Bush Knew, Bush Lied

Murray Waas has details of yet another secret government memo. This one was on George W. Bush's desk just 10 days after 9/11 (when Rumsfeld and Cheney were already urging an attack on Iraq) and it said, among other things, that there was no link between Saddam and 9/11, or between Saddam and Al Quaeda. So much for that bullshit about everyone having the same intelligence as the White House!

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda...

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

After yesterday backing down from his cliam that debating the reasons for war was unpatriotic, Cheney today kept lashing out at the suggestion that "brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood," calling it "revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety" and saying that "it has no place anywhere in American politics." Of course, Cheney refused to take questions.

WaPo has some media response to that kind of stupidity, with all sorts of well-paid professional writers dancing around the fact that Cheney himself is not just a liar, but a homicidal maniac. Knight Ridder are the only ones making a serious attempt to hold the White House accountable for their daily lies.