Forgive me for reprising that rusty slogan, but it’s one that John Kerry should have used in 2004 and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should use now as the Republican nominee for President eagerly collects bear hugs and back pats from Mister Bush. Not because the slogan rhymes, but because in four short words it perfectly encapsulates the lasting legacy of Mister Bush’s leadership, and that of his string-puller, Dick Cheney.
The latest report showing that Mister Bush lied to get us into Iraq will be released by the Pentagon tomorrow, but the intrepid reporters at the McClatchy Washington bureau got advance notice from unnamed sources yesterday in a story lost beneath coverage of a wayward governor. White papers aren't sexy.
Titled Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, it won’t, as one anonymous source said, contain any surprises. Merely one more lengthy notification that, no, Saddam Hussein did not have operational ties with al Qa’ida and did not have anything to do with the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The report won’t actually say that Bush (and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice and the whole panoply of administration prevaricators) lied. Gotta remain respectful, doncha know? Can’t get too steamed up in a public document about 4300 dead coalition soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. It wouldn’t be professional.
McClatchy says the report was actually ready last year, which brings up speculation over what kind of arguments went on about what should and should not be included, much like the delayed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. But save that for later. What the Pentagon contractor, – the Institute for Defense Analyses – apparently found in the 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the 2003 invasion and occupation was what has been found by everybody else who has looked at the evidence since before the war began: Saddam Hussein not only did not work with al Qa’ida, he distrusted them intensely. Everybody, that is, except the Cheney-Bush intelligence fixers.
Even the heavily doctored August 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (that few Senators who voted on the Iraq AUMF in October bothered to read) could find no good evidence of a connection between Hussein and al Qa’ida. Indeed, the NIE stated that Hussein had not sponsored past terrorist attacks against America, was not operating in concert with al Qa’ida, and was not a terrorist threat to America. "We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against U.S. territory," the report stated. And before that, in February 2002, the CIA had said pretty much the same thing.
It didn’t stop Mister Bush and his mentors and minions from spreading the lie.
On October 7, 2002, the administration’s push for invasion included this conflation of truths and lies and shameless fear-mongering:
We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.
And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary; confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror. When I spoke to Congress more than a year ago, I said that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network.
A month after the AUMF was approved, the Los Angeles Times reported in Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaeda:
"We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," said Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French judge who is the dean of the region's investigators after two decades fighting Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorists. "And we are working on 50 cases involving Al Qaeda or radical Islamic cells. I think if there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." Even in Britain, a loyal U.S. partner in the campaign against Iraq, it's hard to find anyone in the government making the case that Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime are close allies. ...
The criticism in Europe reinforces the misgivings of some U.S. congressional leaders and intelligence officials about hawks in the Bush administration who allege that Iraq could have even played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics say that the evidence is weak and that intelligence agencies are feeling political pressure to implicate Iraq in terrorism. In the last two months, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have periodically revived and expanded on the allegations.
Subsequently, they kept lying, despite the 9-11 Commission report’s denial of al Qa’ida-Saddam Hussein links, despite declassified Defense Department documents, despite the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Phase II report in 2006, which said, on page 67:
According to debriefs of multiple detainees — including Saddam Hussein and former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz — and capture documents, Saddam did not trust al-Qa’ida or any other radical Islamist group and did not want to cooperate with them.
The administration kept lying.
Why shouldn’t they? Lying works. As recently as nine months ago, according to a Newsweek poll, 41% of Americans said "Yes" when asked: "Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?" Five percentage points higher than in 2004.
We’ve known for years from insider accounts that by the time the first tower was crashing into the streets of Lower Manhattan, certain members of the administration had already begun thinking about how the attack could put the United States on the path to the long-hoped-for invasion. Not because the dictator of Iraq was any real danger to the United States. He was, however, in the way of the Neo-Con vision of Pax Americana. Now they had their picture-perfect excuse, a picture of destruction and death that played day-after-day until many, many Americans had inextricably linked the fire and smoke of 9-11 to Saddam Hussein. There was no connection to al Qa’ida. Mister Bush knew it. Dick Cheney knew it. Colin Powell knew it. Donald Rumsfeld knew it, but claimed he had "bulletproof" evidence. They all lied about it.
When the Pentagon report is released tomorrow, you can expect them to keep lying about it, and lying about the lies. It’s who they are. The effect of the lies? People died. And they keep dying. No end in sight.