Clinton, al Qaeda and Iraq

Jake Tapper notes that Obama's assertion at DePaul that many in Washington misleadingly argued that Saddam had serious connections with al Qaeda is borne out by the historical record:

As Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth have written in their book about Clinton and the New York Times, Clinton's linkage of Saddam and al Qaeda was unique among Democrats and "was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote."

Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, said it was a spurious claim: "I don’t think any agency pretended to make a case that there was a strong linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. It wasn't in the N.I.E."

"Nevertheless," van Natta and Gerth write, "on the sensitive issue of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Senator Clinton found herself adopting the same argument that was being aggressively pushed by the administration. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials had repeated their claim frequently, and by early October 2002, two out of three Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. By contrast, most of the other Senate Democrats, even those who voted for the war authorization, did not make the Qaeda connection in their remarks on the Senate floor."

But she won the news cycle this week.