iraqi intelligence

Another big get for the military:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday that an Iraqi intelligence team had found and killed al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

Maliki said the team had also killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported leader of al Qaeda's local affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq.

The claims, which followed a March 7 election that produced no clear victor but which Maliki hopes will give him a second term, were not immediately confirmed by the U.S. military, which Maliki said had conducted DNA tests on the bodies.

Of course the right will spin this into a failure of the Obama administration by this evening.

Writing on behalf of his One America political action committee, former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards sent an email Saturday seeking signatories in an effort to expand the powers of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate President Bush's role in the strategic leaking of information related to Iraq.

In the form letter on Edwards' site, he writes, "I urge you to extend Mr. Fitzgerald's charter to include the behavior of the President in this disgraceful affair."

The letter to supporters, while unlikely to influence the investigation, signals that Edwards continues to remain active on the political scene, and could indicate an effort to advance a 2008 presidential run.

Via Raw Story.

If Edwards is doing this to position himself for a run in 2008 or not is not at issue here. Edwards has come up with a very good plan - let the man who is already knee deep in investigating the Iraqi intelligence failure investigate it even further. We know for a fact Bush manipulated and/or ignored intelligence that would have kept us from going to war. It is time he be investigated and put on trial for it. You can sign Edwards letter here. I have also added it to the Get Active section on the left.

From the

National Journal:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly
classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence
linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was
scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties
with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former
officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the
"President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national
security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from
electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence
services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public
statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing
was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda
involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam
viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations
as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts
believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi
nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its
inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the
president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to
learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al
Qaeda.