Bush War Lies #20

This comes to us from The Nation's coverage of the president's recent press conference:

The question was not what new evidence Bush had to back up his previous allegations. The question was whether those earlier allegations had been supported by any evidence when Bush was using them to rally popular support for war. For months prior to the invasion, Bush repeatedly charged that Saddam Hussein was directly in cahoots with al Qaeda. That was supposedly why the Iraqi dictator could be considered a direct and imminent threat to the United States. In November 2002, Bush claimed that Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda. In February 2003, he said that Hussein was "harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner." Days before the invasion, Dick Cheney cited Hussein's "long-standing relationship" with al Qaeda.

What intelligence did Bush and Cheney have to make such alarming statements? That's the evidence the reporter was asking about. The indications so far are that Bush had bupkis. Richard Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading an internal review of the CIA's prewar intelligence, said a few weeks ago that the agency prior to the war had uncovered no proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Hussein's government. Representative Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House intelligence panel, which is conducting its own inquiry, has noted that the intelligence produced before the war contradicted Bush's claim of a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda. And The Washington Post has reported that the October 2002 NIE maintained there was no intelligence showing a clear connection between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's outfit. (The White House has released eight pages of that 90-page report, but not--fro some reason--the pages on this topic.)

Back to the original question: can you, Mr. President, offer any evidence to support those inflammatory assertions you made before the war? At the press conference, Bush did not respond directly. Instead, he offered a weasel-worded answer about the ongoing search for information in Iraq and the need to be patient. But he should already have evidence to cite because he already has made the charge. It was so Red Queenish ("sentence first--verdict afterward"), except Bush's philosophy is, allegation first--evidence afterward. Asked to prove he had not lied to the public before the war, Bush would--or could--not do so.