The Latest Media Smear: Did Palin Link Saddam Hussein To 9/11?
Anne Kornblut, writing in the Washington Post, thinks so:
Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”
The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.
“America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before September 11, 2001,” she said at the deployment ceremony, which drew hundreds of military families who walked from their homes on the sprawling post to the airstrip where the service was held.
Here’s video of the Palin speech in question:
The pertinent quote:
You’ll be there in service to the same cause of freedom from tyranny and from violence. You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned, carried out, and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.
Notice that Palin didn’t mention that the “enemies who planned” and “carried out” the 9/11 attacks was Saddam Hussein and his henchman specifically. What Palin meant was that the troops she was address would be facing al Qaeda in Iraq.
And she was absolutely right. Al Qaeda was (and still is, though they’ve been badly beaten) in Iraq. Their leader, at one point, was a guy named Zarqawi who had declared his allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself and was killed in Iraq by an American bomb. To say that our troops weren’t fighting the same group, the same people, who had a hand in 9/11 is, frankly, a lie.
Palin was right. Anne Kornblut is wrong. But unfortunately President Bush has been accused of this same thing by liberal partisans for years now despite never having said that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, so I imagine this bit of untruth will plague Palin as well.
