http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/24/gore.bush/
Gore rips Bush on al Qaeda-Saddam link
RNC cites 'history of denial' in response

Friday, June 25, 2004 Posted: 10:36 AM EDT (1436 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore accused the Bush administration Thursday of misleading the American people by claiming a strong connection between Saddam Hussein and the terror group al Qaeda.

"Beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind," Gore said.

Bush and Cheney created a false impression in the minds of American people that the former Iraqi leader and al Qaeda, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were working together, Gore said at the Georgetown University Law School.

(snip)

This month, the independent commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks said it found "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection beyond preliminary meetings that led nowhere. But neither Bush nor Cheney have wavered from their earlier statements.

"They dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever," Gore charged.
GOP response

(snip)

Gore said media who challenge Bush and Cheney's claims of a link are intimidated by the administration.

"The administration works closely with a network of rapid-response digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for undermining support for our troops," Gore said. The term "Brown Shirts" refers to Nazi supporters in the 1930s and '40s.

"The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another.

"But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison," Gore said, referring to the prisoner-abuse scandal.

"F**k it. We're going in."

Sometimes you come across a disconnect so profound it almost gives you whiplash.

The cover story in this morning’s New York Times Magazine, by Peter Baker, presumably an excerpt from his upcoming book, concerns Bush’s final days in office, and the beginning of the article focuses on the McCain campaign’s attempt to distance itself from this most unpopular president. At the end of the first section, Mark Salter, McCain’s campaign advisor, says this about the President: “You feel bad for the guy if you think about it.” This leads to the first line of the second section:

George Bush does not want anyone feeling bad for him.

Allow me to back up for a second. Yesterday I came across the money portion of Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World. Suskind is writing about all the end-arounds the Bush administration performed in the lead-up to the Iraq war: ignoring George Tenet and the CIA to get the 16 words into the State of the Union address; using the CIA chief of station for Germany to muzzle German fears about the unreliability of Rafid Ahmed, or “Curveball,” who was feeding the administration misinformation about Saddam’s biological weapons operation; and, finally, not just ignoring but actually reversing the findings of the CIA Paris chief, who was told, in a clandestine meeting with Naji Sabri, Saddam’s last foreign minister, that Saddam didn’t possess WMD.

Then Suskind gets to the big one. In a casual conversation with an American intelligence officer in a Washington restaurant, and subsequently confirmed in face-to-face meetings with the former director and current assistant director of MI6, Suskind discovers that the Bush administration knew Saddam didn’t possess WMD before they went to war. They didn’t suspect. They knew.

In the months before the war, it seems a British agent, Michael Shipster, met with the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, who confirmed everything we subsequently found to be true: Not just that Saddam didn’t have WMD but why he was unwilling to say so publicly. And it all made sense. Here’s Suskind talking with the unnamed American intelligence officer:

I ask if the intelligence was passed to CIA and the White House.
“Of course. Passed instantly, at the very highest levels.”
“And what did we say,” I ask. “Or, I guess, what did Bush say?”
“He said, Fuck it. We’re going in.”

Don’t know if that’s a direct quote or not. Either way, it’s probably a good thing George Bush doesn’t want anyone feeling bad for him.