Slammed and Dunked

This week's hearings on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks show just how inept and backward the national air defense system was, as it was designed to repel military air attacks from outside North America, not suicide hijackings from within. Amazingly, though, in spite of the lack of evidence showing a collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney continue to insist that the communications between Saddam and Osama bin Laden are proof enough that the war in Iraq is still a legitimate part of the war on terror. Most of Iraq's proven links to terrorists, though, involve not bin Laden's gang but with groups like Hamas and people like Palestinian terror mastermind Abu Nidal, who was essentially defanged before he took refuge in Baghdad and died there of unknown causes. There's still no evidence that Iraq was connected to al-Qaeda in any meaningful way, and was thus any kind of threat to the United States when the Iraq War began in March 2003. As our disgraced outgoing CIA chief George Tenet would put it, the Bush-Cheney argument is not a "slam dunk."