Just As I Thought

You can’t prove it didn’t happen

That Dick Cheney — he reminds me of a kid who’s told a lie, and when confronted by his parents he blusters and lies some more, creating a string of untruths that just wanders off into the bizarre.
Now, we’ve known for a long time about the whole Iraq/al Queda thing, and how there was no connection. We knew it even before the 9/11 Commission announced that they had come to the same conclusion.
Well, after that announcement was made, Dick Cheney just plowed forward the same as always, modifying his claims thus:

Cheney said he believed there was a “general relationship” between Iraq and al Qaeda and said he “probably” had information that the commission had not seen.

Well, now the commission says:

“After examining available transcripts of the Vice President’s public remarks, the 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the Vice President has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks.”

Now the strange part. Naturally, Cheney still won’t back down from his spurious claims, but the response to this statement by the commission is laughable:

Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems said the vice president welcomed the commission’s statement because it “puts to rest a non-story.”

“As we’ve said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission,” Kellems said. “The vice president critiqued some press coverage of the staff report. He did not criticize the commission’s work.”

Even when confronted by the facts, Cheney manages to talk his way around it, casting doubt on them by muddying the waters thus:

In two interim reports issued last month, the commission’s investigators said that they found “no credible evidence” that Iraq and al Qaeda had cooperated in attacks on the United States and that a purported April 9, 2001, meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, leader of the terrorist hijackers, never occurred.

The panel said that the FBI placed Atta in Virginia on April 4 through a bank surveillance video and that records show calls were made from the hijacker’s cell phone in Florida on April 6, 9, 10 and 11. There is also “no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again or re-entered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain and back under his true name,” one of the reports said.

Cheney, who previously had said that the alleged meeting was “pretty well confirmed,” said during the June 17 interview on CNBC that “we just don’t know” whether it happened.

“We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down,” Cheney said.

Using the vice-president’s logic, I could claim that a group of aliens with 4 heads apiece had visited me in 1998 and treated me to dinner at TGI Friday’s. There’s no evidence that this happened… but you can’t confirm that it didn’t.

1 comment

  • There’s actually a legal term for that ‘Argumentative ad ignorantom’ (it’s latin so it ok if I don’t spell it right). Anyway the translation is ‘the ignorant argument,’ and if you used it in a court the case would be thrown out and you’d probably be dis-barred for being a general idiot.
    I used to use this during arguments over the existance of God when someone would say ‘well, you can’t prove God DOESN’T exist,’ but then I found Christian friends that weren’t total idots- like our VP.

Browse the Archive

Browse by Category