Stephen F. Hayes, who knows a thing or two about Iraq and intelligence, chews up the Senate Committee’s report on Iraq/al Qaeda relations and spits it out. His conclusion:
Some day there will be an authoritative and richly detailed history of the nature of the relationship between the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups. This latest product of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is unlikely to merit even a footnote in this history.
Read the whole thing.
And yet, the headline in my C-ville (VA) newspaper was, "Senate Report Refutes Major Rationale for Invasion," or something like that, the word I’m 100% sure about being "refutes."
That’s simply where the story stands with a majority of Americans. Although the headline was a C-ville special, that’s the sort of copy AP and Reuters give every small-market newspaper in America.
I looked at the SSIC report and found key parts of it silly on their face, such as the ready credence that the report lends to claims by captured Saddam-regime officials that they had nothing to do with Bin Laden or al-Qaeda.
I happen to know one of the senior Democrat SSIC staffers rather well, and have argued these matters with him privately. He’s an extremely sharp-elbowed, even bitter, partisan and more than a bit of a Bush-hater. I can detect his fingerprints on this report. The sad thing is, the SSIC used to have a reputation for being relatively free of partisanship. In the end, though, I reserve most of my ire for Hagel and Snowe, whose "useful-idiot" cooperation made this tawdry Democrat campaign-season hit piece possible.
So, where is Fung? He above all NLT’ers needs to read Hayes’ article.