>>What is known then, is that Saddam and Osama were quite willing to work with each other. Do you deny it?<<
Dan -
What is known, according to what has been presented here, is that there was some discussion about Saddam and bin Laden working together. That is not new information.
However, given the absence of any further evidence that they did work together, and given bin Laden's later calls for Hussein's ouster (which you refer to as "bad blood", though it seems to be more than that), any speculation we may do is just that - mere speculation.
Speculation is not useful as evidence.
>>After denying the evidence exists and having it thrown in your face instead, you folks want to speculate that nothing came of it. You want to speculate that some indication of bad blood later somehow proves that nothing could have come of Saddams dealings with Osama.<<
I'm not speculating that nothing came of it. But since there is no evidence that something did come of it, I am not speculating that it did, as some are.
>>Evidence does exist, as well as reasonable speculation (grasping at straws, to you), all prior to Bush becoming President, and so claims that Bush intentionally "pretended" something, or "lied" over this, are in fact revisionist history and hogwash speculation of the worst kind.<<
Here's where you run into a problem. Bush didn't just refer to a 1995 meeting and leave it at that. He went a LOT farther than Clinton's speculations, into a whole new realm of sinister connections. He claims that he never said Saddam was connected to 9/11, yet he used the phrase 9/11 constantly while talking about Saddam. He used stories that had already been discredited, presented evidence that had come from highly suspect sources as if it was absolutely factual, and generally acted as if he knew for certain all kinds of things that weren't anywhere close to being proven.
Clinton didn't ever say anything to even suggest that we needed to take Saddam out before he dropped a nuclear weapon on New York.
Most importantly, Bush spent months and months doing everything he could to convince everyone that we needed to go to war preemptively, and take Saddam out because he was such a huge threat to U.S. security.
It is certainly NOT revising history to point that out. One only has to look through Bush's statements, and those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and even poor Colin Powell, and one can easily see how much farther they all took their flights of fancy than anyone in the Clinton administration could be accused of doing.
- Allen |
