Posted on 08/19/2007 11:06:49 AM PDT by april15Bendovr
PBS, NY Times & Scott Riter promoted false history in Iraq
Have you seen this CNS news report posted at Laurie Mylroie's website? If you havent yet its time you should
http://www.lauriemylroie.com/
CNSNews Report:
Saddam Had WMD,
Extensive Terror Ties
By Scott Wheeler
The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has ‘thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated
Quote from the article
“M14 is a reference to Iraqi intelligence directorate of special operations. The Iraqi documents obtained by CNSNews.com show a list of 92 individuals of various national origins who were described in the documents as having “finished the course at M14.”
According to Richard O. Spertzel M14 is in fact "Salman Pak" and who would know better than a member of the Iraq Survey Group?
“HAVE WAR CRITICS EVEN READ THE DUELFER REPORT?”
"It is asserted that Iraq was not supporting terrorists. Really? Documentation indicates that Iraq was training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees included Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese."
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/8195
Page 8 of this report a former UNSCOM inspector Jonathan B. Tucker includes Saddams stalling tactics specifically at Salman Pak
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:yiFiR4ECvhEJ:cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol03/33/tucker33.pdf+documents+and+photographs+salman+pak&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=18&gl=us
MONITORING AND VERIFICATION IN A
NONCOOPERATIVE ENVIRONMENT: LESSONS
FROM THE U.N. EXPERIENCE IN IRAQ
by Jonathan B. Tucker
The systematic destruction of evi- dence also took place at sites in- volved in the Iraqi BW program. Two weeks before the first UNSCOM biological inspection team visited the research laboratory at Salman Pak in August 1991, the Iraqis tore down several structures at the site that had survived the Coalition bombing campaign unscathed, including buildings hous- ing fermenters, an aerosol inhala- tion test chamber, and a small incinerator. The steel aerosol cham- ber was crushed and deposited at a dump several kilometers away. The Iraqis then bulldozed the site and covered it with fresh dirt to erase any remaining evidence. They also burned reams of documents, leav- ing melted looseleaf binders and piles of ashes scattered around the site. According to a member of the UNSCOM team that visited Salman Pak: Although the Iraqis were able to produce some origi- nal research papers and hand-drawn sketches of the layout of the buildings now reduced to rubble, they were unable to produce any documentary evidence to support their assertions, claiming that everything was destroyed by the bomb- ing. Although none of us wanted to admit it, one thing became painfully clear: the only thing we were going to get from the Iraqis was what they wanted to give us.
24 Impeding Inspections During no-notice inspections of sensitive sites, the Iraqi minders have found excuses ranging from transportation bottlenecks to bad weather to delay the U.N. team’s arrival and buy time to remove in- criminating evidence. Since inspec- tions of undeclared sites far from Baghdad require the use of a heli- copter to transport the inspection team, the Iraqi authorities insist on 15 hours’ notice to “stand down” their air defenses so that the U.N. helicopters can fly safely. Although inspection teams try to avoid reveal- ing the location of the target site by declaring a large block of airspace for the helicopter to fly through, the Iraqis still derive useful clues from the advance notice, particularly if they are concerned about a particu- lar clandestine facility within the declared zone.
25 On a few occa- sions, the Iraqis have also threat- ened to open fire on UNSCOM helicopters if they approach secure areas such as presidential palaces. Once the inspectors arrive on- site, plant managers sometimes refuse to provide requested docu- ments or give answers that are in- appropriate to the questions asked. Another common delaying tactic is for Iraqi officials to feign incom- prehension and request the services of an interpreter even though they are capable of speaking fluent En- glish in other situations.
U.N. inspection teams are gen- erally not allowed to interview more than a few senior engineers and technicians employed at an in- spected facility, regardless of the type of site visited. During plant walk-throughs, minders from the National Monitoring Directorate may prevent plant workers from re- sponding to inspector questions or pressure the few individuals who speak some English to work through an interpreter. In addition, the fact that the minders videotape all in- terviews has a chilling effect on the willingness of plant workers to speak freely.
At times, Iraqi stalling tactics have verged on intimidation. Dur- ing a biological weapons inspection at Salman Pak, for example, Iraqi soldiers deliberately placed live mu- nitions and a radioactive source in- side bunkers that were to be in- spected. In addition to frightening the UNSCOM inspectors, this tac- tic delayed the inspection until the ordnance had been removed and a nuclear expert had been called to check the radioactive source.
26 On another occasion, the Iraqi authorities tried to prevent the ex- cavation of a field near Salman Pak suspected of containing buried bio- logical munitions. The Iraqi officials brought in Moslem clergymen who spent two hours pleading with the UNSCOM team that the field was a grave site and that digging would be sacrilegious. Although the chief inspector finally ordered the exca- vation to proceed, only one trench had been completed before the back- hoe broke down and work had to cease because of the intense mid- day heat. On subsequent days the clergymen did not return and the excavation proceeded, but no in- criminating evidence was found.
