Backpeddling!
Wesley Clark officially joined the race for president today. And as I noted of worth yesterday, Clark was the one to reveal that someone in the Adminstration had called him the day he was going on CNN after the events of 9/11 to persuade him to link Iraq into Al-Qaeda and the tragedy.
This afternoon, right after Clark's announcement, Bush makes a special press conference to say that Saddam had nothing to do with the events of September 11th. See the AP article by Terence Hunt titled Bush: No Proof of Saddam Role in 9-11.
Coincidence? I don't think so. I feel Bush knows he and his people are hanging on the shorter end of the rope these days. Bush knows the song Rumsfield, Cheney, and Wolfowitz were singing after 9/11 and the build-up to the Iraq war.
But give it to a clever Bush and party to know that if they simply come out with revealing part of the lie--we meant to say that Saddam had ties with Al-Qaeda but not with 9/11--then when the possible time comes in the future when Clark calls them on that telephone call, Bush will be able to say that the information was, indeed, legitimate.
Robert Scheer, in his damning article to Salon titled When Corrections Need Correcting, writes this about the corrections coming out for the lies:
The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness....Even [a] correction needs correcting.
If you liked that quote, try these choice paragraphs:
So, Wolfowitz and the administration might prove to be right after all. Not about Iraq's ties with bin Laden before the invasion. Nor about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction the president used to scare up support for war. But by turning its claim that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Without this claim, the president's men would be revealed as imperial adventurers who wasted the lives and resources of this country to redraw the map of the world. That scheme, including "preemptive military intervention," can be traced to a "Defense Planning Guidance" document prepared by Wolfowitz in 1992 when he was Cheney's undersecretary of defense for policy.
Thus, it was not too surprising that the bodies recovered after the 9/11 attacks were barely in the ground before Cheney and Wolfowitz were arguing that a proper response to 9/11 was to go after Iraq -- whether or not Iraq had anything to do with the plot. They were willing to say anything to convince us they were right, even trying to sell this as a war without cost.
And I like Scheer's closing remarks about this Administration's incredibly gross underestimation of reconstruction costs for Iraq:
In March, one week into the war, Wolfowitz told Congress, "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." Now we find that Iraq can't pay for its own reconstruction and since we went to war unilaterally, defying world opinion, we are unlikely to persuade anybody else to chip in.
Last week, a Washington Post poll showed that 60 percent of the American people opposed the president's plan to throw $87 billion more into this quagmire, on top of the $79 billion budgeted already. Perhaps, like people blinking in the sun after a long hibernation, Americans are finally awakening to the stupid and craven things being done in the name of our protection.
Another excellent article on the lies regarding the connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda can be found at LiberalOasis; the blog is titled Iraq-Qaeda Backtracking and was posted today, September 17th.
Also check out the excellent blog at The Agora. Doug Anders focuses on Cheney's prevarications on Iraq, 9/11, and Al-Qaeda.
Excellent articles about the arrival of Wesley Clark on the scene can be found at Salon. Joe Conason's Journal for September 16th and 17th; and their feature article today, titled Wesley Clark: The New Howard Dean? by Eric Boehlert.
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