Posted on 04/11/2006 9:41:09 AM PDT by april15Bendovr
The Sixteen Words Were True By Christopher Hitchens Slate | April 11, 2006
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)
At a later 1995 UN special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemagazine.com ...
"According to the London Sunday Times of April 9, the truth appears to be some combination of b) and c). A NATO investigation has identified two named employees of the Niger Embassy in Rome who, having sold a genuine document about Zahawie to Italian and French intelligence agents, then added a forged paper in the hope of turning a further profit. The real stuff went by one route to Washington, and the fakery, via an Italian journalist and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, by another. The upshot was—follow me closely here—that a phony paper alleging a deal was used to shoot down a genuine document suggesting a connection. "
bttt
I never understood why the President said he ought not to have included that statement in his SOTU.
"The Sixteen Words Were True"
Too late. Rove let the memes fester for months on end. He and Bush pushed Tenet to sign that strange semi-apology days after the Wilson article. Failure.
The best Bush can do here come out and say "it was true, nevertheless we made a mistake in how we fought back. We give the Democrats a "win." Let's move on."
He still thinks if he doesn't fight the Dems he's setting a "new tone" in Washington. Guess that's why Scotty "deer-in-the-headlights" McClellan is still his press secretary.
"Interagency feuding has ruined the Bush administration's capacity to make its case in public, and a high-level preference for deniable leaking has further compounded the problem."
The article reminds me of this quote
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Mark Twain
Because the media pushed hard hard hard against it. And with so much else, they just let it go. Not a wise decision, I'm afraid. This admin's own scaredy-cat-ness means there's no way they can get their credibility back, maybe EVEN IF those chemical weapons show up in Syria...
I know he is doing the best he can, but he must talk to the sheeple.
They've always been true. Bush was citing British intel and British intel has never backed down from their statement. The Left obviously didn't care if it was true or not. It fueled their "Bush Lied" mantra and that's all they ever cared about.
Even the damn terrorists are HONEST with you, even if they are completely misguided. Only western liberals have to invent lies out of whole cloth just to believe the lunacy they create.
An interesting thesis. However, the article is not written in the style normally employed by Christopher Hitchens...
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