Corners has gotten confirmation of the story from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit:

He told Four Corners that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi's training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

...."Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp...experimenting with ricin and anthrax...any collateral damage there would have been terrorists."

So why wasn't Bush willing to hit Zarqawi, a known al-Qaeda terrorist in a known location? Scheuer says he was told it was because Bush was afraid of annoying the French — a theory that seems a bit of a stretch, non? Others believe it was because Zarqawi was politically convenient: having him alive allowed Bush to pretend that Saddam was "harboring terrorists," thus providing useful ammunition for the war.

last para...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_04/008718.php

http://au.news.yahoo.com/060430/21/ys5i.html

[beachmom]

1. I don't know what to think.

Should he have bombed Iraq in 2002? Let's face it -- we would have been all over *, having not heard of Zarqawi, thinking * was some kind of cowboy. What do you think? Do you think * should have just bombed the camps? Wasn't Zarqawi at odds with Saddam Hussein or what? I'd like to hear more about this before I make a judgment.

[ProSense]

2. Bush already was operating

under the 2001 resolution. I don't know if going after Zarqawi in the no fly zone would have been considered bombing Iraq. The thing is it appears Bush either deliberately avoided that option or just blew off Zarqawi because he was too focused on Saddam. Either way it's bad judgment, especially given Bush's own elevation of Zarqawi's status, and compounds the problems with his illegal war. Couple this news with Bush taking his eye of bin Laden, it adds up to Bush creating a hell of a mess.

[karynnj]

3. Zarqawi was up in the no fly zone

where we were essentially in control. Saddam didn't. Didn't we do some bombing in that time frame that came out later.

[ginnyinWI]

4. It looks like he and the neocons wanted their war.

It wasn't about taking out terrorists, it was about regime change.