This morning's Times brings a William Safire column that leaps to the defense of the Bush administration's claims about a Saddam/al-Qaida connection and takes issue with the 9/11 Commission's staff report on that topic. Safire, astonishingly, complains that the report "fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks."
Now, if you've followed this issue at all you know that there has indeed been a whole lot of "fuzzing up" of "distinctions," and that it is the hands of the Bush administration that are full of fuzz.
The president, the vice president, the defense secretary and the national security adviser have all served at one time or another as purveyors of this fuzz. They have fastened on three issues: (1) roughly decade-old contacts between al-Qaida and Saddam, in which, as the commission staff report recounts, Osama bin Laden sought bases in Iraq; (2) a report of a meeting in the Czech Republic between 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials; and (3) the presence inside Saddam's Iraq of a radical Islamic group known as Ansar al-Islam that had ties to al-Qaida and an association with a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The Bush administration, and now its apologists like Safire, maintain that points 1, 2 and 3 together constitute "ties" between Saddam and al-Qaida. But here's the fuzz: they completely ignore central contradictory facts. For instance: (1) bin Laden didn't get what he wanted from Saddam -- he was rebuffed. (2) Every credible and careful review of the evidence about Atta's Czech rendezvous has concluded that it never took place. (3) Ansar-al-Islam operated in a part of Iraqi Kurdistan that Saddam did not control, and Ansar, far from being in cahoots with the dictator, wanted to overthrow the Saddam regime -- the Islamic Ansar detested the secular Baathists.
How anyone possessed of the facts can conclude that this body of evidence constitutes "ties" remains a baffling mystery. It's like this: Say a small but vicious band of neo-Aryan white supremacists had approached the Bush administration in early 2001 with a request for federal funding. Say the Bush administration had rejected them. Say these people established some crazy separatist camps in northern Montana on the Canadian border and launched an occasional raid from that enclave. By the logic the Bush administration's claims on the Saddam/al-Qaida question, it would be fair for us to declare, on the basis of these facts, that the Bush administration had "longstanding, significant ties" to neo-Nazis, and that it was "harboring" them.
So, yes, there has been a lot of "fuzzing." Do we think that the 70% of the American public who, at one point over the last year, believed that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks (the number is down in the 50s, according to a variety of polls today) simply arrived at that conclusion on their own, based on independent sources of intelligence that they consulted in their spare time? I don't think so. American voters drew that conclusion because the Bush administration pushed it, at every available speaking opportunity. Bush officials preserved plausible deniability by adopting weasel-word locutions that protected them from the most blatant complaints of lying while preserving the essential charge and establishing the transfer of American outrage at 9/11 from the al-Qaida terrorists who committed the crime to a tinpot Middle East dictator who had nothing to do with it.
Now the administration's leaders are stuck with the feeblest of defenses: When confronted with the facts, they insist that their claims, once asserted as demonstrable truth, are now unfathomable uncertainties -- things that have not been proven, but haven't been disproven, either.
Right. I can assert that, at this very moment, a troupe of small green crustaceans is performing "Brigadoon" on the far side of Ganymede. You can declare that I'm bonkers. And I can say, "Well, I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it!"
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