Cheney: "If We Had It To Do Over Again, We'd Do Exactly The Same Thing"...

Tim Russert hammered Vice President Dick Cheney today on "Meet The Press," hooked on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 but in reality a solid hour of grilling on Iraq, Afghanistan, and WMDs. It was an incredibly dense show, and more than anything shows how carefully Cheney parses words -- no question gets a simple yes or no answer and even while acknowledging that, fine, Iraq was not linked to 9/11 he hammers home the meme of Iraq as a sponsor of terrorism and incipient WMD threat. He also claims not to have read the just-declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report that revealed that intelligence linking Iraq to 9/11 was in fact highly disputed before the invasion. A neat sidestep, that.

Notable was the trademark Russert "gotcha" moment wherein he played the infamous clip of Cheney saying in August 2002: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." When asked if, knowing that Saddam did NOT have weapons of mass destruction, if Cheney would still have gone into Iraq, he said "Yes" and went on:

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