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To: cyncooper

Unbelievable, yet unsurprising.


13 posted on 05/21/2004 10:54:47 AM PDT by EllaMinnow (It's my FR Anniversary! 3 years, 75 threads, 7073 replies.)
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To: redlipstick

As I told the pollster, the media is EXTREMELY untrustworthy.

I believe I had to hear Shep Smith yammer on about children being killed well after I heard Kimmitt say that it was false.

ack!

I'm going to find the thread where I made my contemporaneous notes and copy the above post of the transcript that backs up what I heard.


14 posted on 05/21/2004 11:00:39 AM PDT by cyncooper
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To: redlipstick
Check this out. He must have been asked about "the wedding singer" while I was typing my notes yesterday because I missed this. I think the end of Kimmitt's answer sounds familiar. I was so taken with his definitive reply when I just read it, I feel compelled to post it here (and I am thoroughly charmed by their term "the RAT line"):

Q Yes, Mike Georgia (sp) from Reuters. There are relatives of a well-known wedding singer who say he and his brother were killed in this incident near the Syrian border. And they brought the bodies back to Baghdad. Are you willing to sort of review your assessment of what happened in terms of civilians and combatants at this point?

GEN. KIMMITT: Oh, absolutely. We said we're going to do an investigation. We're going to take a hard look at that.

Obviously, for operational and security reasons, I can't reveal much of the details of what got us there and what we did while we were there. But I am persuaded that, again, the purposes that caused us to conduct that operation in the middle of the barren desert in the early mornings (sic) of the hour, which is kind of an odd time to be having a wedding, against what we believed to be 34 to 35 men and a number of women, less than a handful of women, which doesn't seem to be numbers that one would associate with a wedding, by a group in their four-by- fours, well away from any town, in a known RAT line, which is being used by smugglers and foreign fighters frequently, and other intelligence that we found on the ground, pretty well convinces us that what got us there had a valid purpose.

Are we going to take a look at it, are we going to review it, are we going to conduct some measure of investigation based on some of the things that we're hearing here? Of course we are. I think that's the only prudent thing to do. And we may find out new information that we don't have currently. But we are satisfied that the intelligence that we had, the multiple correlated evidence that got us there, and the actions of our forces on the ground, what they found and what they brought back -- foreign passports, money, weapons, satellite communications -- would be inconsistent with a wedding party for sure, and fairly consistent with what we have seen throughout this country time after time after time, which is the flow of foreign fighters to come in to terrorize and kill the Iraqi citizens.

Q Is it possible that you were targeting these fighters and you hit a wedding party next door? Is that possible?

GEN. KIMMITT: Well, I think let's let the investigation bear out. But this was not "next door." This was in the middle of the open desert.

~SNIP~

Dang, these reporters just take the (wedding) cake.

15 posted on 05/21/2004 11:09:25 AM PDT by cyncooper
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