A Lie, But Not Clark’s

Spinsanity does a good job of unraveling the controversy surrounding Wesley Clark’s much-touted supposed claim that people close to the White House had called him on September 11 to urge him to falsely claim a connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks. The conclusion: what Clark actually said amounts to a lot less than what people on the Left claimed he’d said; commentators like Paul Krugman and Michael Moore exaggerated Clark’s statement, and commentators on the Right – in their zeal to disprove the claims of Krugman, Moore and others – unfairly claimed that Clark had made more sweeping and unfounded accusations than what he’d actually said. Here’s The Krug’s version of this particular Big Lie:
Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from “people around the White House” urging him to link the attack to Saddam Hussein.
It appears that the truth is just that in the days after September 11, Clark talked to a guy at a pro-Israeli think tank in Canada who thought Saddam might be behind the attacks and urged Clark to raise the possibility. But the real fault here has to lie with the paranoids on the Left who used and abused Clark’s statement to attack the Bush Administration. And people wonder why conservatives think Krugman can’t be trusted?