They agree with the Communist press with regards to the 9/11 commission and an Iraq/al Qaeda connection:

The White House has repeatedly argued that the Commission�s statements were restricted to the issue of whether Iraq was connected to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Appearing on CNBC�s “Capital Report” on June 17, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney said, “What [the Commission was] addressing was whether or not [Iraq was] involved with 9/11, and there they found no evidence to support that proposition. They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways.” And in the extended online edition of a June 18 interview for National Public Radio�s “Morning Edition,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice stated, “As I understand it, the Commission said that there was no operational relationship and that would suggest that the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11.” Similarly, a recent email from the White House to its weekly News Room mailing list carried the headline, “Report Confirms Administration’s Views of Al Qaeda/Iraq Ties.” It stated that “A 9/11 Commission staff report supports the Bush Administration’s longstanding conclusion that there was no evidence of �collaboration� between Iraq and Al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks against the United States.”

In fact, the 9/11 Commission looked at whether Al Qaeda and Iraq had worked together as far back as the mid-1990s, as the White House implicitly acknowledged when it noted in the email that “The Commission’s investigation does not dispute that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda occurred.” For instance, some of the contacts cited in the 15th staff statement occurred in Sudan in 1994 (84K PDF), seven years before the September 11 attacks. And commission spokesman Al Felzenber told the Washington Post that “We found no evidence of joint operations or joint work or common operations between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government, and that’s beyond 9/11.”

They find this gem from Cheney as well, which was on the Daily Show earlier:

During the CNBC interview, Cheney also dissembled in the following exchange about Mohammed Atta, an Al Qaeda member who was allegedly involved in the September 11 attacks (a witness claimed that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in the spring of 2001, a heavily disputed assertion that the FBI and CIA have questioned):

BORGER: Well, let’s get to Mohamed Atta for a minute because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, “pretty well confirmed.”

CHENEY: No, I never said that.

BORGER: OK.

CHENEY: I never said that.

BORGER: I think that is…

CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9 of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don’t know.

But as a White House transcript demonstrates, Cheney said in a December 9, 2001 interview on “Meet the Press” that, “Well, what we now have that’s developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that’s been pretty well confirmed, that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.” (our emphasis)

Oopsy. I guess that’s just the SCLM in action, backing away from a bald faced lie from a Republican.

Well, I can’t defend the press for a whole post, can I? That’s bad for my credibility.