Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

It is time for the NY Times to apologize to the President

In an editorial today the NY Times said:

t's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.

Now President Bush should apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different.

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide. While it's possible that Mr. Bush and his top advisers really believed that there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, they should have known all along that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. No serious intelligence analyst believed the connection existed; Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief, wrote in his book that Mr. Bush had been told just that.

However, even the NY Times should know that Richard Clarke said something entirely different in 1998 to justify the hit on the aspirin factory in Sudan.

Then there is this story in a later edition:

Later, Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the commission, and Lee H. Hamilton, the commission vice chairman, sought to parse what the president said.

"What we have found is that, were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq? Yes." Mr. Kean said. "Some of it is shadowy, but there's no question they were there. That is correct. What our staff statement found is there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein in any way were part of the attack on the United States."

Mr. Hamilton said he had "trouble understanding the flak over this."

"The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government," Mr. Hamilton said. "We don't disagree with that. What we have said is what the governor just said, we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these Al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States."

The story buried this info which destroys the papers lead editorial. It followed a lengthy report on the President saying he still believes there is a connection. So the part that shows that the paper jumped to an erroneous conclusion does not even make the lead. Truly shoddy journalism of BBC proportions. It is shoddy for the same reason the BBC blew the story on the dossier, they wanted to believe something that was not so, in order to damage the political posture of those who supported the liberation of Iraq. What we see here is the NY Times leaping at a perceived opportunity to damage the President.

They really did not have to wait for the "clarifying statement. If they had put the original sentence in context as set forth with the remainder of the paragraph in which it was found an applied some logic they would have seen that it was not inconsistent with what the President has said. Then they could have read some of their own prior stories where they quote the President as saying that he was not tying Saddam to the 9-11 attacks.

Apparently the Times is troubled by the fact that many Americans still believe Iraq was behind the attacks. There is some evidence to suggest that, as reported by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard as well as his new book. It is just as inaccurate to say there is no evidence, as it is to say that there is conclusive evidence. That is why the 9-11 Commission used weasel words to state their "conclusion."