IN THE POLITICIZED DEBATE over the former Iraqi regime’s relationship with al Qaeda, no politician has been a more vocal naysayer than Senator Carl Levin. For almost two years the Democratic senator from Michigan has attempted to discredit the notion that the two could have worked together in any way. In so doing he has been willing to advance almost any argument, even if it is at odds with his earlier lines of reasoning.

His modus operandi has been to quote a Bush administration official (usually out of context) and then juxtapose these comments with other evidence (usually mischaracterized) derived from the intelligence community. At the heart of Levin’s crusade to discredit Bush administration policymakers has been the charge that those officials “cherry-picked” intelligence–citing only intelligence that supported their views and discarding the rest. But nowhere is there a better example of cherry-picking than Levin’s own press release from Friday, April 15.