Thank God for Lee Hamilton

News item:
Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton blasted the mainstream press yesterday for distorting the Commission's findings on links between Iraq and al-Qaida, saying those findings actually support Bush administration contentions.

"The sharp differences that the press has drawn [between the White House and the Commission] are not that apparent to me," Hamilton told the Associated Press, a day after insisting that his probe uncovered "all kinds" of connections between Osama bin Laden's terror network and Iraq. Hamilton's comments followed a deluge of mainstream reports falsely claiming that the 9/11 Commission had discredited the Bush administration's claim of longstanding links between Baghdad and bin Laden.

But the Indiana Democrat said the press accounts were flat-out wrong.

"There are all kinds of ties," he told PBS's "The News Hour" late Wednesday, in comments that establishment journalists have refused to report.

"There are all kinds of connections. And it may very well have been that Osama bin Laden or some of his lieutenants met at some time with Saddam Hussein's lieutenants."

Hamilton said that while his probe had failed to uncover any direct operational link between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terror network in attacks on the U.S., there's no question that "they had contacts."

And then there's today's statement from Vladimir Putin that the Russian intelligence service gave Washington information shortly after 9/11 that Saddam might be planning terrorist actions in the U.S.

If nothing else, these developments should serve as a wakeup call to anyone who hasn't already figured it out that the mainstream media is working with a knee-jerk reflexive liberal bias. It's a bias so strong and so profound that everybody from NPR to the New York Times to Dan Rather couldn't wait to spin the 9/11 Commission findings to "prove" Saddam was never a threat to us and that the Bush administration acted irresponsibly by liberating the Iraqi people.

The distortion by the liberal media has been so egregious that a career Democrat politician can't stomach it.

I've said it before and I'm saying it again: I don't give a rat's ass whether we had proof of Saddam's links with Osama and his gang of wackos. The plain fact is that we liberated a nation that had been hideously oppressed for decades. It may well turn out that the amalgam of disparate tribes that constitutes modern Iraq is incapable of democratic self government. The shining fact remains that the United States of America did exactly the right thing at the right time. I haven't the slightest doubt that we will be vindicated by history.