Thursday, February 02, 2006
Interesting post over at A Tiny Revolution -- in a 2004 Esquire article an anonymous high-level source basically states that it was intentional administration strategy to confuse Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Schwarz speculates the source of the assertion was either Wolfowitz or Libby:
But what's gotten little attention is that, in 2004, a Bush official actually admitted this was a conscious strategy.
In other words:
(1) To put it concretely, they sat in their offices and figured out the best way to fool a retired New York City policeman gutted by grief for his dead son.
(2) They were so proud of their cleverness they couldn't help bragging about it to a reporter.
This appears in a November, 2004 article in Esquire about Dick Cheney. If you read the whole thing, you'll see the "senior administration official" was probably Paul Wolfowitz or Scooter Libby:
But what were the real reasons for going into Iraq? I'd asked a senior administration official.
There were two basic reasons, the official said. "One was to be rid of the Saddam Hussein regime"... The other was containment...
As it was, the administration took what looked like the path of least resistance in making its public case for the war: WMD and intelligence links with Al Qaeda. If the public read too much into those links and thought Saddam had a hand in September 11, so much the better.
