  urlLink BoiFromTroy recounts a conversation he had with a particular lefty friend: I had a lengthy discussion driving back from Ginger Rogers Beach in Santa Monica a couple weeks ago with a friend who insists that "Bush Lied!!! " about Iraq causing 9-11. I walked him though what was said... Bush stated truthfully that Al Qaeda was behind 9-11. Bush stated truthfully that there were connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. People inferred that Saddam's regime was behind 9-11 and attributed their thoughts to Bush...and when that was "disproven" by the 9-11 Commission, then naturally, "Bush Lied!!!
" While he's on to something re: the inanity of the whole "GOP mindgames" that Al Gore was talking about recently--I think BFT misses something here though. I'll 'esplain: To offer as a defense of the administration that the admin can't be held responsible for what (rational) inferences can be drawn from their statements is the same defense Michael Moore offers for his clusterf*** of a movie. While it's true that Moore utters very few out and out falsehoods, his method is to selectively present facts such that the most rational inference for an uninformed viewer is to reach the conclusion that Moore wishes you to. That method, while internally consistent and essentially true in the details--gets the big truths very very wrong.
For example, I could use the exact same method to prove, without printing one untrue statement, that the South won the Civil War or that the Axis won WWII. So in that sense, saying "it's not our fault people inferred this" is a cop-out. But ultimately, that isn't a problem since the Administration went out of its way to repeatedly and consistently state that they had no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11.
The most that can be said to counter that is that when pressed, brought up the Czech report of Atta meeting an IIS official in Prague before the attacks (something the Czechs still stick by). And bear in mind, each time that bit of information was brought up, it was in the context of asserting that that was the ONLY bit of information the Admin had linking Iraq to 9/11. In summary: You can't absolve the Admin by claiming they aren't responsible for the inferences drawn from official statements--but you can absolve them when they explicitly and expressly counter the inference drawn (thereby making the inference no longer logical/rational). 
