If that don't cap the climax

Updated This is a most pathetic moment of a most pathetic administration. This even tops the "we never said 'imminent'" business.

(Sidebar: Actually, Donald Rumsfeld said it twice in regard to the "threat" from Iraq, but never mind.)

In response to the finding of the 9/11 Commission that there is "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States" and that the two did not have "a collaborative relationship," Shrub and The Big Dick are whining and bawling that they never said there was and that the media is just being a big mean old bully.

Of course, they didn't gripe about the media confusing people when in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War

a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that an overwhelming 88% of the public believed Saddam Hussein supported terrorist groups that had plans to attack the USA.

Or when last September nearly 70% expressed a belief that Saddam had a role in 9/11, the very role the White House vociferously denies ever claiming - and, to be fair, did deny, if only in passing. (The belief, while weakened, persists: A CBS/New York Times poll done in late April shows 1/3 of the public still clinging to the notion.) But that was then. This is now.

Thus from Bush we get

"This administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida," Bush said Thursday after meeting with his Cabinet at the White House.

Meanwhile, Cheney,

who was the administration's most forceful advocate of the Qaeda-Hussein links, [said] that The New York Times' coverage yesterday of the commission's findings "was outrageous."

So it's no matter what the 9/11 Commission said. It's no matter what the investigation found. No, it doesn't matter at all, they cry, stamping their feet and pouting. There were ties, a "relationship" - and beside, when we said there were ties and a relationship, we didn't mean there were ties and a relationship, we just meant there were, well, ties and a relationship.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush said.

Or, put another way:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Okay, in that case, given that words like "ties" and "relationship" apparently are to mean whatever the Bush gang wants them to mean as a given moment, what are they saying is the basis of their claims?

The sole example [Bush] cited of "numerous contacts" between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda was a meeting between a senior Iraq intelligence agent and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, one that the commission said appeared to have gone nowhere,

says the June 18 New York Times. Not very impressive on the Humpty side. What about Dumpty? As usual, he was more aggressive.

Mr. Cheney has also continued to cite a disputed report that Mohamed Atta, a ringleader of the hijacking plot, met in April, 2001, in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, raising the possibility of a direct tie between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks....

He also rang in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who supposedly got medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002 which meant he was given "sanctuary" there.

Now of course, first off, meetings mean nothing. Just consider that by that same logic, the US has ties to and relationships with all kinds of weird, bizarre, and horrific regimes. I mean, if exchange of letters, if a couple of meetings, is all that's required for a "relationship," the US has a longstanding one with North Korea. In fact, for years and years, we not only had ties to, we had a "collaborative relationship" with the Evil Empire of the communist Soviet Union! (After all, we did cooperate on a few projects.) And a very close collaboration with Saddam Hussein! And the Taliban and the rest of the mujahedeen! And we have one today with the communist Chinese! And Uzbekistan! Omigosh! We are clearly a central front, a central player, in the war against freedom!

Oh no, but that's not true, of course, that's different. How? Well, it just is, that's all. So say Humpty and Dumpty.

As for the rest of the "ties," Cheney resorted to maintaining the idea of them by demanding of others that they prove a negative, saying for example of the Prague meeting that it has "never been proven ... never been refuted." The argument thus comes down to "unless you can positively prove this meeting never happened, we're free to hint at an al-Qaeda-Iraq connection." Well, I say that Dick Cheney is actually from the planet Xerion, here to lay the groundwork for an invasion and that he's the creation of a technology so advanced that it can duplicate human DNA. Prove to me he's not. (As a more practical example, I was once tangentially involved in a tax case involving a man who had been charged with possessing contraband. After he was acquitted, the IRS slapped a tax levy on the alleged contraband, putting him in the impossible position of having to prove he did not possess any.)

That's not really necessary, though, because as Cheney is apparently the last to know, it's highly unlikely this meeting ever took place.

The commission report released on Wednesday concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred," citing phone records and other evidence that Mr. Atta had been in Florida at that time, not Prague.

What's more, the US was told that as far back as October, 2002.

The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials.

That from Why War?, quoting the New York Times for October 21, 2002.

As for Zarqawi, as has repeatedly been noted, he's actually an independent agent, head of his own organization, and "an associate" of Osama bin Laden only in the sense that they have talked. In fact,

the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.

What's more, his "sanctuary" in Baghdad consisted entirely of hospital treatment for a wound he received in Afghanistan, for which a leg was supposedly amputated. That is, if the episode occurred at all.

