Stephen F. Hayes takes Senator Carl Levin to task in his Weekly Standard article The Unvarnished Facts. It's been my view that Levin is remarkably dishonest. Levin clings to the notion that the administration alleged that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks, and on that basis took us to war in Iraq. The 9/11 Commission report will not say that, but Levin in his own doctrine of preemption issued his own report that does. The American public was led to believe before the Iraq War that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attack on America and that the actions of al Qaeda and Iraq were "part of the same threat," as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it. It was not the CIA that led the public to believe that. It was the leaders of this administration.
But here are Condoleezza Rice's comments to Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002, a month before Congress voted to authorize the Iraq War. We continue to look at evidence of that meeting. And it's just more of a picture that is emerging that there may well have been contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. There are others. And we will be laying out the case. But I don't think that we want to try and make the case that he directed somehow the 9/11 events. That's not the issue here.
Here is Dick Cheney reponding to Tim Russert that same day on Meet the Press. Cheney: I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
[...]
Russert: Anything else?
Cheney: There is--again, I want to separate out 9/11 from the other relationships between Iraq and the al Qaeda organization. But there is a pattern of relationships going back many years. And in terms of exchanges and in terms of people, we've had recently since the operations in Afghanistan--we've seen al Qaeda members operating physically in Iraq and off the territory of Iraq. We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly 20 years.Hayes sums up the situation this way.
Levin's preemptive report is indeed revealing, but not in the way he intends. We have a much clearer picture of who, exactly, is exaggerating intelligence to score political points.Levin is not alone. The press has been working overtime on their own ongoing campaign of distortions.
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