Now if you look at what Scott Ritter was quoted saying in the BBC article titled "Reporters Visit Suspect Iraqi Sites" we have quite a story. We can now ask questions why Seymour Hersh and the NY Times became so interested in discrediting intelligence. Maybe even including why the Docex project received a lot of heat from the NY Times and had to shut down?
Scott Ritter Quotes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2247658.stm
‘No terrorism training’
The former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter accompanied the journalists to Salman Pak.
He said there was obviously no terrorism training taking place there - a site he said the US was ready to go to war for.
The journalists were shown an old Iraqi plane abandoned in a field, which Mr Ritter said was used by Iraqi security forces to train for rescuing passengers from hijacked planes.
“Any nation that has an airline industry trains people to rescue those who have been on aircraft that have been hijacked,” he said.
“If there is a time and a place to go to war I will be there,” he said.
“But I am not going to go to war based on a fabrication, especially from politically motivated Iraqi defectors who intend to misuse the tragedy of 11 September by saying somehow those who perpetrated that crime were trained here.”
PBS made a ridiculous retraction on the defectors used in their Gunning for Saddam report. They conveniently threw the men they interviewed in their documentary underneath the bus.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
PBS deciding to discredit these Iraqi men and neglected to note the news conference on Salman Pak by BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS with many other dicoveries corroberated their evidence.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
WAR NEWS UPDATE
April 6, 2003
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/warupdate_04-06.html
“BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS: That’s just one of a number of examples we’ve found where there’s training activity happening inside Iraq. It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations, clear links with common interests. Some of these fighters came from Sudan, some from Egypt and other places and we killed a number of them and have captured a number of them and that’s where some of the information came from”
Now it is time to ask PBS, The NY Times and Scott Ritter questions why their information looks twisted.
Ping
Ping
You would think after being outed as a pedophile, the MSM would stop using Scott Ritter as source.
and we were welcomed with flowers and oil is paying for everything.
“It is asserted that Iraq was not supporting terrorists. Really? Documentation indicates that Iraq was training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees included Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese.”
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/8195
Page 8 of this report a former UNSCOM inspector Jonathan B. Tucker includes Saddams stalling tactics specifically at Salman Pak
PBS made a ridiculous retraction on the defectors used in their Gunning for Saddam report. They conveniently threw the men they interviewed in their documentary underneath the bus.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
PBS deciding to discredit these Iraqi men and neglected to note the news conference on Salman Pak by BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS with many other dicoveries corroberated their evidence.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
WAR NEWS UPDATE
April 6, 2003
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/warupdate_04-06.html
We were greeted with flowers.
Sic ‘em
So, PBS (Democrat house network and home of the convicted drunk, Bill Moyers), the dying (and shrinking!) Democrat house publication, the NY Times, and the disgusting pedophile, Scott Ritter, have collaborated on a lie?
Surprise, surprise. Peas in a pod.
I can’t find a place to start reading this story that makes sense to me.
Is there a link to the CNSNews article?
“and we were welcomed with flowers and oil is paying for everything.”
I thought we were imperialists and Bush was Hitler.
Why? The MSM is pro-pedophile, aren’t they?
Your so old fashioned;)
Yeah, I thought he was busy looking for dates down by the school bus stop.
The way America haters use that as their little joke to bash us is as cruel it gets.
It has actually enhanced his credibility with the msm. Used to be that he was just a White male and an ex-Marine (yes, murtha, there are ex-marines). Now he is a member of an oppressed group that is being denied civil rights.
Funding PBS so that they can be a echo chamber for the left is just wrong.
“You would think after being outed as a pedophile, the MSM would stop using Scott Ritter as source.”
In the minds of those in the MSM, being a pedophile is symptomatic of being a progressive thinker.
ROTFLMAO!!! Now that's funny! I don't care who you are, that's funny right there!
Great article.
Sorry about that. Its kind of like jumping into the mid season of the The Sopranos.
Here is some good starter info about Salman Pak
The 9/11 Connection
What Salman Pak could reveal.
Deroy Murdock
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040303.asp
Maybe it’s true, in a sense, “Birds of a feather flock togeather”.
Speaking of the NYT, did anyoone see the op-ed piece today by members of the 82nd Airborne? I did a search but couldn’t find a thread on it.
Thank you Joseph
I hope this provides people with a little better insight into why your work was cut short.
The left has been hanging their hat on a sloppy twisted information rather than fact finding.
