archy

I don't feel safer knowing this
Josh Marshall quotes a Dick Cheney interview given just this week.

[A] lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda organization.

Cheney appears to be the last person in the government still pushing this lie. Is he too stubborn to let it go or is he really that deluded? We may never know. I expect we will hear more of this story from him as the election gets closer and again in 2008.

Aside from still flogging the Saddam/Osama connection, there are some very odd elements in this particular statement. Marshall points out one of them.

Cheney says there are all these documents "that have not yet been evaluated." But those unevaluated documents provide "additional evidence" of the fabled Iraq-AQ tie.

Does that make any sense?

[...]

We have this new defector. We haven't heard yet what he has to say. But what he says sounds pretty convincing.

What strikes me as alarming is the statement that we haven't evaluated intelligence that's been in our hands for almost three years now. How can they claim to be keeping us safe from attack when they have a three year intelligence backlog?

I guess we can comfort ourselves by saying the intelligence professionals probably know that there is no useful information in Saddam's papers and aren't wasting their time. Why does everything these people do have to be either incompetant or corrupt? If they actually did something okay once in a while, I'd be happy to give them credit for it. I just never have had an occasion to do that.