Cheney a Liar. (not exactly a headline, I know)

I have the good fortune to hear most of Cheney's impromptu Rush concerts live, so I get to laugh at his lies in realtime. Man, did he tell a series of doozies today (transcript via TPMMuckraker):

..remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda(1), then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there (2) before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene (3), and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.... This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq (4).

As I drove I raged at the radio: 1) Zarqawi wasn't in Afghanistan before Iraq, nor was he a member of Al Qaeda. 2) Zarqawi wasn't in Baghdad before the invasion, but in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. 3) Zarqawi created Al Qaeda in Iraq many months after the invasion. 4) How many times do we have to kill the Iraq-Al Qaeda-link lie before it dies?!

Luckily, it turns out that on the same day, we received yet another report conclusively demolishing the pre-war ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Granted, Al Qaeda is in Iraq now, but that's only because we invited them in with our stupidity. Al Qaeda safe-havens + 1, courtesy of George Bush.

From the report, for the record:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.

The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.

Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.

Will this report be the end of the VPs lying on this issue? Don't hold your breath.