Obama says Clinton in 2002 suggested there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government.

CQ Politics

(Barack Obama on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 in an interview on MSNBC's Hardball.)

Yes, Clinton used the Bush administration line.

Asked about a new report that found no connection between al-Qaida and the old Iraqi government before the U.S. invasion, Sen. Barack Obama said it shows that Sen. Hillary Clinton had poor judgment in 2002 when she repeated claims from the Bush administration to support its plan to go to war.

"President Bush and Dick Cheney insisted there was a connection. Senator Clinton on the floor of the Senate suggested that there was such a connection," Obama said in an interview on MSNBC's Hardball on March 11, 2008. "I think it was part of a series of misjudgments that have not only cost us dearly in terms of lives lost and people who are injured, has distracted us from Afghanistan and our ability to pin down bin Laden and al-Qaida, but has also cost us hundreds of billions of dollars."

Clinton's support of the war is well-known, but we wondered if Obama was quoting her correctly about al-Qaida. So we checked the transcript of a speech she gave on Oct. 10, 2002, just hours before the Senate voted to approve the war resolution.

(Continued here.)