Blitzer failed to note Hayes' false Iraq-al-Qaida reporting, Cheney connections

On the July 24 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer interviewed Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes about his recently released book on Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. During the interview, Hayes claimed that Cheney and President Bush "initially... both thought there was a possibility that Saddam Hussein had had some role in the Sept. 11 attacks," and that "pretty much everybody thought" Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction, and these terrorist groups that were -- in some cases, had overlapping relationships with Saddam... and his intelligence services." Blitzer offered no challenge to Hayes' Iraq/al-Qaida statements, despite the fact that Hayes wrote several articles and a book alleging connections between al-Qaida and Iraq that were later discredited, and that Hayes' flawed work was touted by Cheney as the "best source of information" regarding the alleged connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. Indeed, at no point during the interview did Blitzer note Hayes' steadfast support of the Bush administration's national security policies. Nor did CNN identify Hayes as a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard. As Media Matters for America documented, Hayes has for years offered factually inaccurate and misleading support of Cheney and the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Iraq War. Most recently, Hayes appeared on the July 22 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press and claimed that the July 17 release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the terrorist threat to the United States "strengthens the basic case that the administration has been making that al-Qaida remains a serious threat," despite the fact that the NIE, as The New York Times reported, "concludes that the United States is losing ground on a number of fronts in the fight against al-Qaida, and describes the terrorist organization as having significantly strengthened over the past two years." Media Matters also identified instances in which Hayes engaged in falsehoods and distortions in defense of Cheney and the administration's attempts to link al-Qaida and Iraq. For example, on the Dec. 9, 2005, edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Hayes defended Cheney's December 2001 claim that 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. According to Hayes: "If you look at the front page of The New York Times in the days surrounding the vice president's claim, The New York Times was reporting the same thing." But as Media Matters noted, even after the Times and numerous other news outlets subsequently reported in May 2002 the FBI and CIA's finding that "no evidence" existed to substantiate the claim, Cheney continued to raise the possibility of such a meeting. Additionally, in an article in The Weekly Standard's Nov. 24, 2003, issue, Hayes attributed to "a top secret US government memorandum" -- which Hayes identified as a memorandum produced by former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith -- the conclusion that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden "had an operational relationship." Hayes wrote of the memo: "Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources." In a Jan. 9, 2004, interview with Denver's Rocky Mountain News, Cheney cited Hayes' article, claiming that "[i]t goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago." Cheney added: "That's your best source of information." However, following the publication of Hayes' article, the Pentagon released a statement asserting that "[n]ews reports" about the memo "are inaccurate," and that the portion of the memo to which Hayes' article referred "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida, and it drew no conclusions."