Rules of Evidence

by Thomas Joscelyn - September 8th, 2006 - The Daily Standard (The Weekly Standard)

A new Senate report on Iraq and al Qaeda ignores everything which gets in the way of its conclusions.

The committee's staff made little effort to determine whether or not the testimony of former Iraqi regime officials was truthful. In fact, Saddam Hussein and several of his top operatives--all of whom have an obvious incentive to lie--are cited or quoted without caveats of any sort. In Saddam's debriefing it was suggested that he may cooperate with al Qaeda because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." According to the report, "Saddam answered that the United States was not Iraq's enemy. He claimed that Iraq only opposed U.S. policies. He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China."

Anyone with even a partial recollection of the controversy surrounding Iraq in the 1990s will recall that Saddam made it a habit of cursing and threatening the United States. His annual January "Army Day" speeches were laced with threats and promises of retaliation against American assets. That is, when Saddam claimed that the United States was "not Iraq's enemy," he was quite obviously lying. But nowhere in the staff's report is it noted that Saddam's debriefing was substantially at odds with more than a decade of his rhetoric.

The drumbeat of attacks on the Bush administration by liberal democrats is simply amazing. Anyone who seriously wants to know why many people consider the democrats who are attacking the war and supporting withdrawal to be "appeasers" needs only review the history in this article. Noted democrats who have a public history of supporting the contention that Saddam and Al Qaeda were allied, now claim they never believed this. Not that they have changed their minds, but that they never believed it. Their statements and actions are simply ignored as they attack the current administration.

Any dialog about public matters requires that we at least agree on the facts. There are times when opinion and fact are arguable. However democrats today practice a form of dialog that is not just based on lies, but brazen lies that fly in the face of known facts, including statements they have previously made. There are a small number of Republicans who practice the same arrogance, but it is my contention that they are marginal at best. Only in the democrat party has the practice of arrogant lies become standard operating procedure.

Is this because the MSM is so supportive of the democrat's attacks that they know the lies will never get reported?