The Extreme Media's Worst Nightmare

That is, I think, a fair description of the Bush Administration's decision to start publicizing the huge, enormous stacks of documents from the Saddam Hussein regime seized by Coalition forces after the invasion, and moldering in mothballs ever since. Already we have learned quite a bit that is toe-curling to the pressies, especially the extent of Saddam's ties to and cooperation with al Qaeda. Here is the latest revelation:

U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia were attacked by al Qaeda twice in the months following Saddam Hussein's decision to approve Osama bin Laden's request for help in attacking "foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia.

An Iraqi intelligence document released last week states that bin Laden met in Sudan with senior Iraqi intelligence agents on February 19, 1995, where he requested help in conducting "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. Saddam "was informed of the details of the meeting in our letter 370 on March 4, 1995," the Iraqi intelligence memo explains....

Reporting on the bombshell document on Wednesday, ABC News noted:

"Given that the document claims bin Laden was proposing to the Iraqis that they conduct 'joint operations against foreign forces' in Saudi Arabia, it is interesting to note that eight months after the meeting — on November 13, 1995 — terrorists attacked Saudi National Guard Headquarters in Riyadh, killing 5 U.S. military advisors. The militants later confessed on Saudi TV to having been trained by Osama bin Laden."

Unnoted by ABC: Eight months after the Riyadh attack, 19 U.S. servicemen were killed when a large truck bomb blew up the Khobar Towers military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Context, as they say, is everything. The fact that Saddam and OBL were in cahoots at least six years prior to 9/11, and the accompanying fact that Iraqi intelligence was planning an "assymmetrical" offensive against us in the summer of 2003 - and, come to remember it, that there was an established Iraqi connection to both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City attack, the latter connection of which was ruthlessly supressed by the Clinton Justice Department - all of this suggests a degree of cohesion between these two American enemies that raises the spectre of 9/11 having been a "joint operation" as a serious possibility after all. And if that were to become established beyond a reasonable doubt, the domestic Left's case against the GWOT - pathetic and weak and tattered as it is - would be finished.

So you know what that means - the rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein has already begun:

The Associated Press is now [claim]ing that tape recordings of Saddam Hussein chairing his Revolutionary Command Council show that the Iraqi dictator was telling the truth all along when he claimed that he had no weapons of mass destruction.

But only last month the [very same] wire service reported that other recordings show a top Saddam aide boasting about how he concealed Iraq's WMD's from U.N. weapons inspectors.

Read the details of the AP's current "reporting" versus what the disclosed a month ago. Clearly they are frantically attempting damage control for their cherished "Bush lied, people died" meme by plucking isolated quotes implying the press's "Saddam had no WMD" line and ascribing them to the entire 1991-2003 period. As Brother Hinderaker observes:

It is perfectly clear that there were periods of time when Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs. It is highly probable that there were also periods of time when it did not. The fact (if it is a fact) that there were none in the mid-1990s says very little, if anything, about whether Iraq had WMDs in 2002 and 2003.

Clearly the ASSociated Press is essentially telling its readers to ignore their previous reporting on other released Saddamite documents and tapes showing his systematic concealment of his WMD programs and stockpiles from UN weapons inspectors and only pay attention to the one they want to tout now, which just happens to fit their partisan preconceptions. To say nothing of the docs showing Saddam's alliance with al Qaeda, which the EM long ago dismissed as "impossible."

The AP is scared, folks. The entire media establishment is quaking in its Gucci loafers. Because these documents are going to prove that George W. Bush was right all along to take out Saddam, perhaps more so than even he realized, and the entire DisLoyal Opposition was W-R-O-N-G.

And in an election year, too.

More translated documents, please. With dispatch.

UPDATE: How about this one? Methinks Dubya should be getting on the horn to his close, personal friend Vlad and reading him the riot act personally, if you ask me.

UPDATE II: Our press friends are trying to get Saddam acquitted in his war crimes trial as well....