{"id":7003,"date":"2006-03-30T10:11:09","date_gmt":"2006-03-30T15:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7003"},"modified":"2006-03-30T10:11:09","modified_gmt":"2006-03-30T15:11:09","slug":"cheneys-seamless-interweaving-of-fact-and-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/cheneys-seamless-interweaving-of-fact-and-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheney’s seamless interweaving of fact and fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

[tag]Dick Cheney[\/tag] sat down with [tag]Fox News[\/tag]’ Tony Snow yesterday, as part of the conservative pushback against the Dems’ new national security strategy. I realize there’s no real point anymore to fact-checking the Vice President’s remarks — he’s dishonest, we get it — but I was nevertheless struck by how well Cheney can interweave fact and fiction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Snow, in a question that was embarrassing even by Fox News standards, asked Cheney whether the United States “underestimated Saddam’s involvement in the international terror network.” Cheney responded:<\/p>\n

“Well, some of us didn’t. I think there are — there’s been a debate, obviously, and we’ve got a lot of folks who don’t believe that there was any kind of a relationship there between [tag]al Qaeda and Saddam[\/tag] Hussein. I think the record is abundantly clear that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, a prime sponsor of terror. This is the guy who was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers. This is the guy who provided a safe haven for Abu Nidal. The track record there is very clear.<\/p>\n

“George Tenet, Director of the CIA, went before the Senate Intel Committee at one point and said there was a relationship between Iraq and the al Qaeda that went back to the early ’90s. So I think what we’ll find as we get a chance to go through and analyze these documents — there’s some 50,000 boxes of them that are now being made available here over the next few months — that we’ll see a pretty complete picture that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there. And he was legitimately labeled by our State Department as a state sponsor of terror.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As mendacity goes, this is practically award-winning. Notice the effortless juxtaposition between Saddam-al Queda sentences, and broader sentences about Iraq and terrorism in general. Why do too many Americans still believe Iraq had something to do with 9\/11? Because their elected leaders are willing to mislead them like this.<\/p>\n

The implicit inference is that pre-war Iraq had a serious connection to al Queda. For the umpteenth time, all available evidence suggests, at the most<\/i>, there may have been low-level, episodic contact<\/a> between Iraq and al Qaeda. The 9\/11 Commission concluded<\/a> that Saddam and Al Qaeda did not have a “collaborative operational relationship.” Saddam Hussein didn’t try and establish a connection to al Qaeda; he did the opposite<\/a>, warning his Iraqi supporters to be wary of the network. Cheney clearly tried to give the Fox News audience a different impression.<\/p>\n

I genuinely believe the guy just can’t help himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[tag]Dick Cheney[\/tag] sat down with [tag]Fox News[\/tag]’ Tony Snow yesterday, as part of the conservative pushback against the Dems’ new national security strategy. I realize there’s no real point anymore to fact-checking the Vice President’s remarks — he’s dishonest, we get it — but I was nevertheless struck by how well Cheney can interweave fact […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}