Can a leopard change its spots?

Proving that she has neither lost her touch nor changed course, Condoleezza Rice appeared on the Charlie Rose show last night and lied her ass off.

ROSE: But you didn’t believe it had anything to do with 9/11.

RICE: No. No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.

ROSE: No one.

RICE: I was certainly not. The President was certainly not. … That’s right. We were not arguing that.

Rachel Maddow had some nice audio records and quotes from official documents to rebut this on her show tonight.

We know there were no links between Iraq and Saddam on the one hand and al Qaeda and 9/11 on the other. Dubya eventually admitted as much. But not from the beginning. Oh no. The whole Bush Gang pushed the theme repeatedly to build that link in the public consciousness, so patriotic soliders were eager to go to Iraq to revenge 9/11. Except, of course, for the inconvenient fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. A vast percentage of the populace still thinks it did.

We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after 11 September, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there's a reason. We've experienced the horror of 11 September.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a presentation to the UN Security Council, setting out the US case against the Iraqi regime, February 2003. [BBC]

Putting the case for invading Iraq to Congress:

A letter from the White House to the House Speaker on March 18, 2003, read:

“(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

And this:

Rice was no exception either. On Sept. 15, 2002, she said that Saddam had “links to terrorism [that] would include al-Qaeda.” As late as September 2006, she remarked, “there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade.”

Jon Perr at Crooks and Liars comments:

Of course, as ThinkProgress detailed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney throughout 2002 and 2003 warned of the mythical alliance between Saddam and Bin Laden. For example, on October 14, 2002, Bush announced that "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." On the eve of the war, the President told Americans that Iraq "has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." And as hostilities commenced, Cheney on March 21, 2003 decried Iraq as the "geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

As I documented back in June 2005, President Bush continued to nurture the false Iraq connection to 9/11 long after he grudgingly admitted on September 17, 2004 that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Bush's intentional conflation of the two included the amazing June 18, 2005 statement that "we went to war [with Iraq] because we were attacked." By December 2008, Bush's linkage had morphed into the "risk we could not afford to take."

Condi, Dick the Dick, Dubya, and their minions are currently all busy trying to re-write history and toss the inconvenient facts of which we are aware into the memory hole.

We must not let them get away with it.

Anyone else remember how brazenly Condi used to lie to Congress? And how incensed she gets when anyone questions her putative "integrity"? Hah, as if the [expletive deleted] had any.

Need I mention that this needless, counterproductive, illegal, and immoral invasion and occupation is really much, much larger than the AIG scandal?



Nürnberg, indeed, Göran.
--the BB