Three days ago, I railed at the L.A. Times for an incredibly misleading story regarding the 9/11 Commission’s interim staff report. The story, which was on the paper’s front page, was titled Despite Findings, Bush Sees Iraq Tie to Al Qaeda. The story repeatedly asserted, quite incorrectly, that the interim staff report had directly contradicted the Administration’s position on Iraq/Al Qaeda connections. I noted that the story had pointedly omitted several recent quotes from the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, in which they had forcefully and repeatedly stated that their findings were completely consistent with the Bush Administration’s position.

Well, the L.A. Times is at it again — lying directly to its readers’ faces. And this time, it’s not lying by omission — it’s a direct misrepresentation, as the reader can easily verify with a simple review of the relevant transcript.

Today’s story reports on the appearances of 9/11 Commission members on the Sunday shows “Meet the Press” and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” The article states:

Commission members Sunday repeated that they did not see evidence of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

I have one simple question: Does the L.A. Times think we don’t know how to find and read a transcript?

I wrote a blog post about the “Meet the Press” segment on Sunday immediately after it was over. Later in the day, I updated the post with a link to the rush transcript, from which I quoted Commissioner Lehman at length. Let me remind you of some of his statements. As you read these, keep in mind that, according to the L.A. Times, “[c]ommission members Sunday repeated that they did not see evidence of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Here’s Commission Lehman on “Meet the Press”:

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.

Here’s the L.A. Times quote again: “Commission members Sunday repeated that they did not see evidence of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Not one word of what I just quoted you appears in the L.A. Times story. Instead, the exact opposite is reported. Black is white. Up is down. It’s a flat-out lie, and the transcript proves it.

How stupid does the L.A. Times think we are?

So: does this strategy work? Ask Rick Palardy of Temecula. He’s an L.A. Times subscriber who read the paper’s misleading June 18 story, and fired off this letter to the editor, which the Times printed yesterday:

Re “Despite Findings, Bush Sees Iraq Tie to Al Qaeda,” June 18: Leading up to our attack and invasion of Iraq, President Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction and was likely to supply them to Al Qaeda. Now Bush defies the investigative findings of the 9/11 commission staff, which determined that there were no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone some form of “dealing.”

Die-hard supporters of Bush have continued to accept or ignore his repeated lies, while tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans have been slaughtered. Isn’t it time for all people who care about what’s right to admit the truth about Bush’s lies?

Rick Palardy

Temecula

There you have it. The 9/11 Commission “determined that there were no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.” Where do you suppose L.A. Times subscriber Rick Palardy got that particular bit of misinformation?

To paraphrase a famous quote by a certain pseudo-journalist: How in the world could the L.A. Times have left its readers so deeply in the dark?

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from alert reader Brennan Stout at Oh, That Liberal Media, I have found this short bio of Ken Silverstein, the author of the misleading L.A. Times piece:

Freelance writer, Washington, D.C., contributing editor of Harper’s magazine, Washington editor of Mother Jones, contributor to The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon.com, Slate, The American Prospect and Washington Monthly, 1993 -2003.

Does that tell you a little about where this guy is coming from?