Lies and the Lying Liar …
“Dick Cheney spent 90 minutes lying.” – Don Imus on MSNBC this morning.
Last night the MSNBC pundit crew was spinning a Cheney victory, but this morning Imus was putting that to rest. Not that he was crazy about Edwards, either. But the central message was: Cheney lied. About everything.
Glenn Kessler and Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post provide documentation. Last night, for example, I remarked on Cheney’s claim that he had never made a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Kessler and VandeHei write,
Early in the debate, Cheney snapped at Edwards, “The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11.” But in numerous interviews, Cheney has skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers, usually when he cited the possibility that Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, met with an Iraqi official — even after that theory was largely discredited.
(For an example of Cheney’s repeating the “Atta in Prague” tale, see The Mahablog for September 17, 2003, “Six Degrees of al Qaeda.")
Cheney may have stopped telling the Atta story, but he hasn’t gotten over lying about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. From last night:
CHENEY: Gwen, the story that appeared today about this report is one I asked for. I ask an awful lot of questions as part of my job as vice president. A CIA spokesman was quoted in that story as saying they had not yet reached the bottom line and there is still debate over this question of the relationship between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein.
The report also points out that at one point some of Zarqawi‘s people were arrested. Saddam personally intervened to have them released, supposedly at the request of Zarqawi
But let‘s look at what we know about Mr. Zarqawi.
We know he was running a terrorist camp, training terrorists in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. We know that when we went into Afghanistan that he then migrated to Baghdad. He set up shop in Baghdad, where he oversaw the poisons facility up at Kermal (ph), where the terrorists were developing ricin and other deadly substances to use.
We know he‘s still in Baghdad today. He is responsible for most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people. He‘s the one you will see on the evening news beheading hostages.
He is, without question, a bad guy. He is, without question, a terrorist. He was, in fact, in Baghdad before the war, and he‘s in Baghdad now after the war.
The fact of the matter is that this is exactly the kind of track record we‘ve seen over the years. We have to deal with Zarqawi by taking him out, and that‘s exactly what we‘ll do.
There is no question Zarqawi is a really bad guy. And he’s one of Dick the Dick’s favorite bad guys, because he’s a bad guy who helped make the case that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. In fact, Zarqawi is such a useful bad guy that the Bush Administration deliberately passed on opportunities to “take him out” in the past. Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate last May:
Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the story puts it:
“[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.”
The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn’t take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.
Un-bee-leev-ah-bull.
And if Zarqawi is in Baghdad today, as the Veep claims, why aren’t we picking him up today? Is this an admission that we don’t really control Baghdad all that well?
The Bushies needed Zarqawi because his terrorist camps were the only tangible evidence they had of terrorist activity in Iraq. But, as Kaplan says, before the invasion Zarqawi had terrorist training camps in northern Iraq. This was in the area controlled by the Kurds, not Saddam Hussein. A recent CIA report found no conclusive evidence of any connection between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein.
Gwen Ifill brought up this report in the first question:
IFILL: Donald Rumsfeld said he has not seen any hard evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Was this approved—of a report that you requested that you received a week ago that showed there was no connection between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein?
Cheney didn’t mention Zarqawi in his answer, although he did manage to work in “weapons of mass destruction” and “terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon.” The boy doesn’t give up.
Kessler and VandeHei document that Cheney told several more big, whopping, bare-ass lies, while Edwards’s misstatements were more modest. For example, Edwards said Bush had proposed a protection-of-marriage amendment, whereas in fact Bush had just endorsed one. Yeah, big difference.
One Cheney lie was outed by Tim Russert on “The Today Show” this morning. During the debate, Cheney said,
Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I‘m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they‘re in session.
The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.
Russert remembered Cheney and Edwards meeting and shaking hands while off-camera during a 2001 taping of “Meet the Press.” A couple of other prior meetings are documented here. (This little tidbit is getting pretty good coverage this morning. It’s a small, clearly defined episode that the pundits can manage to explain in a couple of sentences, making it a good TV issue. Trying to explain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi takes more effort.)
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