More on Al Quaeda and Iraq

Just happened to check in at The Weekly Standard website and I find that I've missed something big which proves the point I made in the previous post about the MSM (Main Stream Media) promoting the fallacy that there were no links between Iraq and Al Quaeda prior to 9/11. Apparently, as reported by Stephen F. Hayes, several anchors on CNN (including Carol Costello and Daryn Kagan, but I've also heard Aaron Brown pontificate on it as well) stated as fact that there is no evidence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda. The problem for Costello was that she was interviewing a member of the House of Representatives, Robin Hayes, who knew better.

There really is no excuse for ignorance of this type. Representative Hayes indicates that there is substantial confidential information showing the connection, but there is also alot of publicly available info, such as the 9/11 Commission Report, that show the same thing. As Stephen F. Hayes explains in his article, other liberal pundits regularly repeat the same canard. And there is much more:

"Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, regularly chides the Bush administration for presenting what he calls fabricated or "fictive" links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The editor of the Los Angeles Times scolded the Bush administration for perpetuating the "myth" of such links. "Sixty Minutes" anchor Lesley Stahl put it bluntly: "There was no connection."

Conveniently, such analyses ignore statements like this one from Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission. "There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." Hard to believe reporters just missed it--he made the comments at the press conference held to release the commission's final report. And that report detailed several "friendly contacts" between Iraq and al Qaeda, and concluded only that there was no proof of Iraqi involvement in al Qaeda terrorist attacks against American interests. Details, details.

There have been several recent developments. One month ago, Jordan's King Abdullah explained to the Arabic-language newspaper al Hayat that his government had tried before the Iraq war to extradite Abu Musab al Zarqawi from Iraq. "We had information that he entered Iraq from a neighboring country, where he lived and what he was doing. We informed the Iraqi authorities about all this detailed information we had, but they didn't respond." He added: "Since Zarqawi entered Iraq before the fall of the former regime we have been trying to have him deported back to Jordan for trial, but our efforts were in vain."

One week later, former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told the same newspaper that the new Iraqi government is in possession of documents showing that Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's top deputy, and Zarqawi both entered Iraq in September 1999. (If the documents are authentic, they suggest that Zarqawi may have plotted the Jordanian Millennium attacks from Iraq.)"

What to make of this? These anchors and pundits are intelligent people who can read, I suppose. So why continue to lie when the facts can be easily checked? My theory is that the left has a script - and these people are just following it. In this script the truth doesn't matter. As long as the Bush Administration, the military, and the Republicans are embarrased and hopefully made impotent, anything that people like Cohen and Stahl says will be acceptable. It's time for this to stop.