Category Archives: War on Terror

War Powers

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Jonathan Alter proves that there’s still a free press.

President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. …

… I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

Thirdparty at Kos has some questions about this meeting, here. Alter continues:

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference.

I heard several cable television commenters make this same point throughout the day … we have not been told how the NSA snooping is taking place, only that it is. And certainly terrorists communicating with people inside the U.S. must have realized the feds would likely monitor their emails and phone calls. So how in the world has national security been compromised?

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

Exactly.

The flip side of what Alter says can be found at Protein Wisdom, where Jeff Goldstein quotes Dr. Walid Phares:

The question is clear: Are we or are we not at war with the terrorists?

It’s not a declared war, nor a war of limited duration, which makes extraconstitutional “war powers” of the president problematic. Never before has Article II Section II been interpreted to mean that the President can grab more power for himself whenever he wants for as long as he wants because he thinks it’s necessary for national security. During times of invasion or other emergencies the president temporarily may act without consent of Congress. And, yes, Lincoln and FDR both took on expanded “war powers” during the Civil War and World War II. But the “war on terror” could last generations, and it’s so hazily defined that we cannot agree among ourselves who we are fighting or what “victory” will look like. For these reasons Bush must be held in tighter check than Lincoln or FDR, neither of whom overreached nearly as much as Bush has.

While jihadist cells are constantly spying to find chinks in America’s infrastructure, President Bush’s critics are concerned about how America is watching the terrorists. So far, I haven’t heard a critic asking who are we watching?

Actually, a lot of us have asked who the NSA is watching. And a lot of us suspect it isn’t just alleged terrorists.

And here comes the Big Daddy of straw men:

Or anyone requesting an update as to how many terrorists are within the U.S. So, in sum, they want the government to “catch” the terrorists but not to “watch” them. I must admit that if the 9/11 Commission was right on target regarding some fellow Americans; it is about “lack of imagination.” For till further notice, I am not able to figure out how the U.S. can catch the jihadist terrorists if it doesn’t monitor them.

See, nobody is saying we shouldn’t conduct surveillance. We are saying the surveillance must be conducted within constitutional parameters, and so far the President and his crew have not shown one good reason why they had to go outside FISA to snoop on Americans.

And how can the defense and security institutions monitor an enemy in a state of war, if it provides them with the knowledge and the technology it is using.


But that hasn’t happened. I haven’t seen a single news story that provides information about what technology is being used or how the surveillance is being conducted.

I think this story is going to be with us for a while. Fasten your seatbelts.

Strict Construction?

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Fred Barbash and Peter Baker of WaPo posted this story a short time ago:

President Bush today offered his most elaborate defense yet of his administration’s domestic eavesdropping program, saying he was legally and constitutionally authorized to implement it and obligated to do so in order to protect the country from a new kind of enemy.

In a wide-ranging news conference this morning, Bush said his authority to have the National Security Agency eavesdrop without judicial involvement derived from his inherent constitutional powers as commander in chief as well as from the authorization for the use of military force approved by Congress in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Congress gave me authority,” he said.

The “inherent powers” argument is nonsense, but I think it’s fascinating the “strict constructionists” could have found powers in the Constitution no one ever noticed before. The same people who can’t see, for example, a right to privacy in the 4th Amendment certainly have developed an expansive view of Article II Section II. And they say the Constitution is not a living document. Haw.

It is true that some presidents, notably Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, have claimed extraconstitutional “war powers.” But they did so publicly, not secretly, and they did not claim a right to flat-out ignore the Bill of Rights. I believe the closest example is Lincoln’s famous usurpation of the power of Congress to suspend habeas corpus. He argued that there was an emergency (a massive insurgency and widespread civic violence) and Congress was not in session at the time. He obtained consent of Congress after the fact. See further discussion at Findlaw. But what Lincoln did, agree or not, was very much in public view.

For more on “inherent powers,” see also Armando at Kos, here and here.

