Speaking of being stripped

The July 5 issue of "Newsweek" informs us that

[a] captured Qaeda commander who was a principal source for Bush administration claims that Osama bin Laden collaborated with Saddam Hussein's regime has changed his story, setting back White House efforts to shore up the credibility of its original case for the invasion of Iraq.

The man in question is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in November 2001. Under "aggressive interrogation techniques," he told US agents that Iraq had provided training in "poisons and deadly gases" for al-Qaeda. Secretary of State Colin Powerless played up those claims in his prewar presentation to the UN Security Council, asserting that

a bin Laden operative seeking help in acquiring poisons and gases had forged a "successful" relationship with Iraqi officials in the late 1990s and that, as recently as December 2000, Iraq had offered "chemical or biological weapons training for two Al Qaeda associates."

Only one small problem: The story is very likely untrue and al-Libi just made it up to please his captors.

[M]ore recently, sources said, U.S. interrogators went back to al-Libi with new evidence from other detainees that cast doubt on his claims. Al-Libi "subsequently recounted a different story," said one U.S. official.

More bluntly, he recanted. Which may be why the "poisons and deadly gases" business has disappeared from White House arguments, right along with WMDs in every garage and bin Laden having a PO box in Saddam Hussein's palace. Interestingly - and I think significantly - while the original story was emphasized, its retraction by its source has never been officially acknowledged.

And after all, why should it be? After his fantasies about WMDs and missiles were exposed as just that after Saddam was booted, Ahmed Chalabi shrugged and said that it really didn't matter if his information was wrong because it "was in a good cause." The White House, it seems, feels that same way: So what if we lied, so what if we deceived, so what if we were wrong, so what if yet another of our claims has turned out to be bogus? It worked. That's all that matters and we will never, ever admit to having gotten any of it wrong.

Footnote: There are predictions that the White House will do a "document dump" before the election to try to establish that there was a "relationship" between al-Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq. However, the White House has so far defined "contacts" and "relationship" as synonymous - which of course they are not, so any claims made in the run-up to November should be doubted even before they're made.

Moreover, the 9/11 Commission said there was no "collaborative relationship" between al-Qaeda and Saddam. "Collaborative" is of course the operative and, I expect, deliberately chosen word. (Col-lab-o-rate, intr.v. To work together.) That is yet another step removed from the Bushites line. In the wake of that assertion, the WHS* ran two lines of defense: One that the Commission was wrong, there was a "relationship" (although, interestingly, I don't recall any of them specifying a collaborative one), and the other that there really was no conflict between what they said and what the Commission said. Those two arguments are of course mutually contradictory, but again, that doesn't matter to them as long as it works.

So do look for a document dump and do look for the same sorts of word games and sneaky parsing of phrases. Just bear in mind that being in contact with someone has nothing to do with working with them - or even approving of them, for that matter.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths