Saturday, June 19, 2004

Violent disagreement over which way to spin

The papers and blogs the last few days are full of disagreement about the 9/11 commission's report - basically arguing if the commission supports Bush or doesn't. If you get past the first paragraph in any story, it usually just noise about semantics, e.g., did al Qaeda and Iraq collaborate, or just communicate, and what constitutes a threat.

What I wonder is, why is there so much effort to tell us what to think about the report? It's only a few pages long, I'd hope most people would actually read it for themselves. And the part on Iraq is only a paragraph which can be summarized as: three known contacts around 1994; requests for help from bin Laden to Iraq which were not accepted; unconfirmed reports of contacts since then, and denial of "ties" from "two senior bin Laden associates". The paragraph ends: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the US".

But don't take my word for it - read the report, which is pretty interesting anyway, and make up your own mind.


No comments: