Cheney: Saddam/Al Qaeda Link? Uh, Never Mind

All the carnage. All the lives destroyed. All the billions shoveled down the rat-hole. All of this based on a lie.

A lie that Dick Cheney now admits:

June 1 (Bloomberg) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

On whether Hussein helped al-Qaeda carry out the 2001 terrorist attacks, Cheney said, “I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that he was involved in 9/11.”

His fall guy? CIA Director George Tenet. Because torturing false information out of prisoners and lying about ‘yellow cake’ from Niger wasn’t enough, he demanded that the CIA provide proof, and he embellished that thin gruel to make his case. 

This man, who now galivants about the country defending the Bush Administration policies and criticizing Obama for ‘making us less safe’, has now admitted that the war he engineered was built on lies, as was the torture carried out to buttress his claims,  and enabled by hand-picked lawyers who had no compunction about shredding the Constitution.

If that does not constitute war crimes, and if Dick Cheney is not a war criminal, then there is no such thing as a war criminal.

(An El Somnambulo Tip of the Sombrero to the indispensable Daily Kos.)