Fact of the Matter Is That Facts Didn't Matter
Senate panel's report is a damning indictment of the Bush Doctrine
robertscheer.com
July 13, 2004 – Well, the CIA managed, barely, to get one thing right on Iraq: There never was a case for linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden or the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a key rationale for President Bush's invasion of Iraq.
In an otherwise scathing report on how American intelligence agencies fell for misinformation that touted Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States, the Senate Intelligence Committee went out of its way to endorse the CIA finding that "the intelligence community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other Al Qaeda strike." This was also the preliminary conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 commission appointed by the president.
Yet Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney still insist that the war against Bin Laden somehow naturally extended to Iraq. As recently as a June 17 interview with CNBC, Cheney asserted, without providing evidence, that "there clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming." Nor would he rule out that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 plot. He even suggested that he had access to information that the 9/11 commission had not seen, an assertion that was later refuted by the commission's Republican chairman. Apparently, Cheney can now add the CIA and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee to the list of those to be condemned for not embracing his lies.
Of course, this outrageous stubbornness in the face of overwhelming evidence shouldn't be surprising. With no weapons of mass destruction found in occupied Iraq, almost 900 American soldiers dead and U.S. taxpayers having already coughed up more than $100 billion, the quagmire must be justified as being "the central front in the war on terror" if Bush is to win reelection in November.
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