Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Iraq and al Qaeda

Instead of revealing how angry I am at the media for their reporting on the 9/11 Commission’s so called lack of connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, I’m going on a bike ride. I’ll ruminate on it. But it is infuriating. For the meantime, look at these few paragraphs from Andrew Sullivan:

"The vice-president’s direct attack on the New York Times’ portrayal of the 9/11 Commission report was a zinger. On balance, I think Cheney is right. The links between al Qaeda and Saddam may not have amounted to a formal alliance, but they existed all right, as the Commission conceded. The NYT itself reported that ’The report said that despite evidence of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 90’s, ’they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.’ But if there were ’repeated contacts’ between al Qaeda and Iraq, how can it be true that, as the headline put it, that ’Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie’? Headlines truncate things, of course. But Cheney is dead-on in describing this headline as misleading. Here’s Tom Kean, the chairman of the Commision: ’What we have found is, were there contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq? Yes. Some of them were shadowy - but they were there.’ Here’s Lee Hamilton:
’I must say I have trouble understanding the flack over this. The Vice President is saying, I think, that there were connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government. We don’t disagree with that. What we have said is what the governor just said, we don’t have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein’s government and these al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.’
The NYT had the gall to demand that Bush and Cheney apologize. In fact, it’s the NYT that needs to apologize."

Discussions - 1 Comment

The reason Bush asked congress to go to war with Iraq was because they assisted the Al-Queda with the 9/11 attack. This is a matter of public record. Now the Administration is telling us there were only ’shadowy’ contacts, where before it was a full blown operational alliance. It seems they want to have it both ways. The bottom line is this they decieved the country on the reasons we went to war.

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