As far as the “Congress gave me authority,” argument goes, I can’t see how Congress can give authority to ignore the 4th Amendment, because that’s a power Congress doesn’t have, either. And members of Congress say they did no such thing. “The president has, I think, made up a law that we never passed,” Sen. Russell Feingold said. More here.

Barbash and Baker continue,

He expressed anger at the fact that someone revealed the secret program, saying he assumed the Department of Justice would launch an investigation to determine the source of the leak. “My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this program in a time of war. . . . The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said.

And he was visibly angered when a reporter asked him what limits there were on “unchecked” presidential authority during wartime. “I disagree with your assertion of unchecked power,” Bush said. “There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law for starters. There is oversight. We’re talking to Congress all the time. . . . To say ‘unchecked power’ is to ascribe dictatorial power to the president, to which I object.”

See, there’s what President Bush says, and then there’s what President Bush does. And I think this revelation of the President’s creative “construction” of his constitutional powers should tell the Senate to be very careful about Sam Alito and other Bush judicial appointees.

“President Bush’s acknowledgment that he unilaterally approved domestic spying is the latest piece of evidence supporting complaints that his White House operates essentially unchecked by the legislative and judicial branches,” says Dan Froomkin.

Update: More from Kos and from Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber.

Update update: Digby.

And the Battle Resumed at Dawn

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Georgia10 writes at Kos that on The Today Show this morning, Attorney General Alberto “torture is what I say it is” Gonzales told Katie Couric that the president was granted the power to authorize surveillance by the authorization for war.

Reuters reports,

President George W. Bush’s decision to eavesdrop on people within the United States was backed by the U.S. Congress’ authorization of military force after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Monday.

“There were many people, many lawyers, within the administration who advised the president that he had inherent authority as commander in chief under the Constitution to engage in this kind of signals intelligence of our enemy,” Gonzales said in an interview with CNN.

“We also believe that the authorization to use force which was passed by the Congress in the days following the attacks of September 11th constituted additional authorization for the president to engage in this kind of” electronic surveillance, he said.

Georgia10 shreds this claim nicely, so I don’t have to.

See also: Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Michael Bérubé.

Update: See Ezra K. at TAPPED and Atrios. Short version: What is the White House hiding?

Update update: John Aravosis speculates that the NSA was spying on journalists.

Who Knew?

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It’s hard to tell at the moment, but the righties may be retreating from the “what Bush did was within the FISA law” position. There’s one bitter ender here who is ignoring the point that the surveillance allegedly did involve private communications of American citizens. The “we were wrong” thing does come hard to some folks. But although they haven’t raised a white flag, this morning the righties seem to have redeployed to a new battlefield.

Which is: How many senators knew about the surveillance? And if they knew, why didn’t they speak up sooner?

Yesterday the Associated Press reported that Sen. Harry Reid was briefed on the extralegal surveillance “a couple of months ago,” and “whoever disclosed the existence of the surveillance program should be prosecuted.” This rightie blogger jumped in with “Which means that: (1) Reid ADMITS was informed as soon as he took over Dem Senate leadership from Daschle, (as we should expect); and (2) he accepts that the disclosure of this was a crime.”

Reid took over Dem Senate leadership from Daschle nearly a year ago, not a couple of months ago. Maybe the White House briefers were behind schedule. Should the “leaker” be prosecuted? As I understand the law, the liability falls only on people within the government who disclose classified information. I suspect that whoever let the New York Times know what was going on — “Nearly a dozen current and former officials,” according to Risen and Lichtblau — might be in violation of law regarding classified material, and Senator Reid would have been in violation of law had he disclosed it. The New York Times, however, would not be in violation for printing the story. And once the story was public Senator Reid was free to talk about it.

Please note that I don’t claim to be a lawyer. I could be mistaken.

