Just yesterday I mentioned the oft-repeated myth that Osama bin Laden was served up to Clinton on a silver platter, and Clinton intentionally set bin Laden free to wreak havoc upon the world. I reviewed the debunking of this tired lie in this blog entry; go and read it.

The irony here is that while conservatives often dredge up the Clinton/bin Laden fabrication as a way of blaming Clinton for 9/11 so Bush seems without fault, recent revelations regarding Bush’s past actions actually show that Bush in fact did let a major terror suspect go free when it had the ability to nail him.

In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, one of the key arguments the Bush administration used was that Saddam Hussein was in bed with terrorists, and the evidence of this was that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, was operating within Iraqi borders. The administration claimed that Zarqawi was wounded and then treated in a hospital run by Uday Hussein. However,

A CIA report in late 2004 concluded that it had no evidence Saddam’s government was involved or aware of this medical treatment, and that “There’s no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored Zarqawi.” One U.S. official summarized the report: “The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything.” [Source]

In addition, Zarqawi allegedly operated in an area of Iraq not controlled by Hussein; there is no evidence that Hussein had any control over or connection to the man.

But now, evidence is emerging to support a claim made in 2004 that Bush was given specific intelligence on Zarqawi’s location, and that not once, but several times, he had opportunities to have Zarqawi taken down before the invasion of Iraq–but Bush refused to do so. The only plausible reason Bush would conceivably refuse to remove Zarqawi would be that he was more valuable as a propaganda tool for Bush than he would be dead. In other words, Bush refused to take out Zarqawi so he could maintain a fake reason to invade Iraq.

According to the CIA agent heading up the section in charge of bin Laden and al Qaeda,

“Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp . . . experimenting with ricin and anthrax . . . any collateral damage there would have been terrorists.”

According to this agent, the reason Bush declined was because he was “wining and dining” the French, and didn’t want the U.S. to look like “gunslingers.” Naturally, this excuse is not being taken as very credible–but the revelation that Bush knew for a long time where Zarqawi lived and refused to take him out, that is being taken quite seriously, excuse or no.