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com "Cheney curses senator over Halliburton criticism... " \_ Poor guy's under a lot of pressure right now, what with being caught lying and all about Iraq / Al Qaeda connections. Here's one, you wilfully ignorant fool: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." He accused them of siding with the "far-right" for asking a non-softball question. At least with Republicans, it takes idiotic criticism night and day to finally see them pop, but with Democratic politicians, anything can make them burst, because of the constant coddling they get. Bush and his crew, despite being accomplished and impressively educated, get called "stupid" by all kinds of Hollywood people who dropped out of high school and college to act. What gave you the idea that the US President controls the world?
I don't think it is fair to say he lost it, but you should at least see it yourself before you make up your mind. Is there a 17 minute clip leading up to Cheney "losing it" we can watch? When there are clips available I'll watch them, when there are full transcripts I'll read them. In this case I really don't think Clinton lost it at all, but yes I have a bias. All it means to me is that this adminstration is feeling the heat a hell of a lot more. The head of the 9/11 commission has said there's no significant difference between what the President and VP are saying and what the commission is saying. What the media jumped on was, "no collaborative relationship" -- the NY Times overstated this by writing "No Iraq-Al Qaeda Tie" in its headline. But there /are/ links between Al Queda and Saddam's Iraq. This is the same big lie that poeple tell WRT illegal immigration. The cell remotely linked with al qaeda was in Kurds autonomous region, outside Saddam's control, protected by US of A \_ The only control Saddam didn't have was air power over certain regions. Heck, about 19 of them were in the United States as they committed a horrible act three years ago. But we can't invade every damn country that's "linked" to Al Queda. If this was a class paper (outside the Sociology department), you'd get an "F" for that line of reasoning.
One dude in a low-level militia is your collaborative link between Iraq and Al Queda? Even Pakistan has high level nuclear scientists doing more collaborative work with them. StoryID=20040620-050700-2315r United Press International 9/11 panel: New evidence on Iraq-Al-Qaida By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor Published 6/20/2004 5:27 PM WASHINGTON, June 20 (UPI) -- The commission investigating the Sept. John F Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida." The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders. Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence. "Shakir is a pretty common name," said terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen, "and even if the two names refer to the same person, there might be a number of other explanations. Perhaps al-Qaida had penetrated Saddam's security apparatus." Analysts say the Fedayeen was not an intelligence unit, but an irregular militia recruited from clans loyal to the regime in the capital, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and in the surrounding Tigris valley area. Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank set up by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, described them to United Press International last year as "thugs and bumpkins." He said the Fedayeen were "at the low end of the food chain in the security apparatus, doing street level work for the regime." Nevertheless, the revelation seems sure to stoke the controversy over the extent of links between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime, links that were cited by the Bush administration as a justification for the invasion of Iraq. On Wednesday, the commission published a staff statement saying that contacts between the regime and al-Qaida "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship" and that, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States." Critics of the Bush administration seized on the comments as evidence that the White House had sought to mislead Americans about the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida. Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, however, continued to stress that the links were extensive. Cheney hinted that the commission did not have all the facts, telling one interviewer that he "probably" had access to intelligence commission staff and members had not seen. Sunday, Lehman acknowledged that, "the vice president was right when he said he may have things that we don't yet have. And we are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence." Democratic panel member Richard Ben-Veniste agreed that the panel should study any more recent intelligence, "If there is additional information, we're happy to look at it, and we think we should get it." Lehman added that the row illustrated the political minefield the commission was trying to tiptoe through in an election year when the focus of their inquiry is such an explosive issue. Everything we come out with, one side or the other seizes on in this election year to try to make a political point on," he said. He pointed out that the Clinton White House had made the same charges the current administration did about the danger that Iraq might pass chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida. Those charges, he said, formed the basis for the missile strikes against alleged terrorist targets in Sudan in August 1998. "The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam's intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development," he said. Commission Vice Chairman Lee H Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, played down the differences between the commission's view and that of the administration. "When you begin to use words like 'relationship' and 'ties' and 'connections' and 'contacts,'" he told ABC's "This Week," "everybody has a little different view of what those words mean. I don't think there's a difference of opinion with regard to those statements. " Chairman Thomas Kean, meanwhile, stressed that the staff statement released Wednesday did not represent the settled view of the whole commission: "These staff reports have come along every now and then in connection with our public hearings. The commission, for instance, does not get involved, the members, in the staff reports. When we do the report itself, that will be a product of the entire commission." He added that there much more evidence of links between al-Qaida and Iran or Pakistan than Iraq, and pointed out that, "Our investigation is continuing. The commission's two days of meetings last week marked their final public gatherings. Congress formed the commission to look into possible US intelligence failures prior to the Sept.
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