There was an interesting little news item in Wednesday's paper, tucked among the stories about the Pistons' championship, the impending sale of Motor City Casino, and the assassination of yet another luckless Iraqi bureaucrat.
The item said the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 attacks on America had concluded -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- that there's every reason to believe the president of the United States was lying through his teeth when he suggested the existence of a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and the government of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Now, it wasn't so long ago that such an embarrassing exposure of presidential perfidy would have piqued the public's interest for a couple of news cycles -- or at least until the next quarter-turn in the Laci Peterson saga.
So a reasonable person has to wonder: Why aren't responsible leaders in both parties -- those who care about their country and its credibility in the world -- calling for George Bush's resignation?
Too little sex, too much smoke
There are a number of reasons why the latest example of presidential prevarication hasn't elicited much outrage:
1) Nobody expects the president of the United States to tell the truth about something as personal as his reasons for going to war.
2) Nobody with the brains God gave tapioca pudding ever believed there was a Saddam-Osama connection in the first place.
3) It's not as though the precise details of any strategic relationship that may or may not have existed between two of America's most implacable enemies are important -- or at least not as important as the precise details of a sexual relationship between the president and one of his employees would be.
4) How 'bout them Pistons?
There's also the fact that the Bush White House has been sophisticated in putting up its Saddam-Osama smoke screen. There's been nothing as egregiously impeachable as "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" -- just a steady stream of innuendo about "close ties" and "high-level contacts" between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Connecting the dots
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush asserted in a press conference six months before the invasion of Iraq. And if fully half the American public leaped to the erroneous conclusion that Iraq bore some responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, well, that wasn't the president's fault, was it?
One is reminded of Samuel Butler's observation that "the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."
It sickens me to write these words, because I am one of those who gave Bush the benefit of the doubt -- one of the many Americans who, however much we may have disagreed with him on a dozen other issues, simply could not bring ourselves to believe that any president would mislead his constituents about so important a matter, or be so cynical about exploiting the emotional dynamite of 9/11.
As for Bush's insistence that there is no direct contradiction between his vague assertions of a Saddam-Osama connection and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was never any cooperation between the two, well, that depends on what your definition of "is" is, doesn't it?
The bottom line is that this president's pants are on fire -- again.
And that's an outrage worth our attention, even if it is becoming old news.
When the commission studying the 9/11 terrorist attacks refuted the Bush administration's claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, we suggested that President Bush apologize for using these claims to help win Americans' support for the invasion of Iraq. We did not really expect that to happen. But we were surprised by the depth and ferocity of the administration's capacity for denial. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have not only brushed aside the panel's findings and questioned its expertise, but they are also trying to rewrite history.
Mr. Bush said the 9/11 panel had actually confirmed his contention that there were "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said his administration had never connected Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Both statements are wrong.
Before the war, Mr. Bush spoke of far more than vague "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with weapons training, bomb-making expertise and a base in Iraq. On Feb. 8, 2003, Mr. Bush said that "an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990's for help in acquiring poisons and gases." The 9/11 panel's report, as well as news articles, indicate that these things never happened.
Mr. Cheney said yesterday that the "evidence is overwhelming" of an Iraq-Qaeda axis and that there had been a "whole series of high-level contacts" between them. The 9/11 panel said a senior Iraqi intelligence officer made three visits to Sudan in the early 1990's, meeting with Osama bin Laden once in 1994. It said Osama bin Laden had asked for "space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded." The panel cited reports of further contacts after Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, but said there was no working relationship. As far as the public record is concerned, then, Mr. Cheney's "longstanding ties" amount to one confirmed meeting, after which the Iraq government did not help Al Qaeda. By those standards, the United States has longstanding ties to North Korea.
Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush used to refer to Mr. Zarqawi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner" who was in Baghdad working with the Iraqi government. But the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.
When it comes to 9/11, someone in the Bush administration has indeed drawn the connection to Iraq: the vice president. Mr. Cheney has repeatedly referred to reports that Mohamed Atta met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent. He told Tim Russert of NBC on Dec. 9, 2001, that this report has "been pretty well confirmed." If so, no one seems to have informed the C.I.A., the Czech government or the 9/11 commission, which said it did not appear to be true. Yet Mr. Cheney cited it, again, on Thursday night on CNBC.
Mr. Cheney said he had lots of documents to prove his claims. We have heard that before, but Mr. Cheney always seems too pressed for time or too concerned about secrets to share them. Last September, Mr. Cheney's adviser, Mary Matalin, explained to The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney had access to lots of secret stuff. She said he had to "tiptoe through the land mines of what's sayable and not sayable" to the public, but that "his job is to connect the dots."
The message, if we hear it properly, is that when it comes to this critical issue, the vice president is not prepared to offer any evidence beyond the flimsy-to-nonexistent arguments he has used in the past, but he wants us to trust him when he says there's more behind the screen. So far, when it comes to Iraq, blind faith in this administration has been a losing strategy.
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