WELL THAT EXPLAINS IT

Well, now we know why the Bushies fought so hard against the 9/11 commission report for so long: It proves that Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. Nothing.

Kos has portions of a recap that I can't, as of yet, find online, but when I find one I'll post the link. Among the highlights:

The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned.

"The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report.

Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement.

Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers."

The revelation is likely to embarrass the Bush administration, which made links between Saddam's support for bin Laden -- and the attendant possibility that Iraq might supply al-Qaida with weapons of mass destruction -- a major plank of its case for war.

Finally, finally, we might expect to see that percentage of people who think Saddam was behind 9/11 -- near half of the country! -- begin to sink. Still, it requires the media to report it, and so far only UPI has picked this up, I'm cautiously optimistic.

As if everything before didn't, this more than proves the sheer cynicism of our current administration. Pushing the release of the report to after the war -- it was originally scheduled to be released in January -- constitutes an outright deception of the American people. As Bill Maher put it on Saturday night, "the Joker is not the Riddler". Yellowcakegate was the tip of the iceberg.

UPDATE: Here's the UPI story. I'm sure it's gonna break the hearts of Bill Safire and Glenn Reynolds to know that the report concludes that Atta was in the United States at the time of the magical Prague meeting. And...

U.S. officials said Iraq was harboring an alleged al-Qaida terrorist named Abu Mussab al-Zakawi.

But the government official who has seen the report poured scorn on the evidence behind this claim.

"Because someone makes a telephone call from a country, does not mean that the government of that country is complicit in that," he told UPI.

"When we found out there was an al-Qaida cell operating in Germany, we didn't say 'we have to invade Germany, because the German government supports al-Qaida.' ... There was no evidence to indicate that the Iraqi government knew about or was complicit in Zakawi's activities."

Good point, and hey, that would put us in the awkward position of having to invade ourselves. Break out them Civil War figurines!