1115.org

One week to go before the election, and the Bush Administration is still flailing to find definitive links between Saddam Hussein and terrorist boogyman Abu Musab Zarqawi. Most people had long ago concluded that such ties were limited and inconclusive at best, but most people aren’t Dick Cheney, our perpetually-sneering Vice President. Considering the Cheney claims of a Saddam-al Queda link long after intelligence services and the 9/11 Commission dismissed the idea, this shouldn’t be surprising.

It also shouldn’t be surprising that Cheney seems to see intelligence as a tool of politics, instead of being pure information uncorrupted by partisan spin. Justin Logan found the following beauty when leafing through the latest issue of American Conservative magazine, which is surely not the publication of choice for tree-hugging liberal wimps:

The undeclared warfare between the CIA and the Bush administration has continued despite the arrival of Porter goss as Director of Central Intelligence. On Sept. 28, at the Vice President’s request, the Agency provided a special briefing on the subject of Jordanian terrorist Mu’sab al-Zarqawi. The CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) reviewed all of the available intelligence on the subject and based its briefing on a just completed comprehensive intelligence analysis. The CTC concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi’s infrastructure in Iraw before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad’s reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president’s stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president’s outburst, and the incident was reported back to Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president’s staff regarding it.

Lovely. But Cheney has also been busy at work making people scared silly by the mere thought of John Kerry. Remember when Cheney hinted that a vote for Kerry would surely invite another terrorist attack? Now he’s bringing up the dusty threat of Soviet Russia and the Cold War.

The Soviet Union might still exist and Saddam Hussein might dominate the Gulf if Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had been president in recent years, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Saturday.

Cheney told supporters that Kerry had run for the U.S. Senate in the 1980s on a promise to do away with many of the weapons that U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to end the Cold War.

“So if John Kerry had been in charge, maybe the Soviet Union would still be in business,” President Bush’s running mate said on a campaign trip to the swing state of New Mexico.

It would be easy enough to point out all the various weapons that Cheney himself voted to scrap during his younger years, but reality isn’t really going to penetrate the bubble at this stage in the game.