So what else is new ?

As noted by Mark Kleiman and Fred Kaplan, NBC news accuses George Bush of choosing not to attack Ansar al Islam in 2002.

NBC was scooped by ABC which reported the story in 2003.

According to ABC news The Ansar base was secured March 30 “Intelligence officials were convinced they would find the toxin known as ricin, which is deadlier than cyanide, or the apparatus to make chemicals at the facility. They were so concerned about the facility that plans were drawn up to attack it long before the war, although they were not carried out. “

which was scooped by


Romesh Ratnesar of CNN on August 26 2002
“Other Pentagon aides leaked word that the Administration had recently considered but decided against sending commandos into Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq to knock out a clandestine chemical-weapons lab allegedly run by Ansar al-Islam

To blow my own horn, I asked "Why did we let so many of the Ansar Al Islam terrorists get away ?" on November 6 2003 concluding
"Notice Ratnesar’s view that, to the Bush administration hawks, actually doing something about Ansar al Islam, is a minor aspect of the main effort to use the existence of Ansar Al Islam to convince Bush to invade Iraq. Notice also that someone decided not to attack Ansar Al Islam in 2002.
It seems to me that US forces in Iraq are in trouble because the Bush administration did not let minor objectives like catching terrorists by surprise get in the way of its “war on terrorism”.