Care­ful read­ers will remem­ber I wrote about the alleged Qatar coup attempt back in Octo­ber, here, here and here. The story was that mem­bers of the mil­i­tary aligned with Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists attempted a coup in the vital Per­sian Gulf coun­try on Oct. 12. It was put down with the help of U.S. troops there, and the State Depart­ment and the Qataris denied any­thing hap­pened. In my last entry on this, I said I couldn’t con­firm any­thing and that I — reluc­tantly — must con­cede that they were rumors.
Now, pos­si­bly not so! Hes­iod, over at Coun­ter­spin Cen­tral, picked up on an inter­est­ing nugget in the New York Times’ cov­er­age of Colin Powell’s speech before the U.N. on Wednes­day. In his speech, Pow­ell made a lot of noise in tying al Qa’ida to Bagh­dad through the per­son of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi (right), the one-legged man believed respon­si­ble for mas­ter­mind­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Amer­i­can diplo­mat Lau­rence Foley last Octo­ber. But, as Hes­iod points out, the Times buried the real story:

Mr. Pow­ell with­held some crit­i­cal details today, like the dis­cov­ery by the intel­li­gence agen­cies that a mem­ber of the royal fam­ily in Qatar, an impor­tant ally pro­vid­ing air bases and a com­mand head­quar­ters for the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary, oper­ated a safe house for Mr. Zar­qawi when he tran­sited the coun­try going in and out of Afghanistan.
The Qatari royal fam­ily mem­ber was Abdul Karim al-Thani, the coali­tion offi­cial said. The offi­cial added that Mr. al-Thani pro­vided Qatari pass­ports and more than $1 mil­lion in a spe­cial bank account to finance the net­work.
Mr. al-Thani, who has no gov­ern­ment posi­tion, is, accord­ing to offi­cials in the gulf, a deeply reli­gious mem­ber of the royal fam­ily who has pro­vided char­i­ta­ble sup­port for mil­i­tant causes for years and has denied know­ing that his con­tri­bu­tions went toward ter­ror­ist oper­a­tions.
Pri­vate sup­port from promi­nent Qataris to Al Qaeda is a sen­si­tive issue that is said to infu­ri­ate George J. Tenet, the direc­tor of cen­tral intel­li­gence. After the Sept. 11 attacks, another senior Qaeda oper­a­tive, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who may have been the prin­ci­pal plan­ner of the assault on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon, was said by Saudi intel­li­gence offi­cials to have spent two weeks in late 2001 hid­ing in Qatar, with the help of promi­nent patrons, after he escaped from Kuwait.
But with Qatar pro­vid­ing the United States mil­i­tary with its most sig­nif­i­cant air oper­a­tions cen­ter for action against Iraq [the al Udeid Air Base — Ed.], the Pen­ta­gon has cau­tioned against a strong diplo­matic response from Wash­ing­ton, Amer­i­can and coali­tion offi­cials say.

Sure makes those coup reports a lot more inter­est­ing, now doesn’t it? And it makes a lot more sense that Qatar and the United States would both deny that any­thing hap­pened. But this is part of Washington’s game. Pak­istan, Saudi Ara­bia, Kuwait and now Qatar have known ties to Islamic extrem­ists that have had a direct hand in attack­ing United States inter­ests and noth­ing is done because we need these coun­tries to attack Iraq. (Or Afghanistan, in the case of Pak­istan. I have less prob­lem with going easy on Gen. Mushar­raf since he’s in a del­i­cate spot and we don’t want Pakistan’s nukes falling into the hands of Islamo-Fascists.) It’s almost as if the War on Ter­ror is an irri­tat­ing dis­trac­tion from the War on Iraq. And that’s exactly back­ward, as far as the Amer­i­can peo­ple are con­cerned.
(As an aside, the Times arti­cle notes that by reveal­ing that Zar­qawi is a walk­ing dead man now, as Bagh­dad has con­stantly denied links to al Qa’ida. “A half hour after Pow­ell men­tioned his name, I’ll wager he dis­ap­pears or is killed,” said a coali­tion offi­cial, recall­ing the death in Bagh­dad in 2001 of the Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist Abu Nidal, after intel­li­gence reports sug­gested than he might be acti­vat­ing his own ter­ror­ist net­work.” As Hes­iod asks, if the United States could have had Zar­qawi killed ear­lier by men­tion­ing him, why didn’t it? As with Ansar al-Islam, it’s con­ve­nient for the White House to let threats linger as long as they serve the goal of invad­ing Iraq.)
George over at War­blog­ging has an excel­lent entry on why Iraq is the wrong war at the wrong time. With the the national threat level about to go to “orange” later today amid fears of a mid-February attack by al Qa’ida that could rival Sept. 11, 2001, why is Wash­ing­ton ignor­ing real links between sup­posed allies and ter­ror groups and instead focus­ing on ten­u­ous ties between our ene­mies? This is why.