If Bush and Cheney are ever brought to justice ...

OK. Please stop laughing, BUT IF George Bush and Dick Cheney are ever brought to justice for war crimes generally, and specifically for the illegal and unjustified destruction of Iraq, then this article in The New York Times today, "Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report," should play at least some role in their prosecution. If they really were classifying parts of the 9/11 commission report in December 2002 that showed actual links to Saudi officials while still ginning up fictional ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to begin their war, then this piece of evidence shouldn't be forgotten at their trial (again, please stop laughing).

This issue isn't even new, as shown by this exchange between Dick Cheney and Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on September 14, 2003, when we were only six months into our never-ending war along the Tigris and Euphrates. Cheney was still trotting out discredited Iraqi links and there were already rumors about the Saudi government connections contained in the suppressed sections of the 9/11 Report:

Dick Cheney: ... With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.

Tim Russert: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.

Cheney: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.

Russert: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.

Cheney: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. ..."

The shorter version? It's perfectly fine if the fictional Czech story of the Iraqi link is somehow "public out there" (with no help from Bush and Cheney, obviously), but the true Saudi link needs to be kept from the public.

Now for the happy musical outro courtesy of Michael Moore and REM who put all of this into a 2004 movie: