I got an e-mail earlier this week from a reader about a CNN article that was a basically a rewrite of this article from National Journal. The Powerline guys quickly ripped the revisionist-history hit-job and their readers made the key points succinctly.

Readers Malcolm Jones and John Steele add a more basic point. Jones writes:

How is a non-link to 9/11 significant? The President never made such a link claim!!!

I suspect the Daily Brief was a snap-shot/preliminary assessment of possible/known ties between Al Qaeda and Hussein. Even if a non-link verdict exists; it doesn't undermine the case for war.

John Steele writes:

I guess I missed something. So the left is now claiming that contemporary intel documents say there was no proof of a link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. So what, the President didn't say there was. The elephantine efforts of the left have managed to prove that that there was no justification for what the President didn't claim.

Wow, stop the presses.

The Democrats and their allies on the loony left have been able to peddle this "Bush lied" canard because too few of the American people are so aware and engaged in current affairs to detect the deception. In theory, journalists are supposed to put these things in the larger context and test the truth of the claims. Journalists aren't supposed to be stenographers, but the Washington press corps sure does seem uninterested in things like the Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar intelligence, the Butler report out of Great Britain or the Silberman-Robb report.

Journalism's wounds are self-inflicted.