The Bush Ship Sinks Deeper

There's an old saying that "loose lips sink ships." Of course, the Bush ship has already sunk. But the loose-lipped comments of former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith on Fox today are going to sink the Bush ship even further. Feith argued that his office never claimed that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. Here's the key quote:

"Nobody in my office ever said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It's just not correct. I mean, words matter. And people are throwing around loose allegations, vague allegations, based on not reading the words carefully. "

Via Talking Points Memo, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly and Laura Rozen show that Feith had indeed leaked a document to The Weekly Standard claiming a Saddam/al-Qaida relationship. But he Feith controversy isn't just a minor "gotcha" catching Feith lying in the present. It's a big "gotcha." Thinking about this closely, Feith practically admitted that he lied about the purported Saddam/al-Qaeda link in his original leak to The Weekly Standard. Most importantly, Feith implicitly admitted that the allegation of a Saddam/al-Qaeda link was not true. If Feith had thought that the Saddam/al-Qaeda accusation were true, he would have either bragged about the leak or dishonestly expressed regret that he hadn't made the point himself.

In denying any connection to the leak, Feith effectively disowned the Saddam/ al-Qaida link. That's huge. Nobody in the Bush administration has coped to a false allegation since the "sixteen little word" confession about Nigerian yellowcake. I wonder if Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are going to start confessing to their Iraq lies by denying that they ever made the claim in the first place. It may turn out that the new lies of the Bush administration will trip up their old lies.

That's certainly the case with Feith. He also admits implicitly that anyone who put out the claim was lying. Given that Feith was the person responsible for leaking the claim to the Weekly Standard, he was the one who was lying.