The Big Lie about the 9/11 commission’s staff report, and the prominent role played in this lie by the New York Times, is steadily being taken apart. Last night on BBC Radio Four’s The World Tonight , commissioner John Lehman fingered the NYT and other papers for misreporting the findings. These, he said, showed in fact ‘real evidence of contact and co-operation between Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service and al Qaeda’. What there was no evidence of was Saddam’s involvement with al Qaeda in its attacks on the US. A very different matter.

Meanwhile, in an interview Vice-President Dick Cheney tore into the NYT coverage as ‘outrageous’, particularly for its utterly mendacious headline: ‘Panel finds no Qaeda-Iraq tie’. But Cheney went further and repeated some of the evidence supporting the link which is so wickedly being totally ignored by the media. Here’s a segment of the interview:

‘First of all, on the question of whether or not there was any kind of a relationship, there clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials. It involves a senior official, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service going to the Sudan before bin Laden ever went to Afghanistan to train them in bomb-making, helping teach them how to forge documents. Mr. Zarqawi, who's in Baghdad today, is an al-Qaida associate who took refuge in Baghdad, found sanctuary and safe harbor there before we ever launched into Iraq. There's a Mr. Yasin, who was a World Trade Center bomber in '93, who fled to Iraq after that and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the '93 attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary. There's clearly been a relationship.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: That's not true. He had been involved working side by side, as described by the CIA, with al-Qaida over the years. This is an old established relationship. He's the man who killed our man Foley in Jordan, an AID official, during this period of time. To suggest that there's no connection between Zarqawi, no relationship if you will, and Iraq just simply is not true.

David Horowitz also takes the New York Times apart for its dishonesty:

‘Actually this Times reportage is several lies in one. First, the panel did not conclude that there was no Qaeda-Iraq tie. It concluded that it could not find a Qaeda-Iraq tie in respect to the attacks of 9/11. This is entirely different from the claim that there were no links between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. There are in fact extensive links, which Stephen Hayes and others have detailed. But that is just the beginning. The bigger lie in this particular claim is that Mohammed Atta’s visit to Prague was one of “Mr. Bush’s justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.” Mr. Bush made no such claim, certainly not in connection with a justification for the war in Iraq. (The Times actually prints Bush’s references to Iraq and al-Qaeda links on February 8, 2003, none of which mentions 9/11.) The justification for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein was the violation of UN Resolution 1441 – and 16 UN resolutions before that. Resolution 1441 authorized the use of force as of December 7, 2002, the deadline that had been set by the Security Council on November 8, 2002.’

Meanwhile, Ben Jonson draws attention to the non-reporting of the UN report on how Saddam shipped out WMD parts (see earlier posting on this site):

‘The New York Times noted that among those items were “fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.” UN spokesman Ewen Buchanan put the threat of “dual use” technology into perspective. “You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter,” Buchanan said. “You can also use it to breed anthrax.” Before the war, Saddam’s regime cast its possession of “dual use” materials in the most innocent light, a ruse familiar to students of the Cold War. UNMOVIC wisely rejected his sunny assessment. Today, UNMOVIC inspectors are deeply concerned about the possibility of WMD proliferation. A Reuters news story captures their distress: “A number of sites which contained dual-use equipment that was previously monitored by UN inspectors has [sic.] been systematically taken apart,” said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the New York-based inspectors. “The question this raises is what happened to equipment known to have been there.” “Where is it now?” “It's a concern,” Buchanan asked.

You bet it’s a concern. But from the media for whom ‘Bush and Blair lied’ is the only story, there is only a shameful silence. Oh -- and this, for good measure, from the Guardian's leader writer:

'The Bush administration's reaction to the report of the bipartisan US commission investigating September 11, which has found no evidence of a substantive relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida, is a classic case of none being so blind as those who will not see. "We stand by what was said publicly," said the White House spokesman, thus endorsing the stream of loose and contradictory claims made by the president and vice-president as they have thrashed around to justify the Iraq war'.

And then, this: 'On Monday Mr Cheney again insisted that Saddam had "long-established ties with al-Qaida", and neo-conservatives (my emphasis) are already rallying to attack the commission's findings on the absence of a September 11 link.'

Ah yes, those pesky neo-cons with their wholly perverse attachment to the truth. Shame on you, Guardian.