Prove It

Last week, the 9/11 commission released a report saying in plain English that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, especially on 9/11. Since this was one of the Bush Administration’s favorite propaganda lines, the report simply could not go unchallenged, and the White House promptly marshaled its media allies to hammer away at the commission’s findings.

Said hammering is taking three forms:

1. This conclusion was reached by lower-level staffers and not the commissioners themselves. This one didn’t fly for very long; after all, one would think that said staffers would be unable to release a paper under the commission’s name and on the commission’s website without the commissioners’ approval.

2. 9/11 connection? We never said there was a 9/11 connection. Oh, please – don’t insult our intelligence. For months before and after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others said ad nauseum that Iraq and al Qaeda were two peas in a pod, and repeatedly insinuated (and sometimes more) that Iraq was behind 9/11. For example:
a. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” (Bush, 9/25/02)
b. Invading Iraq “is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” (Bush’s official war notification letter to Congress, 4/19/03)
c. “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda.” (Bush, 5/1/03)
d. “If we’re successful in Iraq, we will have struck a blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Cheney, 9/14/03)
e. “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” (Condoleezza Rice, 9/17/03)

3. All right, so maybe Iraq wasn’t involved with 9/11, but they were still involved with al Qaeda. This one doesn’t wash either. The commission release clearly said that Baghdad ignored al Qaeda’s repeated attempts to procure training camps and weapons from Iraq.

As one aspect of the Administration’s PR counterattack, the arch-conservative Washington Times trumpeted an unconfirmed – and very obviously planted – allegation that a senior official in Saddam’s militia was also a member of al Qaeda, but the story fell apart just hours later with the realization that there were actually two different people with similar names. Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to help out by claiming he personally warned Bush soon after 9/11 that Saddam was planning terrorist attacks within the US, but that also went nowhere when the White House sheepishly admitted that the story was groundless and no such warning was ever given.

Most ludicrously, Cheney was trotted out on CNBC Thursday night to mutter darkly that the White House “probably” held back evidence from the 9/11 commission proving that Saddam collaborated with al Qaeda and that – again – he just might have had a hand in 9/11 after all.

Putting aside the question of whether or not the Administration deliberately withheld very relevant facts from the commission, I say to Cheney: Prove it. Release your evidence. If it supports what you claim, then you should have no problem with making it public. After all, your Administration has in the past leaked sensitive information for political purposes, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. (Remember Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown in retaliation for her husband publicly saying the African uranium story was a crock?) But it seems infinitely more likely that if there were such a smoking gun, it would have been loudly publicized long before now. Instead, it seems that any new “evidence” would be just more of the same: more rumors, more conjecture, and more speculation.

The Administration ideologues, hell-bent on war with Iraq no matter what, saw only what they wanted to see and took unsupported allegations to be gospel truth. They ignored everyone who told them it wasn’t true. They knowingly poured deceptive garbage into the public consciousness to scare Americans into going along with their schemes. And now that they’ve been caught red-handed, they are completely incapable of doing anything other than spouting the same nonsense. How pathetic.