HOME | BIO | MUSIC | JOURNEYS BY DJ | STUDIO BLOG | POLITICAL BLOG | BOOKING INFO | CONTACT

Despite the release last week of a bipartisan Senate report concluding that bin Laden and Saddam saw each other not as allies but potential adversaries, administration officials went back on the air this past weekend to continue with the claim that they posed a unified threat. First it was Condoleeza Rice maintaining that ""There were ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda," and then you've got the VP himself claiming that the connection is still an open question.

All of which has prompted a great point by one of the readers over at TPM:

Now, there are essentially two, if you'll permit the oversimplification, responses to this record: 1) He was intentionally deceptive (to whatever varying degree) in the service of marketing an invasion he favored (for whatever varying reason); and 2) He was unintentionally deceptive and in each case repeated incorrect assessments he had been given and genuinely believed.

Whenever an interviewer confronts Mr. Cheney with any portion of this litany of forcefully incorrect assertions, he is permitted to reply as though he were addressing the concerns exclusively of the first group (i.e. that he was deliberately deceptive.) And he manages in this vain to acquit himself fairly capably in an intricately-parsed technical sense. . . . But, granting him that then, I would like to see an interviewer seriously call him to task on behalf of the second camp.

Is the vice-president seriously allowed to express no remorse for the fact that he was so forcefully wrong. In public. So often. On so many matters. As they pertained to pre-emptively invading a sovereign nation?

This is a subtle point, and I think its been overlooked for far too long. Irrespective of why the false statements were made, with the passing of time and the accumulation of evidence, it has been made abundantly clear that the statements were wrong. And despite that, no one has ever been called no account. No one has ever been held responsible for making mistakes of such world-historical import.

Was it lies, or was it willful ignorance? The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in between. Ultimately what matters most, however, is that they were wrong. One day, perhaps, our leaders will be called to account for that.