Seriously. If this administration is
going to lie, can they at least
get their story straight? Is that too much to ask?
Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said Monday that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaida, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.
The vice president offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaida.
"He was a patron of terrorism," Cheney said of Hussein during a speech before The James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Florida. "He had long established ties with al Qaida."
These claims, made Monday night, are quite curious, especially since frickin' Colin Powell has admitted
there was no such link!
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted ? and something administration officials have done little to discourage.
The war is going to shit and dragging Bush's numbers down with it. The last desperate hope of this administration is to continue stoking public perception of a link between al Qaida and Saddam.
But really, isn't this all rather pathetic and bordering on the pathological?