Enemy Chatter: Bush Only Tortured to Make His Case that Iraq Had Something to do with 9/11!

Maureen Dowd plagiarized Josh Marshall for this point.

Dowd:

What Dowd wrote:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Marshall:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

She only changed "we" to "the Bush crowd," note.

But that was covered already by DrewM. The point I want to make is the left is busy, busy, busy pushing this meme. Jonathan Alter, a member of "JournoList," pushed the same claim on, I believe, Olbermann (of course) a few weeks back. Joe Klein, who's not as far as I know a member of JournoList but keeps his eyes on all the lefty blogs, pushed the idea in his Time Swampland blog last week.

So why the drumbeat?

Because the left has had a problem: Even if waterboarding were deemed "illegal," there is no corrupt motive for doing so. If Bush, Cheney, and etc. had taken illegal steps, well, they were doing so to defend the country, not to line their own pockets. They may have erred, but they erred with good intentions.

The left cannot tolerate this state of affairs. The Demon Bush must have also have had a corrupt motive in undertaking his corrupt acts. Maybe Halliburton was paying him. Maybe those Truther claims about a Trans-Capsian pipeline are true. Maybe...

Nah. Too hard to make those cases.

Hmmm... what if we just claim he was only interested in "torturing" Al Qaeda in order to prove the insane case that terrorist-supporter, would-be Presidential assassin Saddam Hussein were involved in 9/11? Then we can claim that's a personal -- and therefore corrupt -- motive for his actions, and thereby strip him of the inconvenient defense that he didn't personally profit from his "crime."

Well. I mean, he still didn't really personally profit, but the left takes it as an Established Fact that Bush had some enormous psychological need to take out Saddam, because 1) his father didn't and 2) Saddam tried to kill his father in the early years of the Clinton Administration.

(The left, note, takes that latter bit to be important as regards Bush's psychology, but when we discuss Saddam's psychology -- specifically, whether or not he was "contained" and "deterred" by American power such as that he would not make any big moves against us -- they conveniently forget that he arranged for the assassination of a former president just months out of office. And the murder of his wife and anyone else traveling with him, too.)

At any rate, this meme seems to have originated on the lefty blogs and/or JournoList as the diehard lefties attempt to spin some corrupt motive for EITs which personally benefits George W. Bush.

As usual, it's half-baked. For one thing, the left takes it as an article of faith that of course Saddam could not possibly have been involved in 9/11. That seems to have been the case, but I don't quite get this insistence that of course everyone should have known that, and the question shouldn't even have been investigated. The left behaves as if simply asking the question "Is there any evidence Saddam was involved?" is and always has been illegitimate and lunatic.

Personally, given the fact that Saddam supported terrorists and attempted to kill a US president, I'd say the question warranted investigation.

Further, Dowd -- by which I mean Josh Marshall, from whom she plagiarizes -- seems to forget a little something about the "timeline" she claims proves this corrupt motive.

We practiced EITs the most during the period from September 11, 2001 to about 2003, she says, ergo it must have been just about linking Saddam to 9/11.

Um, maybe it was just linked to 9/11, period. She -- and Marshall, and Alter, and Klein -- all seem to forget that 9/11 had just happened, the Anthrax letter murders were still entirely unsolved, and that fears of a "Second Wave" were at their highest. And, also -- um, this is when we caught the biggest AQ fish.

So, yes, we "tortured" the most from 9/11 to sometime around 2003 or so... which implies to me we were the most serious about terrorism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and not so much anymore.

But for Dowd, Alter, Klein, Marshall, and the rest of the JournoList pinheads-- this is evidence not that 9/11 had just happened, but that the Demon Bush must have had some prosecutable motive for EITs.

Update: I Got It From "A Friend," Says MoDo: Yes, I'm sure she did. And all of her friends are reading from the same hymnals, so of course the sermons often sound exactly alike.

posted by Ace at 01:37 PM

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