CABL Forum - Re: I Don't Care

OK. I said I'd stop, but we seem to be keeping this civil. Show me some quotes where the Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein had anything to to with 9/11. You are correct--terrorists in Iraq weren't blowing up roadside bombs before we got there. They didn't have to. Anybody who was viewed as a threat to Saddam or any of his cronies before that was just gassed or beheaded. I'm not going to buy the claim that there weren't terrorist camps in Iraq before we invaded, either. And didn't Saddam offer rewards to Palestinian suicide bombers' families? So...in effect we did have a terrorist problem in Iraq before we got there.
Here are some comments from senior members of the Administration on not-so-conservative talk shows.

NSC Advisor Condoleeza Rice remarked one year after the attacks in a “NewsHour” interview, “No one is trying to make an argument at this point that Saddam Hussein somehow had operational control of what happened on September 11.” Similarly, only two moths before the Iraq war, President Bush, in
response to a reporter’s question as to whether Iraq was involved with the attacks, stated simply: “I cannot make that claim.”
Meet the Press, September 16, 2001
Tim Russert: “Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?”
Vice President Cheney: “No.”
Meet the Press, September 8, 2002
Tim Russert: “Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to [9-11]?”
Vice President Cheney: “No.”
Tim Russert: “Has anything changed, in your mind?”
Vice President Cheney: “Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I’m not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can’t say that.”
Tim Russert: “Anything else?”
Vice President Cheney: “I want to separate out 9/11, from the other relationships between Iraq and the al Qaeda organization.”
Tim Russert: “But no direct link?”
Vice President Cheney: “I can’t — I’ll leave it right where it’s at. I don’t want to go beyond that. I’ve tried to be cautious and restrained in my comments, and I hope that everybody will recognize that.”
Meet the Press, September 14, 2003
Tim Russert: “The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks.
Are you surprised by that?”
Vice President Cheney: “No, I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection.”
Tim Russert: “But is there a connection?”
Vice President Cheney: "We don’t know.”
Capital Report, June 17, 2004
Gloria Borger: “Was Iraq involved?”
Vice President Cheney: “We don’t’ know.”

One final note, directly from a different article from Bernard Weiner...the author of the Clearing House piece, stating "what Bush should have said":
"We may not be able to influence those in al Qaeda – clearly, they are, in their political/religious frenzy, dedicated to mass-murder and mayhem in their desire to destroy the "infidel" West – but, by changing our policies, we may help alter the chemistry of the soil in which future terrorism would grow. That, along with wiping out the al Qaeda terror network, is the best thing we can do to protect our country and help make for a better world."

Besides the fact that I love "we may not be able to influence al-Qaeda"--there's a newsflash--we shouldn't focus solely on them either. We need to wipe out the entire terrorist network. After we bombed the hell out of Afghanistan, which was fully supported, it's pretty common knowledge that al-Zarqawi fled briefly to Iran, and then set up shop in Baghdad. So, if Mr. Weiner, the anti-war activist that he is, still lays claim that we should "wipe out the terror network", does that not include al-Zarqawi, his network in Iraq, and any other terrorists from any other network that want to come after us there? Or should we wait to destroy them after they attack us again?

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Re: I Don't Care