http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/03/outsourcing_the.htmlEconomist Mark Thoma picks up on a note from Dick Cheney via Fox News via a WSJ blog. The White House is now intent on wasting even more of your money to pay outside researchers to prove what has been thoroughly discredited:
Vice President Cheney suggests it's only a matter of time before strong links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda are discovered now that the search is being conducted by researchers outside of the administration: The Case for Iraq, by John McKinnon, WSJ's Washington Wire:
Seeking to buoy public support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration hopes tens of thousands of boxes of captured Iraqi documents now being made public will buttress their case for invading. On Fox News Talk’s Tony Snow Show today, Vice President Cheney predicted that over the next few months, as researchers comb through the records, “we’ll see a pretty complete picture that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there there. And he was legitimately labeled by our State Department as a state sponsor of terror.” That likely includes dealings with Osama bin Laden, Cheney suggested, while adding that he wasn’t making a “hard and fast prediction.”
In the past, the administration has been embarrassed over suggestions that Iraq aided the 9/11 attackers. Cheney conceded yesterday that an early report that lead hijacker Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague “has been pretty well knocked down.” But he said that “that’s a separate proposition from the question of whether or not there was some kind of a relationship between the Iraqi government, Iraqi intelligence services and the al Qaeda organization.” Conservatives also hope to find evidence that Iraq was actively pursuing development of various weapons of mass destruction. . . .
Disgraceful, as always.