Keith Olbermann: Yesterday's Terror Busts A Hoax

He does admit there's terrorism afoot, though. He castigates the Bush Administrations attempt to "'terrorize' Americans with phony threats," for example.

That's an OlbyWatch link, btw.

Pretty standard stuff. The dudes over at Wonkette snarked it was all phonied up yesterday, too.

They're simply incapable of accepting that terrorism is real, because admitting that would force them to re-assess their no-external-enemies, no-enemies-to-the-left mantra.

We thought that 9/11 would change everything. It didn't. The left is still angry about 9/11, but not because Islamist maniacs murdered 3000 innocent civilians.

They're angry that 9/11 gives their non-pacifist opponents a talking point.

Related: Fred Thompson notes that while the media is only interested in George Tenet's Bush-bashing, he's got a lot to say that repudiates their metanarratives about terrorism and Saddam:

Naturally, the media emphasis is not on that. Its attention is on any differences Tenet had with the administration. The media’s premise is that Iraq should not have been considered a real threat to us and that the administration basically misled the country into war. While one may take issue with Tenet on several things, I was intrigued that on some very important issues, Tenet did not follow the media script when answering Russert’s questions.

On the issue of al Qaeda’s relationship with Iraq, for example, Tenet said that the CIA had proof of al Qaeda contact with Saddam’s regime; that the regime had provided safe haven for al Qaeda operatives and that Saddam had provided training assistance for al Qaeda terrorists. He went on to say that the CIA had no proof that the relationship was operational or that they had any ongoing working relationship — that it could have been that each side was just using the other. Maybe my recollection is faulty on this, but that doesn’t seem to be inconsistent with what folks in the administration said. In other words, there was clearly contact and a relationship, but no one knew exactly what it meant.

On the issue of weapons of mass destruction, although Iraq undoubtedly had such weapons in the past, Tenet acknowledges that everybody got it wrong as to whether they would have them at the time of the invasion. On the nuclear issue, he said that the CIA thought that Saddam was five to seven years away from a nuclear capability — unless he was able to obtain fissile material from another source.

A couple of things occur to me here. In the first place, is five to seven years that far away? Since four years have passed since the invasion, that would be only a year from now if we had not invaded. If he had been able to obtain fissile materials, the time could have been much shorter. There are over 40 countries in the world with fissile material sufficient to make a nuclear bomb and much of it is unguarded.

It's interesting to note that the media and the left have hardly been content in arguing that Saddam wasn't a threat -- increasingly they feel comfortable declaring what they've always believed, that Al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism generally were never a threat, either.

Is anyone else kind of thrilled by Fred Thompson merely because he bothers to state what the Bush Administratiohn should have been saying for four years?

More Terrorism: By the Bush Administration and US intelligence, I mean. Credible reports of imminent terrorist attacks on US citizens and soldiers in Germany.

The left has rode the Bush-didn't-connect-the-dots argument for a long time. Just curious -- given the left's constant denigration of the terrorist threat, will they be willing to cop to the fact that they refused to "connect the dots," and in fact made it harder for the American government to act against terrorism, when the next large-scale terrorist against America attack proves successful?

posted by Ace at 07:02 PM

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