Let's Do the Timeline Again

So a few hours after Saddam Husein is captured, this story breaks in the British press. I'm sorry, but doesn't that just scream "freshly fabricated"? For one, if this is true, the entire CIA is full of shit, and I think what with the sword-falling and the secret-agent-ousting and the yellow cake and just with the bare bones of logic, the CIA is marginally more trustworthy at this juncture than BushCo and press releases cooked up in the DoD cauldrons. Secondly, the authors of this "angle" are banking on the "eradication of short-term memory" programme that has been successfully implemented by the form & content of news for the last 2 1/2 years, it's like, dude, if the only thing you were ever made to watch were Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, what would that do to your sense of linear narrative? The short-term memory lapse in question, done away with through strategically repeated metonymy between Bin Laden and Hussein is the fact that the former is an Islamic extremist who despised the latter, who was a secular dictator, a.k.a. "apostate" working in the tradition of Stalinist state socialism. Even within the murky discourse of the Bin Laden "tapes," if there was any sort of cooperation brewing twixt the two, it would not have commenced until right before the US invasion of Iraq, as shown in this discussion. Note how the conjecture from that tape is interpretive, whereas here you can read all about how the US press did not cite the parts of a Bin Laden tape where he condemns Hussein and calls the Iraqi people to rise up again him. Not because he's humanitarian, but because he is a religious fanatic, and I don't see that cosmology allowing for much distinction between the capitalist West and an ideologically "socialist" Iraq where the state is atheist and women are educated and employed. I remember being outraged at the time about how information was manipulated, but I remember because I exercise my mind to retain chronology, linearity and short-term memories. It's like an exercise to improve eyesight.
Don't get me wrong. I think Saddam Husein should be tried for war crimes. Same goes for Bush and Rumsfeld, no wonder they are throwing bully weight around and refusing to sign treatiesto avoid being prosecuted. I just read that Saddam has already been whisked out of Iraq. Never mind the fact that Iraqis had already set up a war crimes tribunal. Why is that? Are they going to torture him at Guantanamo Bay from now until Novemeber when he will sign a confession admitting to having a secret WMD lab so deep underground it had to be run by dwarves and hobbits and then we will have elections, after all? And if the Husein/Bin Laden connection is the new hot item, why not remind people that Bin Laden, the main terrorist responsible for 9/11 was trained and funded by our very own Central Intelligence Agency?

*Incidentally, the links I have been providing lately are google cached links, with words I used to search highlighted through the text. As annoying as that is, it's not nearly as annoying as the fact that articles have been mysteriously vanishing leaving a 404 error in place.

[On Edit: Until I just started reading it over to phone to nuncstans, I did not even realize that the first article that I linked to, the one from The Telegraph, had a whole section about the "second part of the memo," which, apparenly, after it gets done linking Husein and Bin Laden, also magically ties up all the loose ends with the Uranium Niger scandal, the presence of WMDs in Iraq and, for good measure, fingers Libya and Syria for future invasion thusly:
"The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.". Jesus Christ. Isn't it all so convenient? I am surprised there wasn't a third part of the memo, which documented how Bush's plastic Thanksgiving turkey came to life Pinnochio-style. Critics lambast Hollywood movies that end like this. Or, as nuncstans said, they have better writing on 7th Heaven. ]