Legends of the Left: Rumsfeld and "bulletproof"

I've been once again astonished by the equivocal arguments produced by the left where Iraq is at issue. Hot Air featured a mention of the timely announcement that a review of Iraqi documents had produced no evidence of "operational ties" between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda. Is "operational tie" the same as "tie"? If so, we don't really need the word "operational."

But certain "reality-based" types from the political left argue as though there is no distinction.

The hullabaloo over "bulletproof" evidence follows from a Rumsfeld speech given in Atlanta on Sept. 27, 2002.

There is a desire on the part of the American people and people around the world to want to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt like you do in a court of law because our interest there is to protect minority rights. Our interest is to gain intelligence so that we can protect the American people. It is critically important.
I tried to do what you're talking about the other day. Before I left for Poland I gathered some thoughts with a couple of people who work with me -- Paul Wolfowitz and others. We said why don't we get this into the intelligence community, let them scrub it over the next week or so, see if they can find out what portion of it can be made public. They did, they came back, we ended up with five or six sentences that were bullet-proof. We could say them, they're factual, they're exactly accurate. They demonstrate that there are in fact al Qaeda in Iraq. But they're not photographs, they are not beyond a reasonable doubt, they in some cases are assessments from a limited number of sources. They're in some cases hard information that were we to release it would reveal a method of gathering it. And it seems to me that if our quest is for proof positive we probably will be left somewhat unfulfilled. The same thing is true in business. When you make judgments about what markets you're going to go after and what acquisitions are going to be made and where the investments are going to be made, you end up making them based on 40, 50, 60, percent of the information that you can get in a reasonable period of time, and if you waited for the next 20-30 percent of the knowledge you could get the market would be gone and the investment would be gone.
(Defenselink.mil)

It cannot be reasonably argued that Rumsfeld did not take pains to qualify what was meant by "bullet-proof," but Rumsfeld's statement evolved in the literature. Take this account of a confrontation between Rumsfeld and former CIA employee Ray McGovern (written by Ray Everest):

At the beginning of Rumsfeld's televised speech, a woman shouted, "I cannot stay silent, this man needs to be in prison for war crimes. Drive Out the Bush Regime!" Two more protesters stood up and accused Rumsfeld of war crimes and lying, and another man stood with his back to Rumsfeld. Then during the question-and-answer period, McGovern confronted Rumsfeld-with facts.

Ray McGovern (quoting from a New York Times report): Atlanta. Sept. 27, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld said (and this is in quotation marks), "There is bulletproof evidence of links between al Qaeda and the government of Saddam Hussein."

Regardless of the quotation marks, that phrase apparently doesn't come from Rumsfeld's speech in Atlanta.

What did The New York Times actually print that day?

ATLANTA, Sept. 27 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that American intelligence had "bulletproof" evidence of links between Al Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that recently declassified intelligence reports about suspected ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government, including the presence of senior members of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in "recent periods," were "factual" and "exactly accurate."

The quotation, then, is Eric Schmitt's dubiously accurate paraphrase of Rumsfeld. At the very least, Schmitt's reporting is misleading. It is not until the fourth graph that the reporter gets around to acknowledging the caveats emphasized by Rumsfeld. Enough to counterbalance the effects of the headline ("Rumsfeld Says U.S. Has 'Bulletproof' Evidence of Iraq's Links to Al Qaeda")?

In fact, Rumsfeld could have said that the evidence for ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq was bulletproof. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found as much in its report.

Some analysts concur with the assessment that intelligence reporting provides "no conclusive evidence of cooperation on specific terrorist operations," but believe that the available signs support a conclusion that Iraq has had sporadic, wary contacts with al-Qaida since the mid-1990s, rather than a relationship with al-Qaida that has developed over time. These analysts would contend that mistrust and conflicting ideologies and goals probably tempered these contacts and severely limited the opportunities for cooperation. These analysts do not rule out that Baghdad sought and obtained a nonaggression agreement or made limited offers of cooperation, training, or even safehaven (ultimately uncorroborated or withdrawn) in an effort to manipulate, penetrate, or otherwise keep tabs on al-Qaida or selected operatives.
(page 306--pdf)

The contacts are not seriously disputed. The dispute centers on to what degree the contacts amounted to functional cooperation, and on that point the consensus view is that evidence does not support active cooperation.

People seem to routinely overlook that finding insufficient evidence to support cooperation fails to rule out the possibility of cooperation, however.

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