Cheney Redux?

Avid pursuit of WMD - anthrax - links with terrorists - be very afraid!

Ah yes, Cheney's favorite fiction: the Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that wasn't. The standard White House lines leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What White House stooge was uttering them on November 28, 2001?



Here's some background for y'all on the allegations that the lead hijacker of 9/11, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi spy in Prague. First a clip of Darth Cheney denying what he'd said earlier:



And some follow-up:

The claim that terrorist leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi spy a few months before 9/11 was never substantiated, but that didn’t stop the White House from trying to insert the allegation in presidential speeches, according to classified documents.

Cryptic references to the White House efforts are contained in a new Senate Intelligence Committee report released last Friday that debunked purported links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, attempts by committee Democrats to make public a more explicit account of White House interest in the anecdote were thwarted when the “intelligence community” refused to declassify a CIA cable that lays out the controversy, according to congressional sources. Democrats charged in a written statement that intelligence officials had failed to demonstrate “that disclosing the [cable] ... would reveal sources and methods or otherwise harm national security.” The Democrats also complained that officials' refusal to declassify the cable “represents an improper use of classification authority by the intelligence community to shield the White House.”

According to two sources familiar with the blacked-out portions of the Senate report that discuss the CIA cable's contents, the document indicates that White House officials had proposed mentioning the supposed Atta-Prague meeting in a Bush speech scheduled for March 14, 2003. Originated by Czech intelligence shortly after 9/11, the tendentious claim was that in April 2001, Atta, the 9/11 hijack leader, had met in Prague with the local station chief for Iraqi intelligence. The sources said that upon learning of the proposed White House speech, the CIA station in Prague sent back a cable explaining in detail why the agency believed the anecdote was ill-founded.

According to one of the sources familiar with the Senate report's censored portions, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, the tone of the CIA cable was “strident” and expressed dismay that the White House was trying to shoehorn the Atta anecdote into the Bush speech to be delivered only days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The source said the cable also suggested that policymakers had tried to insert the same anecdote into other speeches by top administration officials.

--Newsweek
[Emphasis mine]

Cheney. McCain.

Wrong then. Wrong now.

Oh, and while we're all obsessing on economic woes, what might you suppose will be the effects of a 50% unemployment rate? That's the case in Iraq right now. Heckuva job, Dubya.

h/t to Juan Cole at Informed Comment
--the BB