As it turns out, the report of medical treatment wasn't even credible to begin with. According to U.S. intelligence, Zarqawi had a leg amputated in Baghdad. Except that most sources now believe Zarqawi is equipped with two working legs. As Newsweek colorfully put it in early 2004, "The stark fact is that we don't even know for sure how many legs Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi has...."

In short, Cheney is either willfully ignorant or an outright liar.

I go with the latter since the whole underlying claim that the administration had never proposed anything more than ill-defined ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda is itself a lie, as the New York Times noted in an editorial on Saturday.

Before the war, Mr. Bush spoke of far more than vague "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with weapons training, bomb-making expertise and a base in Iraq. On Feb. 8, 2003, Mr. Bush said that "an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990's for help in acquiring poisons and gases."

In fact, on September 26, 2002, ABC News reported that

[t]he United States has long charged Saddam Hussein with supporting terrorism, but the Bush administration is now alleging something new - what one official called a "current, symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda.

President Bush appeared in the Rose Garden today with members of Congress who support him on Iraq and accused Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of essentially the same crime he charged the Taliban with: harboring al Qaeda terrorists. ...

"In particular some high ranking [al-Qaeda] detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical weapons development. So, yes, there are contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

And a whole year later, September 29, 2003, the Washington Post was able to headline an article "Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney."

So the assertion that the Bushites never claimed a link between Iraq and 9/11 is a lie. The assertion that there is only a semantic difference between White House statements and the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda is a lie. The tie to Zarqawi is a lie. It's all lies.

Give them credit: The lies for the most part have been clever ones, word games, associations hinted at but not actually asserted and therefore deniable. In fact, Bush did it again in trying to weasel out of the effects of the Commission's staff report:

"He (Saddam) was a threat because he was a sworn enemy to the United States of America, just like al-Qaida," Bush said.

That's it. Just hint. Always say both of them in the same sentence, the same breath. Equate them. One is "just like" the other. Enemies. Both. The same. Blend them. So they're the same. Aren't they? This is exactly what they did in the months leading up to war: Don't claim a connection, just vaguely suggest one by your phrasing and do nothing to disabuse people when they get the wrong idea you wanted them to get, and certainly don't denounce the media as "outrageous" when they report it that way and when repeated polls say people believe you said the very thing you claim you never did.

But maybe, just maybe, just maybe this time they went too far. After The Big Dick asserted in a television interview on Thursday that he "probably" knew things about Iraq's supposed links to terrorism that the 9/11 Commission didn't,

[t]he leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession....

To put it a little less diplomatically, they're telling Cheney to put up or shut up. I expect he'll do neither. But the Commission has been stubborn about some things before, maybe, hopefully, this will prove to be another case. I have my doubts, as the Commission is already showing signs of looking for a way out, which may have been behind the ferocity of the assaults on the report.

Commission members said Friday that as result of the furor created by that portion of the report, they may rewrite it significantly in preparation of the panel's final report, which is expected to be released next month.

Mr. Kean suggested that the commission may want to limit the scope of the conclusion about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq to only what is known about any possible collaboration between them on terrorist attacks against the United States, not against other targets.

"That's our mandate," he said. "This was a staff statement, and we've had commissioners who have disagreed occasionally with the staff statements, and this may be one of those occasions," he said.

A statement thusly more narrowly-focused would allow the Bushites ample room to continue to spin their fantasies, which is clearly what they desire. But even in that case, if the final report is as sharp as the facts indicate it should be in its rejection of the claims of a threat to the US arising from an Iraqi link to terrorism, it would still be a great service to the truth. What truth? Try this:

One outside adviser to the White House said the administration expected the debate over Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda to be "a regular feature" of the presidential campaign.

"They feel it's important to their long-term credibility on the issue of the decision to go to war," the adviser said. "It's important because it's part of the overall view that Iraq is part of the war on terror. If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it's part of the war on terror. If it's not part of the war on terror, then what is it - some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?"

Well, yes.

Footnote: The text of the entire staff report on contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq can be found in .pdf format here.

Updated to correct a statement which in the fourth paragraph. It originally referred to a January poll showing a majority believing that Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11. I recalled such a poll but I've not been able to find an account of it; it's possible that I confused it with a more general question about Iraq support for al-Qaeda rather than Saddam's direct involvement in 9/11. The polls linked in the sentence as it stands do refer to that specific issue.