Conservatives, including the vice president himself, have been quick to attack press coverage of the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there is no evidence tying Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.
So far, no one has attacked two especially gullible news accounts of the president’s counter-attack in response to the commission’s findings, one from AP, one from Reuters.
Permit us to fill the breach.
Deb Reichmann of the Associated Press wrote:
“The president said Saddam had links, for example, to the Abu Nidal Palestinian terror organization and sheltered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, considered the most dangerous foreign fighter in Iraq and one of the world’s top terrorists.
‘He was a threat because he provided safe haven for a terrorist like al-Zarqawi, who is still killing innocents inside Iraq,’ Bush said.”
Reuters also ran the president’s comments about Zarqawi.
It’s true that Zarqawi was in Iraq while Saddam was in power, but he operated only in the Kurdish territory, over which Saddam had no control. To blame Saddam for Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq would be like blaming Fidel Castro for instances of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Either the wire services haven’t done their homework, or they just don’t feel comfortable saying straight out that the president’s spin is seriously misleadaing.
This matters for the same reason that it matters any time a public official makes a spurious claim and reporters regress into parrots. That doesn’t just cheat readers, it also gives those public officials renewed motivation to keep distorting the facts.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.