Blogoland

Just caught Frederick Kagan, a “Resident Scholar” of the conservative American Enterprise Intsitutue on C-SPAN. Focus for the program was on Douglas Jehl’s front-page bombshell in the NYT on the case of a tortured, rendered terror suspect who offered up what turned out to be bogus information on the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda

First, Mr. Kagan responded to fluffy questions from Brian Lamb about the timing and placement of the article by decrying the revelation as “irrelevant.” He then believed the play given to it in the NYT was “childish,” intended to undermine the war effort, and further remarked that while we were “wrong” on the intelligence, that we should, you know, just move on.

Excuse me, but the issue is not whether the intelligence was simply “wrong,” – but whether the wrongness of it was derived from the fact that it was cooked by people looking for a justification for invasion. OK?

As a postscript, Mr. Kagan trotted out one of the most fantastically silly, recurring talking points from the administration’s defenders: That there was an Iraq-al Qaeda link. Yes, indeed. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in – gasp! – Iraq prior to our invasion.

Yes, dear readers, it’s true, but as some might note, completely irrelevant, as the conservative Cato Institute noted last year:

But as Powell himself acknowledged, Zarqawi and the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group with which Zarqawi was associated were based "in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq," which did not make a strong case for close ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.

Mr. Kagan just seemed astonished that the ‘mainstream media’ were not focused on such a nugget. I have a notion why: It’s a complete non-story.