Topic: NewsBusters
A July 25 NewsBusters post by Warner Todd Huston takes time that could better be used penning his apology to the Los Angeles Times to accuse the New York Daily News of "[f]ollowing the left's playbook of claiming Bush has illicitly linked Saddam's Iraq to 9/11." Huston then launches into a highly defensive explanation of why, when President Bush asserted that al-Qaeda in Iraq is part of the al-Qaeda "terrorist network" that attacked on 9/11, he wasn't linking Iraq to 9/11.
It should be no surprise that Huston leaves a few things out. First, when Huston stated that "there is no speech in which Bush claimed that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 ... This is a lie that the left has promulgated since Bush announced we were going into Iraq," he failed to note that other Bush administration officials and supporters have, in fact, made that claim.
Huston then writes: "What Bush really did was link al Qaeda, the al Qaeda that is in Iraq today, to the same network controlled by Osamma bin Ladden [sic], the very same bin Ladden that did take credit for perpetrating 9/11," adding, "What he did was say that the al Qaeda that planned 9/11 has a branch in Iraq and always has had one in Iraq." Nowhere does Huston note that the claim that al-Qaeda in Iraq is the same thing as, or is controlled by, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda is highly disputed by Bush's own officials.
