Must read: Jim Lobe: Bush Team Tries to Brazen It Out

''The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda'', U.S. President George W Bush told reporters Thursday, is ''because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda''.
This is what logicians call a tautology -- a ''useless repetition'' is how the dictionary defines it -- but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it is enmeshed.
Repetition and blaming the media, an old standby -- of which Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld are particularly fond, dating back to their service under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 30 years ago -- are back in vogue..
Thus it was that Cheney, the most aggressive administration proponent of the theory that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had not only been working hand in glove with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for years, but that he was also behind the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993, complained that New York Times' coverage of the 9/11 Commission's finding that no such link existed was ''outrageous'' and probably ''malicious''.
And thus it was that Rumsfeld charged that media coverage of the abuses of detainees held by the United States in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere was not only wrong, but dangerous.
''The implication that's out there is the United States government is engaging in torture as a matter of policy, and that's not true'', he declared, despite the cascading leaks of Pentagon, Justice Department and White House memoranda suggesting ways in which domestic and international bans on torture can be circumvented or ignored in the ''war on terror''. . . .
''At this point, the White House position is just frankly bizarre'', Daniel Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official in the administration of Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton told the 'Los Angeles Times' in response to Bush's declaration about al-Qaeda and Hussein. ''They're just repeating themselves, rather than admit they were wrong''.
Bush, of course, was responding to the finding by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that while bin Laden ''explored possible cooperation with Iraq'' when he was based in Sudan through 1994, ''Iraq apparently never responded'', and no ''collaborative relationship'' was ever established. Proceeding from his tautology, Bush insisted ''this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.”
That rendition, of course, raises a host of questions, among them definitional -- does the existence of ''numerous contacts'' amount to a ''relationship'', particularly when one side fails to respond to the other?
"When I was 15 and kept asking Mary Beth for a date, and she would always politely refuse, I think I would have been hard put to describe that as a 'relationship' as much as I wanted to brag about one'', suggested one congressional aide this week."