Rising Hegemon
A majority of U.S. adults believe the Bush administration generally misleads the public on current issues, while fewer than a third of Americans believe the information provided by the administration is generally accurate, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds.
While the telephone survey of 1,011 U.S. adults indicates about 64% of Americans believe the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends," opinion on the topic is clearly divided along party lines. A large majority (68% to 28%) of Republicans say the Bush administration generally provides accurate information. However, even larger majorities of Democrats (91% to 7%) and Independents (73% to 25%) think the information is generally misleading.
The poll was taken between November 8 to 13 so about the time the White House hysterical pushback started. I'm guessing that probably didn't help their numbers. If nearly two-thirds of the country thinks you are a liar, they are not going to be persuaded by you wheeling out Crashcart to glare and sneer at people. Not to mention if you think someone is a liar, you tend to think they are the type to point fingers.
And, of course, it helps if they are actually liars.
From the National Journal:
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter...
...One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
So:
1. Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil were right when they said that Bush wanted to take out Saddam early and often and 9/11 provided a search for an excuse to go after Iraq.
2. Bush, Cheney and the rest were informed that there were NO connection between Iraq & Al Qaeda.
...except to the extent that Saddam hated them and feared them as a potential threat to him...not as allies in the war.
3. Laurie Myolrie is nuts. But so is every other PNAC tool that actually got a job in the Bush Administration.
To build up support for their glorious little war, the Bush regime constantly buttressed their now discredited "WMD" claims with peripheral evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.
This is the thing that has gotten Stephen Hayes, who left his prior profession of septic tank cleaner to push these unsupported half-assed ideas, on all these talk shows the last several years.
The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.
Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists...
..."What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."
In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.
Douchebags one and all.
So when does Bush plan on bombing the National Journal?
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