Review Online that "[w]hat one can not say is that regime change in Iraq was unjustified: Not if you know Saddam's record, his clearly stated intentions, and his ties to international terrorists—including, as a new Pentagon report reveals, a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s second-in-command." In an April 2004 interview with Tavis Smiley, who alleged that George W. Bush had decided to invade Iraq before the 9/11 attacks and manipulated the intelligence links on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, May argued that Bush had been continuing the policy of the Bill Clinton-era Iraq Liberation Act and that Bush had pushed the CIA for accurate information. May told Smiley: "I'm rooting for the guy in the White House, personally, 'cause I do think he has done a good job". In the aftermath of the American re-deployment in Iraq during July 2009, he wrote for The Washington Times that "[t]he news is not that American combat troops withdrew from Iraqi cities. The news is that American combat troops withdrew from Iraqi cities in victory—rather than in defeat." In October 2012, May wrote for the San Angelo Standard Times that, despite the death of Osama bin Laden and other successes against al-Qaida, he considered the group "degraded" but not actually "defeated"; he referred to the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai as a particular sign of a still dangerous Taliban. He argued that "Roosevelt and Churchill grasped what too many analysts in government, academia, media and think tanks do not: To prevail against America's 21st century enemies, kinetic warfare is necessary but insufficient. An ideological war, a war of ideas, also must be waged. And on that front, we have not yet begun to fight." Disputes, debates, and criticism During the beginning of the 2003 CIA leak scandal, May wrote that an ex-administration official had told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, and May stated that the fact was an open secret widely known across Washington, D.C. He also remarked that he chose not to mention this in his own writings since he considered this to be irrelevant to anything else. David Corn, writing for The Nation in March 2007 in the aftermath of the scandal, disputed May's assertions, and he quoted Plame as saying that only a handful of people knew about her covert status. Corn then called upon May, along with other conservative commentators such as