June 21, 2004
Surely in the past week or so you've seen the headlines crying out about how wrong Bush was in linking Iraq and al Queda. You saw headlines such as Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie or Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ., and maybe you thought Bush messed up again by moving too quickly or grabbing unverified data.Well, according to William Safire, an NY Times columnist, these headlines are all wrong. In fact, the chairman of the presidential 9/11 panel even confirms that there were ties. He mentions "Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?...Yes...no question." I have to chuckle. We have the liberal media tearing apart the Bush administration for not completely checking all their facts, yet when the data, albeit false, takes their side, they rush to use it. QuĂ© hipocresĂa!
Posted by charr at 2:23 PM
Reader Comments
That's good information to know, because after seeing the headlines, I began to wonder what had really gone on.Oh, by the way, you forgot to close the italics tag and now my comment is in italics and I feel like I need a V8 to stand up straight again. My head is involuntarily leaning to the right.
Thanks Dan. I had forgotten the "/" in the end tag. I hope you can get your life straightened out now.
Yeah, I think the media definitely has an agenda this year: bury anything that makes Bush look good and push everything that makes him look bad. You hear nothing of the good that's happening in Iraq in the media because they're afraid it will help Bush. (Though I did find this article at the Boston Globe online.) And they twist the truth about the 9/11 Commision's findings because it would help Bush.
Jan, thanks for the link. It's a refreshing look at things.
Another example of the liberal press is in this article by the Times. They applaud the efforts to make Iran obey the non-proliferation rules, without really crediting the Bush Administration (though they do mention Washington), while at the same time basically calling the perceived unilateral war in Iraq useless.I can see how some might argue the war in Iraq wasn't worth the costs, but I don't see how you can say it was "not a very useful" pursuit. A family of pernicious dictators has been destroyed, along with their state who has knowingly pursued weapons of mass destruction (and used them I might add). How is that not very useful?"
The way I heard this story on cable TV news is this: the 9/11 committee did not say there were TIES or LINKS to Al Qaida because there weren't any. Rather it used the weaker CONTACTS between Al Qaida and Iraq, to which the person thought he could say yes. I imagined it as 2 guys getting coffee at the bazaar, happening to sit next to each other and saying "Hi." Thus, you have "contact" between Al Qaida and Iraq, but no actual "ties" or "links" which would mean they were actually working together and making plans.
From all the articles I've read, it seems to be a little more than that. The two groups have collaborated at times; just not on the 9/11 plot.
And a report in the NY Times on the new release of a document by the Iraqi National Congress, gathered after the fall of Saddam, shows some of those links.
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That's good information to know, because after seeing the headlines, I began to wonder what had really gone on.Oh, by the way, you forgot to close the italics tag and now my comment is in italics and I feel like I need a V8 to stand up straight again. My head is involuntarily leaning to the right.
Posted by dan at June 21, 2004 5:55 PM