I thought we were pretty much past this. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not tied to al Queda — it’s one of the few points that nearly everyone can agree on.
Except Dick Cheney.
The vice president was on National Public Radio this morning, where the urge to say things that are demonstrably false was apparently too strong for him to control.
As the Progress Report explained, Cheney said this morning that “there was overwhelming evidence of a connection with al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.” He stated flatly, “I am very confident that there was an established relationship there.”
This isn’t the first time Cheney has tried to present his fantasies as reality. In September, Cheney went so far as to suggest that there may have been a connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the attacks of 9/11. (Even Bush had to distance himself from this nonsense.)
The fact remains that Hussein and al Queda were not linked in any meaningful way. Even Colin Powell, Bush’s Secretary of State, has acknowledged that there is no “concrete evidence about the connection” between the two.
Indeed, as CAP reported today, documents surfaced last week that showed Hussein shunning al Queda for fear that the terrorists would target him. Also, “CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Queda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam.”
Adding insult to injury, Cheney went on in his NPR interview to say, “We found some semi trailers we think were part of that [Iraqi weapons] program. In my mind, it was a danger to have these in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein.”
You have got to be kidding me. How this man is capable of saying such things with a straight face is beyond me.
Semi trailers? He tried this exact same stunt in September on Meet the Press when he said, “We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack.”
Cheney just isn’t telling the truth — and he must know better. The trailer theory has been thoroughly debunked. Indeed, our government has believed for months that the trailers had nothing to do with WMD. Since finding the mobile labs, the U.S. State Department, British intelligence officials, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency have all concluded that these trailers couldn’t have been used for manufacturing or delivering biological weapons, though Cheney, who lies so casually it’s scary, continues to argue otherwise.
Indeed, the Kay report, the same document cited by Bush in the State of the Union, specifically explained, “We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological weapons production effort…Technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers.”
When Bush says things that don’t make any sense, there seems to be a collective shrug — people don’t expect him to know much, so when he’s completely wrong about the facts, Bush is simply meeting expectations.
But what’s Cheney excuse? As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have one. Cheney just finds it necessary to say things that are patently untrue. It’s simply breathtaking.