The Death of a Lie

Just in time for Doug J. Feith’s score-settling memoir — this Balloon Juice post about it made me LOL — the Pentagon has determined, finally, once and for all, that there was no Saddam-al-Qaeda link.

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

Many people in journalism were actively complicit in this lie. Not only have they not been punished, they’ve been rewarded. Jeffrey Goldberg peddled this falsehood in the pages of the New Yorker, and now he’s got a cush job at The Atlantic. The biggest shill of them all, Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, wrote a dishonest book called The Connection and traded up for a fawning biography of Dick Cheney for HarperCollins. Hayes’ benefactor, William Kristol, of course, now writes a column for the most powerful newspaper on the planet. Expect the report to have absolutely no impact on their work, or their careers. This game is rigged.