More On Purported Bush Sr. Assassination Plot

When the Pentagon released a study about Iraq's terrorist activities under Saddam, I thought it was interesting they hadn't mentioned anything about Saddam's supposed attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. But I missed this article by Michael Isikoff at the time, on exactly this subject:

[C]uriously little has been heard about the allegedly foiled assassination plot in the five years since the U.S. military invaded Iraq. A just-released Pentagon study on the Iraqi regime's ties to terrorism only adds to the mystery. The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence. "It was surprising," said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."

But it turns out absence of evidence still isn't evidence of absence:

"It would not have surprised me at all if the Iraqis expunged any record of that—it was an utter embarrassment for them," says Paul Pillar, the CIA's former top analyst on the Middle East.

You bet. Likewise, given the utter embarrassment the CIA felt when its remote control mechanism failed to crash Flight 93 into the Capitol on 9/11, I'm not surprised they've expunged all references to it from their records.

EARLIER: The FBI chemist who tested the explosives recovered in Kuwait describes how his report was falsified.

—Jonathan Schwarz