Shakespeare’s Sister reports that some “media analyst” on Fox News said that senators who are now critical of the program were briefed about it before it started. But there seems to be disagreement on this point. Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer write in yesterday’s Washington Post that

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA’s new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

However,

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers “no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States” — and no mention of the president’s intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

So we’ve wandered into “he said, she said” territory. Dicey.

Risen and Lichtblau report today that

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defended President Bush’s decision to secretly authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking warrants, saying the program was carefully controlled and necessary to close gaps in the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

In Sunday talk show appearances, Ms. Rice said the program was intended to eliminate the “seam” between American intelligence operations overseas and law enforcement agencies at home.

“One of the most compelling outcomes of the 9/11 commission was that a seam had developed,” Ms. Rice said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “Our intelligence agencies looked out; our law enforcement agencies looked in. And people could – terrorists could – exploit the seam between them.”

The article goes on to quote a number of lawyers and security experts who say they have no idea what Rice was talking about. In an emergency, warrants can be obtained in minutes from the secret FISA court, and can even be obtained after surveillance has begun. Either the Bushies are hiding something, or they just don’t like to mess around with paperwork.

This Way to the Gulags II

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James Risen and and Eric Lichtblau report in today’s New York Times that President Bush once again violated the Bill of Rights for the sake of “security.”

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

Let’s see …

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So how is monitoring emails and telephone calls without a warrant not a bare-assed end run around the 4th Amendment?

The Times says “Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”

Get this:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

“Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.” What safeguards? Oh, the same ones that prevent the feds from engaging in torture, operating “black site” prisons, and holding Jose Padilla for 3 1/2 years without bringing charges (see 6th Amendment), just because? Yeah, I’m reassured.

“The number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years.” And includes a lot of Bush’s political opposition, no doubt.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches.

That’s actually funny, if you think about it. It’s not like a crew could sneak up to the Brooklyn Bridge sometime when no one was around and start blowtorching.

What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

Post 9/11 it can’t be all that hard to get warrants if you’ve got any probable cause against somebody. So what’s wrong with getting warrants? Somehow, we limped through all previous wars and even the Cold War without going this far.

“The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation’s intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials.” Then streamline the bureaucracy. Don’t run the Constitution through a shredder.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., “Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?”

“Generally,” Mr. Mueller said, “I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens.” President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

Yeah, who needs those pesky checks and balances? The executive branch needs to have unfettered power to do whatever it wants. That’s the American way.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. “People just looked the other way because they didn’t want to know what was going on,” he said.

This is the path to totalitarianism, you know.

Oliver Willis writes,

There are going to be some folks who say “no big deal”, because in their world it would be okay for the entire CIA to go inside someone’s rectum because the president waved his hands around and said “terrah”. It’s so hard to care anymore.

He’s right. I noticed a number of rightie blogs — some of the same ones who are excited about how we’re bringing “democracy” to Iraq — are busily making excuses for the Bushies. Like we’re too cool to need the Bill of Rights any more.

In the comments to this blog post, someone actually wrote — “If you aren’t doing anything illegal you should have nothing to worry about.” That’s right; the classic line uttered by toadies to totalitarianism throughout history. The lessons of history don’t apply to us, though, because we’re America.

Not any more.

See also: Monitoring books but not guns.

Lies and More Lies

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This morning President Bush gave the last of his four speeches explaining the war in Iraq. So I listened and took notes, and gagged, all the time wishing he would please shut up. It was painful.

Today, he said, I want to talk about why we went into iraq, why we stayed in iraq, why we cannot leave iraq until victory is achieved. Then he proceded to spew out the same bullshit he’s been spewing for the past couple of years, cooked down into an impervious toxic soup.

September 11, September 11, and September 11, he said, taught us that we cannot depend on oceans and friendly neighbors to protect us. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

We had to remove Saddam Hussein because he was a threat to our security, Bush said.

