Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback;>linking" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback;>linking" bit from the end of the URL.
The Contest.
One Hand Clapping's Donald Sensing has challenged his readers to an essay contest:
I invite you to write up a guest post for me actually demonstrating how the Bush administration actively led Americans to believe that Saddam and the 9/11 attacks were directly linked. I'll post your essay on this site. Yes, I am serious.
There are certain points, and certain people, that I'm not willing to debate. It's not because I concede the points, or fear the people: It's because I don't like wasting my breath. I don't debate members of the Flat Earth Society, for example: I could prove to any reasonable person that the earth is an oblate spheroid, but I couldn't prove it to them. No one can. They're not "reasonable people," in the literal sense; their axioms are so far removed from mine that there's nothing we can do but agree to disagree.
By accepting Donald Sensing's challenge, I'm implicitly granting that Donald is open to reason. Some of my peers may not be willing to grant that—some of my peers may suspect his contest is rigged in Bush's favor from the get-go, since it only allows active liars and direct lies—but in the spirit of public debate I'll give the benefit of the doubt, and assume that Donald is willing to truly consider the facts I put before him.
(Besides, even if I don't win over Donald himself, I may still win some of his audience. One Hand Clapping is in the "Playful Primates" section of the blogosphere ecosystem, whereas my blog is somewhere near the fiddler crab level. If nothing else, I may gain a few readers.)
One last point before I get down to business: With the possible exception of Richard Perle (which we'll discuss), no senior member of the Bush Administration explicitly claimed to have proof of a link betwen Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell or Rice had issued that statement, we'd all remember it; the pressure to share that proof with then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, if not with the United Nations Security Council, would have been overwhelming.
But, if your yardstick for integrity only measures whether Bush explicitly lied about Saddam and 9/11, then I'll assume you had no problem with Bill Clinton's "I didn't inhale" remark: After all, Clinton implied that he'd never taken drugs, but he never explicitly lied about it.
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."
—George W. Bush, September 25, 2002
If you're looking for the Bush Administration official who made the strongest allegation linking Saddam to Osama, look no further than Richard Perle. In September 2002, Perle made this remark to the Italian business daily Il Sole 24 Ore:
"Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn't just there for a holiday."
Perle was presumably in a position to know: As chairman of the Defense Policy Board (a title he held until March 2003), he certainly had more access to classified intelligence than you or I did. Perle's claim was forceful and direct, and he was a leading public figure in the Administration at the time; it's hard to argue that his remark doesn't meet the contest criteria.
At the same time, the circumstances here are puzzling. Perle chose an obscure forum to make such a sensational charge, and the claim was never repeated—it was never retracted, either, but Perle apparently chose never to raise it again. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else in the media or government pursue Perle demanding a public explanation. If Perle had evidence that a September 11 hijacker met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, then he (and, by extension, the entire Administration) invested way too much in protecting that source; they should have risked at least a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting, if not burning the source outright.
One explanation would be a misquote or translation error: Perle may have been repeating earlier rumors that Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, and his words were somehow translated to "Saddam" and "Baghdad" in Italian. But if Perle was misquoted, he had ample opportunity to correct the public record—and he did not.
In any case, Perle's aggressive linking of Saddam and 9/11 was not a one-time event. Perle contributed this blurb to Laurie Mylroie's book Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America:
"Laurie Myroie has amassed convincing evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. If she is right - and there are simple ways to test her hypothesis - we would be justified in concluding that Saddam was probably involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks as well."
History doesn't record whether Perle ever performed the "simple tests" required to prove Saddam's involvement in 9/11—but his comments speak for themselves. Perle actively led people to believe in a direct link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks.
And Perle wasn't the only one. Here's an excerpt from the September 8, 2002 edition of Meet the Press:
Mr. RUSSERT: One year ago when you were on MEET THE PRESS just five days after September 11, I asked you a specific question about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Let's watch:
(Videotape, September 16, 2001):
Mr. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.
(End videotape)
Mr. RUSSERT: Has anything changed, in your mind?
Cheney's 2001 response was the whole truth: "No." We don't have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Bush's statement earlier this month was an echo of that response: We have no evidence. But the statement in between, the one Cheney made in 2002, dances so close to the edge that Cheney has to issue a disclaimer: New information has come to light. A number of contacts over the years. Atta met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.
