Just watched “Meet the Press,” with 9/11 Commission members John Lehman and Democrat partisan hack Richard Ben-Veniste commenting on the staff report. The highlights were that both of them clarified that the sentence in the staff report about the lack of “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda referred to collaboration in planning specific terrorist attacks against the United States. Lehman specifically said that there is substantial evidence that Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda members did collaborate on weapons development. Also, they both alluded to the apparent existence of evidence of Iraq/Al Qaeda ties known to Vice-President Cheney but unknown to the commissioners, including the possibility (recently discovered) that one of Hussein’s Fedayeen members was actually an Al Qaeda associate or member.

While both commissioners agreed that there is no evidence of direct involvement by Saddam or Iraq in the 9/11 attacks, they appeared to disagree sharply on whether the staff report contradicted Bush Administration claims of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, as reported by virtually every media outlet in the nation. Russert quoted the by-now famous New York Times report that stated:

The staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks sharply contradicted one of President Bush’s central justifications for the Iraq war, reporting on Wednesday that there did not appear to have been a “collaborative relationship” between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Hack Ben-Veniste said he agreed with this assessment. But in explaining why he agreed, he assumed away the issue of what the Bush Administration had said — the issue that is at the heart of conservative complaints about the media reporting. Ben-Veniste confined his remarks to the commission staff’s finding that Saddam had not collaborated with Al Qaeda in terrorist activities against the United States — particularly in the 9/11 attacks. Ben-Veniste also implausibly asserted that there is “unshakable” evidence that Mohamed Atta did not meet with an Iraqi intelligence representative in Prague. (As we know, this supposedly “unshakable” evidence is . . . cell phone records.)

Lehman disagreed. In his response to the New York Times reportage, Lehman echoed Vice-President Cheney’s criticism of media reporting such as that of the New York Times as “outrageous” and “irresponsible.” Lehman said there is no difference between what the staff report said, what the Bush Administration had said, and what the Clinton Administration had said about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. (Clinton himself is reaffirming this fact.) Lehman pointed to meetings between Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence in Sudan for the purpose of collaborating on weapons development. (Astute readers will recall that bin-Laden’s 1998 indictment contained allegations of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda on weapons development.)

Lehman also stated that, like Cheney, he had not personally come to a conclusion regarding the alleged meeting between Iraqi intelligence and Atta. Lehman’s position on the Atta meeting was a more responsible position than Ben-Veniste’s, since cell phone records are hardly “unshakable evidence” of the owner’s whereabouts, as a former prosecutor like Ben-Veniste should know. (Here is some evidence of the meeting that the staff report doesn’t address.)

I’ll provide a link to the transcript when it’s available. I am also eager to hear the Ranting Prof’s assessment.

UPDATE: Apparently Lee Hamilton has said to the NYT that he has seen no credible evidence “of any collaborative relationship — period.” A strange statement in light of the other commissioners’ statements about collaboration on weapons systems. Either the NYT quoted Hamilton out of context (very possible — it’s the NYT) or there is some disagreement among the commissioners (quite likely). (The story also reveals that some of the commissioners have disagreed with the staff report — another significant point.)

Even in the NYT story, Hamilton says any differences between the Administration and the commission staff report are largely “semantic.” This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.

UPDATE x2: Here is the rush transcript, so you can check my memory against the transcript. Here the quote I found most significant:

MR. LEHMAN: Well, I really totally disagree with what I thought was outrageously irresponsible journalism, to portray what the staff statement–and again, this is a staff statement; the commissioners have not addressed this issue yet–to portray it as contradicting what the administration said. There’s really very little difference between what our staff found, what the administration is saying today and what the Clinton administration said. The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al- Qaeda and Saddam’s intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development. There’s abundant evidence of that. In fact, as you’ll soon hear from Joe Klein, President Clinton justified his strike on the Sudan “pharmaceutical” site because it was thought to be manufacturing VX gas with the help of the Iraqi intelligence service.

Since then, that’s been validated. There has been traces of Empta that comes straight from Iraq, and this confounds the Republicans, who accused Clinton of doing it for political purposes. But it confirms the cooperative relationship, which were the words of the Clinton administration, between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.

The Bush administration has never said that they participated in the 9/11 attack. They’ve said, and our staff has confirmed, there have been numerous contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda over a period of 10 years, at least. And now there’s new intelligence, and this has come since our staff report has been written because, as you know, new intelligence is coming in steadily from the interrogations in Guantanamo and in Iraq and from captured documents. And some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam’s Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaeda. That still has to be confirmed. But the vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don’t yet have. And we are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence.

Try, if you can, to reconcile the above description of confirmation of a “cooperative relationship . . . between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence” with Lee Hamilton’s alleged quote in the NYT article mentioned in the first update to this post, that there is no credible evidence “of any collaborative relationship — period.” As I said, either the NYT quoted Hamilton grievously out of context, or these commissioners have some serious areas of disagreement to work out.