Flawed intelligence

By Creature

As Capt. Fogg posted about below, the president plans to give a speech today with the hope of rallying support for his Iraq war. In this latest rah-rah speech, there will be a juicy bit of freshly declassified intelligence from a 2005 Homeland Security bulletin "which warned that bin Laden had enlisted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his senior operative in Iraq, to plan potential strikes in the United States."

The Lefty blogs are dead-on with their criticism that this is the same old, tried and true, after-the-fact Bush tactic of scaring the American people into submission. However, I have not seen anyone raise the basic disconnect which flows from this newly declassified intelligence. A disconnect that undermines the GOP talking point that if we leave Iraq now they will follow us home.

See, the declassified Homeland Security bulletin makes it abundantly clear that Al Qaeda is perfectly willing to follow us home while we are fighting them over there. By golly, they can fight us over there and follow us home at the same time. So, I guess the fight, and withdrawing from the fight, isn't as black and white as the president and his supporters would like us to believe. Who would have thought?

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)