And Now the Screaming Starts:
Dick Cheney needs to be gang raped by released Abu Ghraib prisoners and fucked so hard that the pacemaker actually leaps out of his mouth in a brief moment when it's not filled with Sunni cock. Motherfucker is like a plague rat cornered in 17th century London, snarling out with all he's got so he can prevent his own drowning.

Here's the whole goddamn paragraph from Staff Statement 15 of the 9/11 Commission:
"Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein’s secular regime. Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Now, let's nuts and bolts this: Osama hated Saddam. At one point, he even supported the Kurds in overthrowing Saddam (and had he done so, would Osama have been our ally?). Osama met with an Iraqi official, asking for some shit, but Iraq blew him off. There may have been more "contacts," which, for fuck's sake, in the middle of the Afghan mountains, could have meant smoke signals. Osama's people say no relationship. And the report is very fucking clear in that last sentence. What else is clear is that this paragraph is not fucking about September 11, 2001. It is about the wider relationship claimed by the Bush administration.

But, oh, goddamn Dick Cheney, like a pit bull with a little boy's arm in his mouth, ain't lettin' this go. You've all read about the Monday speech in Florida where Cheney said, "[Saddam]had long-established ties with al-Qaida." Now Cheney, in all his oozy malevolence, is sliming up the works by saying that the adminstration never said that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that "lazy" reporters made that assertion. However, as pointed out above, the paragraph from the staff report isn't about 9/11.

It is in the context of the 9/11 commission, but if context is everything, let's cut to the video tape of Bush:
From the State of the Union, January 2003: "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained."
When announcing an end to "major combat" in Iraq aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln: "We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th -- the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."

This list go on and on, with speeches by the President and Vice-President where they say "September 11" and "Iraq" within a line or two of each other. And here's the deal: if you're gonna call Iraq the "central front" in the "war on terror," and you say that that war was declared on 9/11, well, you know, you don't have to be a "lazy" reporter, or even a Fox "news" reporter, to connect the big, giant dots the adminstration has laid out. Inference by proxy is a wonderful thing to whip up war fever, is it not?

But why argue when the President of our nation says, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." See? It is so because it is so. Like religion. Like faith. We don't need to see God to know his presence, right? And you believe in God, don't you?

As for this whole "Putin says he warned the U.S. that Saddam wanted to attack the U.S." thing, c'mon. If that was true and verified by our own government, Condi, Colin, George, Dick, Rumslove, and Elaine fuckin' Chao would have been on every fuckin' talk show from Meet the Press to Wake-Up, Billings, screaming it from the rooftops. And as for Cheney's claim that he "probably" knows more about the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection than the 9/11 commission, then he should put up or shut up.

The thing about plague rats is they always found a way to escape and infect more. And the plague years will be upon us once again.