And how, pray tell, was he a threat to our security? He had had weapons of mass destruction, and he had used WMDs. (Yeah, in the distant past. )He had sponsored terrorists (but not al Qaeda), ordered planes patrolling the the no-fly zones to be shot down, he had declared the USA to be his enemy; he had refused to comply with more than a dozen UN resolutions (and this made him a threat to the United States …. how, exactly?).

He deceived international weapons inspectors (and some of those inspectors have some pretty choice words for you, too, toots), and denied them unconditional access for them to do their job (not exactly what Hans Blix was saying on the eve of the March 2003 invasion).

Get this: The Security Council gave him one final chance, Bush said. He refused to comply. Like the Security Council made the decision to invade? I don’t think so. The US did not choose war, the choice was Saddam Hussein’s. Yeah, right.

My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision, Bush said. Breathtaking.

Then he went on for awhile about how we’re trying to build a peaceful and propserous Iraq, but those nasty rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists just won’t cooperate. Same stuff as in the last three speeches.

He compared the democratization of Iraq to the democratization of Japan after World War II, a comparison that fails massively on several levels — I’ve been meaning to get around to blogging about that; maybe today or tomorrow. Then he defiled the hallowed name of Harry S Truman by speaking it with his chimp mouth. I gagged some more.

He reintroduced his favorite, and most maddening, straw man — Some say our presence in iraq has made us more vulnerable to terrorism. These people must believe that if we were not in Iraq the terrorists would be leaving us alone.

Never mind that no one in politics, media, or the blogosphere — surely no one with two brain cells to rub together — actually makes that argument. But Bush carried his straw man further, reminding us of every act al Qaeda has perpetrated since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And of September 11, several times.

Finally (finally!) he got around to sniping at those who — irresponsibly — claim that intelligence was manipulated, or that he had misled us into war. Those people saw the same intelligence I did, Bush LIED, and they authorized the invasion of Iraq. Those people changing their minds is just pure politics.

Wow. Lots of presidents have lied to the American people — most of ’em, actually, at one time or another — but I’m not aware of any other president who has been such a bare-assed, consistent liar even after he’s been caught lying.

The audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC applauded a few times and seemed friendly enough, but Bush didn’t take questions this time.

I’ll keep my eye out for a transcript.

Update: Transcript here. Don’t read on a full stomach.

Busted

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The Associated Press reports that a Swiss lawmaker claims to have evidence that the U.S. is indeed “rendering” detainees outside of any criminal justice system.

A Swiss investigator probing claims of secret CIA prisons in Europe said his committee has evidence that supports allegations that prisoners were transferred between countries and temporarily held “without any judicial involvement.”

“Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards,” lawmaker Dick Marty said in a written report summarizing his investigations so far.

Marty told a news conference he believed the United States was no longer holding prisoners clandestinely in Europe and he believed they were moved to North Africa in early November, when reports about secret U.S. prisons first emerged in The Washington Post. He did not provide any other details.

Stay tuned …

Air-Conditioned Garbage Trucks

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Yesterday I mentioned that Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission, were on Meet the Press. Today they have an op-ed in the New York Times in which they argue the Department of Homeland Security is seriously screwed up.

Billions have been distributed with virtually no risk assessment, and little planning. Nor has the federal government set preparedness standards to help state and local governments use the money wisely. The District of Columbia used part of its grant to buy leather jackets and to send sanitation workers to self-improvement seminars. Newark bought air-conditioned garbage trucks. Columbus, Ohio, bought body armor for fire department dogs. These are not the priorities of a nation under threat.

Since they said a lot yesterday that didn’t end up in the Times, I’m adding a chunk of the Meet the Press transcript, below the fold. Continue reading →

Trigger Happy, Are We?

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Last year Blair talked Bush out of bombing al-Jazeera.

The five-page transcript of a conversation between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveals that Blair talked Bush out of launching a military strike on the station, unnamed sources told the daily which is against the war in Iraq.

The transcript of the pair’s talks during Blair’s April 16, 2004 visit to Washington allegedly shows Bush wanted to attack the satellite channel’s headquarters.

