QuackQuack's Journal: New CIA memo links Iraq and Al Qaeda

A CIA memo detailing Iraqi Al-Qaeda links from 1990 through 2003 has surfaced. This could prove to be quite a bombshell, but what's curious is the silence of the "mainstream" media on this. Sure the story was broken in a conservative publication, but does that automatically make it an invalid story?

A lot of people attempt to claim that liberal media bias is some kind of "right-wing fantasy", but if that's so, then why is the "mainstream" press ignoring this memo, underplayed the Democrat memo suggesting the politicization of intelligence as a 2004 campaign strategy, but make a big fuss about the Rumsfeld memo that was nothing more than a series of discussion points for an upcoming staff meeting?

Updated: Oops, I forgot the CIA memo that said that more Iraqis are joining the insurgents. That one got a good deal of press as well.

The two memos that are bad new for the Bush administration get a lot of press and are exagerated. ("Rumsfeld Questions War", "CIA warns that Iraqs are turning against us" (gee, watching the press coverage gave me the impression that they were ALREADY against us, but I digress)).

Out of the two that are good for the Bush administration, one is ignored, the other is simply portrayed as the usual Republican/Democrat bickering.

No Liberal Bias?

Update: The Washington Post ran a story, of course not so much about the memo's contents as on a CIA probe into how it got leaked. Also they got quotes from two experts casting doubt on the content of the memo. One "unnamed" (love that) expert said that the memo contained "data points . . . many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.". Well if "many" are untrue, that implies that some ARE true. The nature of intelligence is that you get an amount of good and bad intelligence, and you have to sift through and figure out which and try to piece together a puzzle.

This still shatters the belief that there was no evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

The other story that is getting some play is the DOD press release on this subject. Some reports are saying that the DOD "debunked" this memo. That is not true. The DOD is denying reports that it CONFIRMED an Iraq/Al-qaeda connection in the memo. It also says that this document is sort of an index of intelligence documents on the subject, not intelligence itself.