That's Chrissy Matthews' complaint, too. He has conceded the administration never tied Saddam to 9/11, but he maintains by asserting the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda they deliberately misled the public.
Keith Olberman claims the administration is playing a parsing game. It seems plain enough to me, what they've been saying--and parsing it is not. I thought Olberman, biased as he is, was brighter than that. But with Clinton the scene lately, I figure Keith wants to play "everybody does it".
I guess Chris wants them to disavow a connection that in fact existed? I, for one, will not keel over from shock if reliable evidence that Saddam participated in 9/11 emerges.
And unlike these media entities, I listened to President Bush and understood hiim when he first articulated the Bush Doctrine.
While you are right that a direct link to Saddam and 9/11 wouldn't be a shock, the fact is that Bush has deliberately avoided connecting the two. When Bush said..."We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them," he was clearly putting Saddam into this special box. It was the media who ignored these peripheral ties...when they were the very ones making them less than 4 years ago.
The fact is, it is the media that has misrepresented and flat out lied about everything this administration has said. From the "16-words," were they directly attributed to Bush a British Intel report (which they still stood by) to their claims that Bush labeled Saddam an immenent threat when he said just the opposite...and that we couldn't wait "until" Saddam became an immenent threat, this media has lied.
I've never seen anything like this before.