Call it “Search and Avoid”
SEYMOUR HERSH: “One of the things that’s overwhelming to me as a journalist was the notion that everybody believed before March of ’03 that Saddam had weapons. This is just an urban myth. The fact of the matter is that – and my personal experience — and this, I ran into Scott when? In about 1998, 1999? And in talking to people who worked on the UNSCOM and also on the International Atomic Energy Agency, which did a lot of very first-rate reporting. And you know some of the people who wrote some of the reports, former intelligence agents from Britain, among others, they were pretty much clear by 1997 that there was very little likelihood that Saddam had weapons, and there were many people in our State Department, our Department of Energy, in the C.I.A., who didn’t believe there were weapons. And I think history is going to judge the — what I can almost call almost mass hysteria we had about Saddam and weapons. And one of the questions that keeps on coming up now is: Why didn’t Saddam tell us? Did he tell us?”
History is going to show that Seymour Hersh put way too much stock in what Scott Ritter had to say leaving him looking like he had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Seymour seemed happy defending people surrounded by the U.N. oil for food scandal and because of his own personal ideological agenda turned a blind eye to Saddams weapons and terrorist connections. Simultaneously he played search and avoid with factual information becoming a useless idiot for our enemy. I thought journalists were supposed to take pride in themselves with their objectivity? It is clear that this was and currently continues to be the prevailing attitude at the NY Times and PBS.
Since Seymour is such a big name in the Mainstream media nobody challenged him.
http://cdonohoe.townhall.com/g/65f90639-bb34-4894-9c03-c6e6f698f2b5
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZjA4Yjk5MmY4NGJjMzRhYjIwOThhMzcxNzRlYTQ0Yjg=
Bad Press
From the October 11, 2004, issue of National Review.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh (HarperCollins, 370 pp., $25.95)
T his side of Dan Rather, no one has more cause for concern about fallout from CBS’s scandalous document hoax than Seymour Hersh. For no journalist has benefited more from the decades-old jerry-rigged system of American news reporting now being razed before our eyes.
It was a cozy arrangement. A precious few titans—called the “mainstream” media, though there was little mainstream about them—anointed themselves arbiters of the “objective” and the “responsible.” Objective was a veneer of just-the-facts-ma’am rigor, hiding a supernumerary lens implacably programmed to align selected facts with certain preordained “truths”: American strength bad, European piety good, individual initiative dangerous, government social activism desirable, and so on. Responsible, in turn, was the process of bolstering this “objectivity” with analysis from dependable sources, trusted to go along with the program and transformed into superstar pundits for doing so.
Only through such an arrangement could Seymour Hersh have thrived. In lionizing this Pulitzer Prize winner, the “mainstream” has honored itself. How fitting, then, that Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command—derived from his Bush-bashing post-9/11 reports for The New Yorker—arrives just as Rather’s blogging nemeses have removed the last stitch of the emperor’s clothes.
By any truly objective standard, Hersh is a terrible reporter. Real reporting plays it straight and gets it right, and the reader simply can’t trust him to do either. Hersh is a hard-left ideologue who disdains facts that collide with his dark theories. His methodology, moreover, is a joke. As has been ably recounted by National Review’s John J. Miller and others, Hersh’s most important sources are anonymous and impossible to verify, while the few sources he does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven. His journalistic practices have been decried by his former New York Times editor, A. M. Rosenthal, and embarrassingly laid bare by his own admissions, in court testimony, about concocting elaborate deceptions to pry out dubious information.
More fundamentally, Hersh gets even easily verifiable details wrong. And, as long as a story-hawker is playing to his prejudices, he has proved spectacularly gullible. Indeed, were it not for some rudimentary due diligence by ABC News—the kind CBS recently eschewed—Hersh might have beaten Rather to phony-document infamy when, in the course of compiling his roundly discredited account of the Kennedy presidency (The Dark Side of Camelot), he was taken in for months by forgeries trumpeting salacious gossip about JFK and Marilyn Monroe.
Nevertheless, as long as they were the only game in town, the mainstream media could present Hersh as a respectable raconteur instead of a hyper- partisan. In fact, at The New Yorker, they still think they can: Chain of Command begins with a cloying introduction by Hersh’s current editor, David Remnick, who burnishes the legend, elides any hint of the innumerable gaffes, and conveniently explains that, of course, Hersh can’t be expected to name his sources, but you can bet the ranch on their credibility because, after all, this is The New Yorker we’re talking about.
Hersh wastes little time cashing in on this license to mutilate. In the book’s most explosive section, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” he tries to trace knowing culpability for the degradation of Iraqi prisoners directly to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But his case is a house of cards. The White House made a legally unassailable decision after the 9/11 attacks that Qaeda terrorists were not entitled to Geneva Convention prisoner-of-war protections: Captives could properly be subjected to harsh interrogation methods, but not torture. This, to Hersh, appears sinister; so he cites internal memoranda in which government lawyers at the non-policy level discuss the limits of permissible interrogation in light of anti-torture laws, and finds a conspiracy to torture prisoners.
