Reinventing History

Larry Johnson has some evidence that Doug Feith would like to see buried:

Dougie Feith appeared on Faux News Sunday with Chris Wallace today and emphatically denied that he or anyone in his office ever said there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. How sad. Mr. Feith apparently has early on-set Alzheimer's disease. He's forgotten that someone in his shop at DOD leaked his October 2003 memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee to one Mr. Stephen Hayes, an enterprising journalist, who in turn published the breathless findings in the Weekly Standard.

So what? The Weekly Standard is not an official government publication. Why should we take it seriously? Well, let's ask Vice President Dick Cheney. Here's what the Weekly Standard Editor, a guy named Bill Kristol, wrote three years ago:

Editor's Note, 1/27/04: In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank reported that "Vice President Cheney . . . in an interview this month with the Rocky Mountain News, recommended as the 'best source of information' an article in The Weekly Standard magazine detailing a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda based on leaked classified information."

If it is good enough for Dick should it not be good enough for you? Hayes account of the Feith memo pulls no punches and provides no room for ambiguity--Saddam and Bin Laden were in bed together since the early 1990s.

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Not since the glory days of the Stalinist Soviet Union have we witnessed such a bald, audacious, and mendacious effort to reinvent history. Notwithstanding the concerted effort of the neocons to deny any responsibility for the debacle in Iraq, their propaganda campaign, which conflated the threat of Islamic terrorism with the alleged menace of Saddam, was the foundation for going to war in Iraq. No amount of lies disavowing responsibility for whipping up the public anger to go to war by the likes of Feith, Bill Kristol, George Bush or Dick Cheney, can erase the scarlet stain of the blood of American soldiers killed in Iraq because of their folly. Sorry Doug, I remember what you said and did. Run if you must, coward that you are, but the facts on this are clear and unambiguous.