"Mr. President, thank you for inviting me! It is a great honor!"
"Mr. President, it is a great honor to meet you!!"
Posted on 12/19/2003 9:18:29 AM PST by WinOne4TheGipper
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who guided New York City through the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, said Friday that Saddam Hussein's capture could yield additional evidence that Iraq played a "direct" role in the 9/11 attacks.
"I don't know if evidence is going to get discovered or not - you know, direct evidence of a link. It may, it may," Giuliani told radio host Don Imus. "It may still get developed with the interrogations of [Saddam] and the people we find."
Giuliani said Americans were right to believe that Hussein played, at the very least, an indirect role in the 9/11 attacks, describing the Iraqi dictator as part of terrorist network "of separate individuals who organize and then they help each other."
The former mayor noted that Iraq had provided "land where terrorists could train . . and they supplied money."
"If you were to list the pillars of the world's terrorist organizations, [Saddam is] one of the big ones," he added.
But Giuliani clearly indicated that he suspects a stronger tie between the deposed dictator and the 9/11 attacks, reiterating, "It may still turn out that there's evidence of a more direct connection."
In recent weeks, a Defense Department memo released to the Senate Intelligence Committee cited a Czech intelligence report indicating that Iraqi intelligence had funneled money to 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta.
On Sunday, the London Telegraph reported that new documents unearthed by Iraq's governing coalition showed that Atta had trained in Baghdad to attack U.S. targets just two months before 9/11.
"Mr. President, thank you for inviting me! It is a great honor!"
"Mr. President, it is a great honor to meet you!!"
Luckily, you and I are probably the only people who saw the show anyway.
There have been two reports, one in June and another in early November.
We have 42 of the 55 "most wanted" including, and in addition, a number of intelligence personnel and scientists.
What is the "big picture", what has been exploited, and who were the non-Iraqi players on Iraq's payroll pre-war?
Iraq had an extensive intelligence apparatus. Were they completely incompetent and isolated from the Islamists operating in their midst and all around them? Were they completely impotent outside of the ME region? If not, what do we know?
I expect to hear much of this as the political campaign revs up - either as Bush makes the case for his re-election or as he defends himself against judiciary, congressional and election opposition attack.
Whether it's good news or bad news politically, if this is being kept quiet for legal or intelligence investigative (or leverage) purposes, he had better make that clear as well.
I was watching Hardball last night and Matthews, as he always does, was making a big deal about how ignorant the 53% of Americans are who think Saddam MAY have played some role in 9/11. He was giving Peggy Noonan hell because she was so inept on the question as to whether there was ANY evidence of such a connection. I could not believe Noonan would go on that show so unprepared to answer such a question. It really was a pathetic performance.
Good observation. My thoughts are that the lovely Ms. Noonan is very good (given her speech-writing background) at painting word pictures; she paints themes. She is not good at dealing with snap replies to facts on which she has not had time to cogitate in the manner of a writer. That is what makes her weak on shows like 'Hardball' where part of the game is to respond and parry the the host's seemingly off-the-cuff questions based on poll questions. She has not learned the rules to this game yet...
Originally posted by tirednvirginia:
You are right, Matthews was giving Peggy Noonan a hard time. However, I understood what she was trying to say and to me she made sense. Chris Matthews and Mike Barnicle were disgusting as they ridiculed and laughed at her. she did get a little flustered as they kept bombarding her with questions and not giving her time to really explain he[r] answers.
First off, it was "Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell", not Mike Barnicle. The problem can bee see by reading from the question and poll results that were used by Chris Matthews last night from the Gallup/USA Today poll of December 17th, 2003. Look at the actual poll question and poll results. Next we'll look at what Matthews really did to Noonan.
11. Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks, or not?
Yes, was involved No, was not No opinion 2003 Dec 15-16 ^ 53 42 5 2003 Sep 19-21 43 50 7 2003 Mar 14-15 ^ 51 41 8 2002 Aug 19-21 ^ 53 34 13 ^ Asked of a half sample. Margin of error: ±5 percentage points
The poll never defined what 'personally involved' meant, allowing both all the poll respondents and Chris Matthews to read into those words a whole range of meanings. Sounds ridiculous, just like Clinton's immortal "the meaning of the word 'is' is..." nonsense, right? For example, does 'personally involved' for Saddam Hussein mean:
1.) Was on the aircraft (like Atta) that hit either the WTC or Pentagon?
Obviously not, since he was just captured.2.) He was in on the target selection, planning, funding?
3.) He was responsible for partially funding the operation?
He seems to have had no problems with funding the jihadists before his recent capture, so much for the secular leader never helping the Islamic terrorists.4.) He was responsible for providing training facilities and personnel in assistance to the actual 19+ individuals responsible for the attacks?
5.) He did not know the time and place of the attacks, but did provide 'generic' terrorist training to provide familiarity with an actual aircraft environment and practice run-throughs for the violent take-over from the air-crew and passengers.
Perhaps for security, Atta did not inform anyone as to the actual dates, time, targets who was not his immediate boss.
You could come up with other examples for a continuum of definitions of what 'personally involved' actually means to anyone, but since those words in the poll question lets the respondents define the meaning without a common definition it allowed both Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell to make Ms. Noonan look foolish trying to talk her way around a direct reply. Matthews was smart enough to realise that HE could define the poll question as my item number two listed above, while poor Noonan was trying to articulate say items number three, four or five in my above list.
Her best counterattack would have been to dismiss Matthews line of interrogation until she could get HIM to define what both he and the Gallup poll respondents meant or implied by the phrase 'personally responsible'. Notice that Matthews never defined his meaning of 'personally responsible' at all, he just kept repeating it. Then she could have said that the ambiguity of the question might mean that the American people might believe that Hussein had some type of involvement other than doing high-fives with his minions on 9/11...
dvwjr
Yeah, Matthews was strident and downright hostile with her. He would never go after Hilliary like that. Never.
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