As I mentioned in a recent post, I been living a happier life these days by paying less attention to the media. For conservatives, the incessant liberal bias can become too much to swallow. My family just got back from a wonderful ski vacation in Park City, Utah. Naturally, we spent a fair amount of time in the airport waiting for our flights and were therefore subjected to the Clockwork Orange-type indoctrination that is airport CNN. As a regular FoxNews viewer is it always a jarring experience to be subjected to CNN. Still, some of the bias was so blatant, it was laugh-out-loud funny.

I specifically recall a dark intonation that the company that supplies water to our troops in Iraq (along with thousands of other supplies) and which supplied a bad batch sent to some of the troops was formerly run by... Dick Cheney! Oh, no, not Dick Cheney! What an evil company!

Why, oh why, does CNN have a monopoly on airport news? For the love of all that is good and just, would some other news network please outbid them? The idea that millions of Americans (and, I'd guess, millions of non-Americans around the world, in some foreign airports) are subjected to such slanted reported, whether they like it or not, is galling.

I also recall seeing a quick blurb that the Pentagon released a report which, according to CNN, said that there was no link between Saddam Hussien and al Qaeda. That struck me as very odd, since I had read of extensive links in previous reports by the Weekly Standard, among others. Being at the airport at the time, and without an internet connection, I couldn't check out the story for myself, so I dismissed it as probably another example of misleading reporting.

I was right.

Powerline has a nice summary of the situation, based on reading the actual Pentagon report, something the mainstream press either did not do, or chose not to accurately report. Here's part of the report's abstract:

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a "de facto" link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.

No link or connection, huh?