Abu Wabu

Stephen Hayes has for years been chronicling the news the MSM loves to either ignore or misreport regarding the proven connections between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda and its offshoots and proxies. His new article in the Weekly Standard follows a recent blog post on the Pentagon's new report that outlines those connections. Of course, the New York Times and the rest of the MSM somehow miss the information in the report that counters their narrative. That's to be expected, but it's still wrong and dishonest:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

...How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism," in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America's most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study's executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.

...What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Saddam's Dangerous Friends

Dan Wismar has compiled a list of links to Hayes' extensive reporting on The Connection. He also notes the media's widespread dishonesty on this story.

Tom Joscelyn weighs in on the subject, which he has covered as well: "the report ties Saddam’s regime to at least five different al Qaeda associated groups, including two groups that formed the core of al Qaeda." (Emphasis mine)