Let's talk about Prague for a moment. Cheney knew the FBI had found no evidence to support this claim, which the Czechs would fully debunk the following month; it turned out the spy had met with a local used-car dealer who looked a lot like Atta, while the real Atta had remained in Virginia Beach. The Iraqi spy has been in U.S. custody since July 2003, and Bush's "no evidence" statement earlier this month can only confirm that the alleged meeting never really happened.
The best interpretation of this transcript, then, is that Cheney recklessly and willingly took the unconfirmed report of a lone Czech informant as solid information worth disclosing to a national audience. Individually, each of Cheney's statements can be considered factual—"we spent time looking," "we have reporting," etc.—but if Cheney had been telling the whole truth, he would have disclosed that the FBI had found no evidence to confirm the informant's report (and, in fact, had found a lot of evidence that debunked it). Cheney's selective comments deliberately created a false impression, and led the viewer to think the Administration had good reason to suspect Iraqi involvement in 9/11—even as Cheney declined to made a specific allegation.
Changing the channel, we find National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (September 25, 2002):
MARGARET WARNER: Secretary Rumsfeld in Europe today said - and it was a rather cryptic and brief remark - but when asked if there was evidence tying Iraq to al-Qaida - said, yes. He did not elaborate. Are you prepared to elaborate?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al-Qaida going back for actually quite a long time.
We know too that several of the detainees, in particular some high ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al-Qaida in chemical weapons development.
So, yes, there are contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida. We know that Saddam Hussein has a long history with terrorism in general. And there are some al-Qaida personnel who found refuge in Baghdad.
We're learning more because we have a lot of detainees who are able to fill in pieces of the puzzle. And when the picture is clear, we'll make full disclosure about it.
But, yes, there clearly are contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq that can be documented. There clearly is testimony that some of these contacts have been important contacts and there's a relationship here.
Here we have Rumsfeld connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda, and Rice's disclaimer is even weaker than Cheney's. No one is arguing at this point that Saddam was involved with September 11. The story is still unfolding; we'll disclose it later, after we finish interviewing detainees. Rice's message is unambiguous: The Administration isn't ready to claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11 yet, but there is a story to tell here—we're gathering the evidence, filling in the details, and we'll make the arrest shortly.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld and his deputies were linking Saddam to Al Qaeda at every turn. Consider, as a brief sample, Rumsfeld's press briefing from September 26, 2002, his press release from September 27, Paul Wolfowitz's San Francisco Chronicle interview from earlier in the year… as Rumsfeld puts it, the evidence piles up. The Secretary of Defense was engaged in a very active effort to blur the distinction between Saddam and Osama, and to build a direct association between Saddam and the September 11 attacks, in the minds of the American public; it was an effort that created a burst of public support for the Administration and the Iraq war—a burst that, as we've seen, lasted only until the shooting stopped and the rest of the facts came out.
All of these officials made deliberate efforts to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11 in the minds of the American public: They actively led us to reach a conclusion not supported by evidence—and to believe the Administration had, or soon would have, the evidence to back it up. But the evidence never came.
President Bush himself frequently associated Saddam with 9/11. In a Cincinnati speech on October 7, 2002:
"We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."
In a letter to Congress on March 21, 2003:
"I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. "
And in his remarks from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, on May 1, 2003:
Throughout all these statements, Bush and his administration (except for Perle) were careful never to step over the line: They never lied the explicit lie, and claimed they had evidence tying Saddam to September 11. But if Bush wasn't lying in 2002, then he was lying in 2000—in his campaign promises to hold his White House to higher standards of honesty, integrity and accountability. Even Bush's strongest supporters can't be pleased with this outcome: An administration whose public statements can't be taken at face value, and that uses their access to classified information to selectively hide any inconvenient facts.
It's disingenuous to claim that Bush and his team didn't actively mislead the public on Saddam and 9/11. At best this is a contest of semantics, which holds President Bush to the same hair-splitting standard that let Clinton proclaim he never had sex with that woman. Bush's campaign promise was that we wouldn't need to have this debate—a debate where the question is whether the President lied, and the answer is "it depends on what your definition of 'deliberately misled' is."
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