Not that this is a new revelation or anything, but in light of all of the lies being force fed to the American public as well as the rewriting of history we shouldn’t let this little nugget of information fall down the memory hole.

jasonwhat had a diary up over the weekend that didn’t get much play (hell, I didn’t even see it until I was searching to see if this story was diaried recently) which points out that, for over a year, Bush had Zarqawi in his sights and didn’t pull the trigger.  And guess why?  Because it would hurt the case for invading Iraq.  And the best part – Saddam knew about Zarqawi and was trying to have him captured.

I kid you not.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane – back to 2002.  According to Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent with over 20 years of experience, six of which were as head of the Bin Laden unit:

[d]uring 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi’s training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Mr Scheuer claims that a July 2002 plan to destroy the camp lapsed because “it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers”.

“Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn’t shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq,” he told Four Corners.

“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.”

And how much did Bush care about keeping people safe and hunting down terrorists?  Well, you guessed it, not nearly enough when compared to stacking as many lies together as possible to invade Iraq.  In fact, the Pentagon even drew up plans not once but TWICE to attack the terrorist training camp in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq but the plans were killed by the White House;

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

—snip—

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it.  By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

And what about that whole “1% doctrine” relating to a preemptive strike?  Well, intelligence indicated that Zarqawi was planning on using ricin in Europe, and this was, according to Gen. John M. Keane, the Army’s vice chief of staff at the time,

Zarqawi represented “one of the best targets we ever had.”

Sadly, however, Bush was more interested in invading Iraq than he was in taking out Zarqawi.

In a cruel and ironic twist (as I mentioned above), while Rice and Cheney and every other neocon war criminal insisted on the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the Senate Intelligence Report released last week (see page 109) indicates the following:

Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zaraqwi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.

—snip—

Saddam’s regime “considered Zarqawi an outlaw” and blamed his network, operating in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, for two bombings in Baghdad.

We know the rest of this story – police in the UK uncovered a terror plot, arrested six suspects and found a ricin lab which was connected to the training camp in Iraq.  Zarqawi is erroneously (and that is a generous word) linked over and over to Saddam by the neocon war criminals.  The US “gets its war” with Iraq, redeploying troops from Afghanistan – letting Bin Laden escape in the process.  Zarqawi’s camp is attacked during 2003 – after him and many of his followers have long since left the area.  Zarqawi goes on to plan and commit many attacks against our troops, innocent civilians and becomes “public enemy number one”.  According to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey:

“Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,”

And all of those lives could have been saved – innocent lives, our own troops’ lives – not to mention all of the hundreds of billions of dollars and goodwill that was pissed away.

So in all of the hullabaloo about ABC/Disney and their lies – let’s not forget who really let not one but two terrorists get away when he had the chance.  Bush let Bin Laden slip away in Tora Bora.  Bush purposely let Zarqawi slip away in northern Iraq to “sell” his illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.  And Saddam, for all the evil that he has done, was actually trying to have Zarqawi captured – according to the Republican controlled Senate Intelligence Report.

Just another war crime to add to the list…..