Al Gore speaks:

The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident -- the President and Vice President deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe’s top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "an exaggeration."

(snip)

They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.

(snip)

The Bush administration’s objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison.

The RNC responds:

“Al Gore's history of denial of the threat of terrorism is no less dangerous today in his role as John Kerry’s surrogate than it was in the 1990s in his role as Vice President, a time when Osama Bin Laden was declaring war on the United States five different times,” said RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke.

And Tristero rebuts:

And what did the GOP serve up? Not a lie, and of course not a word in response to Gore's assertions. No, they issed a fucking baldfaced lie on top of another one:

"Al Gore's history of denial of the threat of terrorism [Gore NEVER denied the threat of terrorism] is no less dangerous today in his role as John Kerry's surrogate [Gore speaks for himself, not Kerry] than it was in the 1990s in his role as vice president, a time when Osama Bin Laden was declaring war on the United States five different times," [and a time when the GOP made every effort to deflect attention from Clinton's attempt to detail with bin Laden by pruriently focusing on Clinton's wee-wee. ]RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke said in a written statement.