Well Duh

[Previously posted on my Vox blog Sep 9, 2006 at 10:50 AM]

This story has been overshadowed by the ongoing ABC "docu"drama debacle:

Senate Finds No al-Qaida-Saddam Link

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060909/ap_on_go_co/iraq_report

Well duh. We knew that before the war even started. As I've said several times before, Tomcat and I were standing with a group of anti-war protestors outside Parliament in London a few days before the war began discussing this very issue. We could not believe that our own government didn't know that Saddam and Osama were enemies! Another thing we discussed back then was the fact that an invasion of Iraq would spark civil war. Were Tomcat and I, as well as the other protestors out there that night, prophets? Of course not. We were just liberals - you know, well-informed critical thinking types, the very types of people that Iran's president wants to silence.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/09/05/iran.universities.ap/index.html

Iran's hard-line president urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of
liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to
strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.
###
Iran still has strong moderate factions but Ahmadinejad's
administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, Web
sites and bloggers. [emphasis mine]

But back to the Senate's report.

Democrats singled out CIA Director [Democrat] George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration's case for war despite his own agents' doubts about the intelligence it was based on.

"Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to 'say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,'" Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.

Tenet also told the committee that complying had been "the wrong thing to do," according to Levin. [emphasis mine]

Gee, ya think?

And get this:

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, President Bush said people should
"imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make
weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi." [Bush and his
handlers know this is a lie; see next paragraph]

The report said that al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader killed by a U.S. airstrike last June, was in Baghdad from May 2002 until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

In June 2004, Bush also defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida. "Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida," the president said. [another absolute lie] [emphasis mine]

Remember I said that three years ago, before the war started, "We could not believe that our own government didn't know that Saddam and Osama were enemies!" That's what we (naively) thought then. What we KNOW now is that the administration had the facts before them but chose to ignore them. Furthermore, this administration continues to repeat the lies to this day, and that has been quite successful for them. Incredibly, about half of the American population STILL BELIEVES that there was a link between Saddam and Osama.

I suppose we should rejoice now that at least the United States Senate - half of one branch of this government - has recently "discovered" what the rest of us out here already knew.