Truth - Al Franken [20]
That’s it. Believe it or not, Fox didn’t mention it all. Neither did the liberals at ABC, CBS, The New York Times, NPR, or PBS. So don’t get me wrong. I’m not accusing Fox of any bias here. I took care of that in my last book. And look what happened.
Once we’d invaded Iraq on false pretenses, you’d think the Bushies would have been satisfied with what they’d pulled off. It was impressive. Clinton hadn’t been able to mislead his country into war, and he was a political master.
So on the day when Bush landed on that aircraft carrier dressed in a flight suit with a stuffed codpiece, most of us expected him simply to crow about how he fooled everyone and then to explain what we were really doing there. Instead, he declared the war over, and mentioned September 11 not once, not twice, but three times. And he mentioned al Qaeda, not twice, not thrice, but four times. I could hardly believe it. He was sticking to his story. When would he give up the ruse?
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.4
In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the eleventh—the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.
Bin Laden must have been furious. Here he had gone to all this trouble to murder thousands of Americans, and Saddam—Saddam, the infidel!—was getting all the credit! Who was the head of al Qaeda?! Who was funding al Qaeda?! Somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border there was a very angry terrorist mastermind that day.
Amazingly, as the months passed and Iraq–al Qaeda connections repeatedly failed to materialize, Bush and his friends in the right-wing media continued to flog them. The Weekly Standard, edited by the nefarious neocon William Kristol, ran an article ironically titled “Case Closed.” The article summarized a memo leaked by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. “Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990’s to 2003,” Feith wrote. “There can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden to plot against America.” His memo contained fifty bullet points of supposed links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
As Newsweek reported, “many of these reports were old, uncorroborated and came from sources of unknown if not dubious credibility, U.S. intelligence officials say.” While the Standard reported this as new information, Newsweek concluded that Feith’s memo was just a collection of “recycled shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts . . . whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraq–al Qaeda connection.”
This didn’t stop the right-wing media from waving the story hysterically whenever anyone pointed out that Bush’s case for war was a mirage. To this day, Sean Hannity, for example, mentions that article an average of 12 million times a show.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known to shorthand enthusiasts as the 9/11 Commission, closed the case on “Case Closed” and filed it in a drawer marked, “Dustbin of History.” As it concluded on page 66 of its Final Report:
The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or