Clue to what? The reason we went to Iraq?
Oh sorry I forgot, after no WMDs were found, no links to al Qaeda, we went in to 'free' the Iraqis.
I also remember the implications made by Cheney that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
Maybe thats my problem, I should just forget what they said before when ever they come out with a new story.
No WMDs were found is the only accurate thing in that post. There were others that believed that WMDs/Iraq threat were real.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePb6H-j51xE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCVZlLBchVE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i87cZ3Og6ts&feature=related
The very report cited in the article in the OP says opposite what the OP title does. CNN isn't anything like authorative.
The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:
• In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.
• Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.
• Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.
• In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.
• In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.
• The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The Pentagon study finds, "Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, 'terror cartel' that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam's regime."
verbatum from the report said:
The Iraqi Perspectives Project. In September 2003 the Commander,
United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), asked the Joint Advanced
Warfighting Program (JAWP) at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)
to help develop the operational and strategic lessons from OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM
(OIF) from the perspectives of former senior Iraqi decision-makers. By creating
a historical narrative of the events surrounding OIF, interviewing captured
prisoners, and reviewing translations of enemy documents and media archives,
IDA researchers were able to report on the inner workings-and sometimes delusional
behavior en masse-of the Saddam Hussein regime.
For this paper, the JAWP Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) research
team screened more than 600,000 original captured documents I and several thousand
hours of audio and video footage archived in a US Department of Defense
(DOD) database called Harmony. As of August 2006, only 15 percent of the captured
documents have English translations. evertheless, a user can search all of
the documents by their cataloging descriptions, i.e., by topic, key concepts, and
date, all of which are in English.
A PDF of the report can be read here (assuming the facts are relevent to you):
http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf
As for the goals changing I ask:
-Was Iraq being a sponsor of terrorism given for our action or was it that Iraq had operational links to AlQ given?
-Was providing for Iraq being self governed and it's people enjoying freedom given as a mark for success at the the beginning of OIF?
-Were we told when OIF began that it would take longer to achieve such freedom then many estimated?
-Was it asserted that Iraq was involved in 9/11 when OIF started?
I mean by the PRESIDENT which is being alleged to have lied or changed the goal, etc.
As stated before, Operation Iraqi Freedom seems to be terminology lost to the discussion. And to help check your answers to the above questions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DvIDuk1498
"This campaign may take longer, and be more difficult than some predict, and helping Iraqis create a united, stable, and free country will require our sustained commitment."
"We have no ambitions in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to it's own people."
Now having the answers, do you wonder what you really know about the situation or what has been repeated to you so often you just THINK you know about the situation.
..............bring on the 'enlightened' and 'progressive' hosility in lieu of discussion.