Thursday, March 30, 2006

IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST

This is from NewsMax:

Dick Cheney: Iraq Documents Show Saddam-Osama Tie

Vice President Dick Cheney predicted Wednesday that thousands of boxes of documents captured from Saddam's Hussein's former regime will show that the Iraqi dictator had a much closer relationship with Osama bin Laden than was previously known.

"I think what we'll find as we get a chance to go through and analyze these documents -- there's some 50,000 boxes of them that are now being made available here over the next few months -- that we'll see a pretty complete picture that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there," Cheney told Fox News Radio's Tony Snow.

Asked if he was referring to Osama bin Laden, Cheney replied:

"Yes, we don't know the full scale of it there yet, and I don't want to make a hard and fast prediction here. But there is reporting, obviously, that we've seen over the years that there was some kind of a relationship there between the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden." ...


There you go. Still believe the mainstream-press story that the administration didn't want this stuff out and had to have its arm twisted by Congressman Peter Hoekstra?

I'm still not sure whether these guys are lying or are simply unable to let go of a delicious pipe dream, but this seems like the work of a seasoned liar. Note that Cheney is very, very careful in his wording here. "[S]ome kind of a relationship there between the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden"? Well, yes -- as Peter Bergen put it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of days ago, "Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's, but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation." That qualifies, barely, as "some kind of a relationship." And Cheney adds that "Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there" -- weaseling out by naming no names. (It's true, of course -- he did deal with some pretty nefarious characters.)

Filing a false police report is a crime. Despite the weasel words, in a just world this would be regarded as an impeachable high crime.

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