Blair allegedly feared such a strike, in the business district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, a key western ally in the Persian Gulf, would spark revenge attacks.

The Mirror quoted an unnamed British government official as saying Bush’s threat was “humorous, not serious”.

However, another source told the Mirror Bush was serious.

A source told the Mirror: “The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.

“He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.

“There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do — and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.”

Another source said: “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men.”

What can one say but … Jeebus.

Shakespeare’s Sister: “Looks like Instapundit DOES owe Eason Jordan a serious apology.”

Don’t hold your breath.

Serious Matters

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IF it weren’t tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, “We do not torture.” Even as he spoke, the administration’s flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new “black sites” in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region’s Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn’t scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, “We do not torture” – a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib – you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore. — Frank Rich, New York Times, November 13, 2005

It’s a shame the way that Frank Rich minces words. He should just come out and say what he thinks.

He goes on to say that the American people are not buying GOP talking points that the Libby-Rove-Plame investigation is all just politics; polls show that “roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter.” Further, “57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war.”

Frank Rich continues,

The Bush loyalists’ push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don’t see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech – that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence – is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq’s supposed W.M.D.’s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.

And then there was, IMO, the Mother of All Lies —

There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration’s prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.’s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration’s disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.

But…but…but…the White House says they never claimed Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11! Or did they?

This report by David Shuster was on MSNBC yesterday:

…the White House started claiming that Iraq and the group responsible for 9/11 were one in the same.

“The war on terror, you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” said Bush on September 25, 2002.

“We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” said Bush a few days later on October 7. “He’s a threat because he is dealing with Al-Qaeda.”

In pushing the Saddam-Iraq-9/11 connection, both the president and the vice president made two crucial claims. First, they alleged there had been a 1994 meeting in the Sudan between Osama bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence official.

After the Iraq war began, however, the 9/11 Commission was formed and reported that while Osama bin Laden may have requested Iraqi help, “Iraq apparently never responded.”

The other crucial pre-war White House claim was that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech republic in April 2001.

Cheney stated, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”

Confirmed or unconfirmed by Vice President Cheney the 9/11 Commission said, “We do not believe such a meeting occurred.” Why? Because cell phone records from the time show Atta in the United States.

None the less, the White House strategy worked. In March of 2003, one poll found 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.

On the eve of the Iraq war, the White House sent a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that force was authorized against those who, “aided the 9/11 attacks.”

Yet the Bush administration continues to say it never claimed Iraq was linked to 9/11.

“I think I made it very clear that we have never made that claim,” White House Press Secretary McClellan repeated on Sept. 17, 2003.

The brutal irony is that while implications, innuendo, or false claims if you will about a 9/11 connection helped take us into Iraq. The Iraqi war itself has created a real al-Qaeda/Iraq link that may keep us from getting out.

Do you remember the pre-flightsuit, “military” (cough) phase of the Iraq war? Do you remember that a flag that had flown at the Pentagon on September 11 somehow ended up in the hands of a U.S. Marine, who by coincidence was one of the Marines who pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad? The Marines couldn’t actually raise the flag–wouldn’t have looked right, you know–but they could, with much publicity, cover Saddam Hussein’s bronze head with the flag before they pulled the statue down. If Karl Rove wasn’t behind that …

Let’s go back to Frank Rich.

… in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it – Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, “intentionally misleading” Qaeda informant. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 “meeting” between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.

The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed “others” or with the Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed Saddam had been “personally involved” in 9/11; other polls showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis.

The full story of how the Bushies managed to sell this whopper to so many Americans has yet to be told. Of course, that’s not the only story we don’t know in full. Rich writes,

There is still much more to learn about our government’s duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry.

The White House has launched a counter-offensive against its critics. Bushies are wounded and cornered, so they are going to be vicious. Our job is to keep the pressure on, to answer the lies, and to call loudly for investigations. The next few months could be pivotal.