While interviewing Mayor Giuliani last night on MSNBC, Matthews stated:
...let me just make this historic point, which is factual. Osama bin Laden offered the Saudi Arabian government his strength, his powers, to the extent he had them, to defend them if there was an attack by Iraq, by Saddam Hussein. Before all this hell has broken loose the last couple of years, before we went to war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein and Islam and bin Laden were enemies. We brought them together. But how can you say that Saddam Hussein was in league with bin Laden, when bun bin offered Saudi Arabia to defend them against him?
True enough. But as Stephen Hayes point out, Matthews didn't tell the whole story.
Bin Laden did offer the Saudi regime protection...in 1990. But I'm not sure why that is somehow more important than the... Defense Intelligence Agency-authenticated Iraqi document listing bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset in 1992, Iraq-al Qaeda non-aggression pact in 1993 (which was later cited in a Clinton administration terrorist indictment), meetings between senior al Qaeda officials and Faruq Hijazi in 1994, series of meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda terrorists in the mid-1990s, 1997 Iraqi intelligence (IIS) document describing "the relationship" between Iraq and bin Laden and promising to explore future cooperation between the two, Baghdad meetings in March 1998 between a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden and the IIS, early 1999 offer of asylum from Iraq to al Qaeda, fact that the Saudi kingdom was put on alert in 2000 because of anticipated joint attacks by al Qaeda and Iraq, IIS support for Ansar al Islam from 2001-2003, and on it goes....
Tom Joscelyn has more here.