So Rumsfeld said flat-out that he knows of no Iraq link to 9/11. Was there a big front-page story in your newspaper? Did the sound bite make your local TV news? Did you hear this on the radio this morning?

No? Same here.

Well, why not? Why wasn't there a huge above-the-fold headline, RUMSFELD: IRAQ NOT LINKED TO 9/11, in, say, this morning's USA Today?

The groupthinkers in the media will say there's nothing new in what Rumsfeld said. They'll say the administration has never claimed a Saddam-Osama link. Which is true -- but the Bushies have implied the link with nods and winks, over and over and over again, and they're still doing it. As the story I linked notes,

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday, for example, that success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11."

And Tuesday, in an interview on ABC's "Nightline," White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that one of the reasons President Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged."

The press is there to inform us. Guess what? We're not adequately informed. More than two-thirds of Americans think this Saddam-Osama link exists, because of a deliberate Bush administration strategy of disinformation-by-implication.

The Beltway media failed to debunk this -- and that failure is ongoing.