For Hersh, it is immaterial that these memos were never endorsed as policy and that the relevant administration decision-makers all insisted that torture was forbidden. Relying on an unidentified “former intelligence official,” Hersh contends there was a top-secret program that licensed the abuse of Qaeda captives for intelligence purposes, and that, in late 2003, the Pentagon shifted the program to Iraq in an effort to get tough with the thriving insurgency there. The result was the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal—which the Pentagon tried to keep a lid on, but could not, owing to Hersh’s tireless reporting.
This account is farcical. First, it was the Pentagon, which vehemently denies the existence of such a program, that first publicly revealed prisoner-abuse allegations in Iraq, months before Hersh reported them. Second, Gen. Antonio Taguba was loosed to conduct an aggressive internal investigation—which Hersh selectively praises—and expressly concluded that the abuse was not authorized. Third, former defense secretary James Schlesinger’s exhaustive independent probe similarly found neither a “policy of abuse” nor “approved procedures” for inhumane treatment. And fourth, the abuse is being vigorously prosecuted, with 45 personnel thus far referred for courts-martial, and at least one cooperating defendant denying that the heinous conduct was authorized. Hersh nonetheless plows ahead with this and other calumnies, propped up by shadowy sources.
He also reprises his contention that the U.S. was duped into invading Iraq by that root-of-all-evil, the “neocons” in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney’s office. Prominent here is the disingenuous harangue that, to heighten fears of a revived Iraqi nuclear program, the Bush administration relied on crude forgeries suggesting Iraqi efforts to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Hersh’s case, again, is a crock. The forgeries were a sideshow, and never the core of concerns about Saddam’s ambitions. Probes completed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lord Butler’s commission in the U.K. have concluded that the uranium allegation was consistent with years of clandestine surveillance by Western intelligence services.
Were it not perfectly obvious from the suspect fact-gathering that his purpose is a pre-election mauling of the sitting president, Hersh’s designs would be clear from his choice of identified sources, who are called on when the pretense of impartial expert analysis is in order. On prisoner abuse, for example, his go-to guys are Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch and former New York Times eminence Anthony Lewis—both scathing Bush critics at the forefront of a due-process-for-terrorists movement. On Iraq, Hersh offers up former weapons inspector and current Saddam apologist Scott Ritter, and Richard Clarke, who, after years of holding very nearly the opposite view, “evolved” into a naysayer on Iraqi ties to terror just in time to pen his own election-year bestseller. And, for the astounding claim that ostensibly successful military operations in Afghanistan were really a study in ineptitude, Hersh is accommodated by a declared Democratic partisan, retired general Wesley Clark.
This is the way the mainstream game, in which Hersh is among the most renowned winners, was always played. The game is ending, apparently unbeknownst to the storied investigative journalist, but not a moment too soon for the rest of us.
—Mr. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a contributor to National Review Online.
— Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
From article above
“Hersh’s most important sources are anonymous and impossible to verify, while the few sources he does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven.”
“Hersh can’t be expected to name his sources, but you can bet the ranch on their credibility because, after all, this is The New Yorker we’re talking about.”
This was the retraction PBS and the NY Times used in the FRONTLINE documentary.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
“[Editor’s Note, November 2005: More than two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of the general’s account of the activities at Salman Pak. In fact, U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques. It should also be noted that the general and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE’s attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This interview was conducted by FRONTLINE and The New York Times in Beirut. The Lt. Gen. was later identified in other stories as Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, a former high-ranking officer in the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. Abu Zeinab reportedly now lives in Baghdad; he claims not to have left Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein and that the story of Salman Pak was a hoax. He maintains that the man FRONTLINE and The New York Times interviewed was an impostor provided by the INC. The INC denies this claim, and stands by the original story.]”
How can they post this crap while at the same time reporting “BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS news conference and not give it equal attention?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/warupdate_04-06.html
WAR NEWS UPDATE
April 6, 2003
“BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS: That’s just one of a number of examples we’ve found where there’s training activity happening inside Iraq. It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations, clear links with common interests. Some of these fighters came from Sudan, some from Egypt and other places and we killed a number of them and have captured a number of them and that’s where some of the information came from”
February 26, 2004
Scott Ritter Press Conference at MacDuffie School Springfield, Massachusetts
“In the wide ranging and hard hitting press conference, Ritter described and denounced major media’s role in deceiving the American people into war. Ahmed Chalabi concocted lies that US neoconservatives used to justify war, such as claims that Iraq was involved with 9/11. The New York Times and PBS’s Frontline misinformed the American people. Ritter showed how neo-conservatives tried to use war to implement the pre-war Project for the New American Century. He describes in detail how The New York Times relied on Chalabi, ignored evidence to the contrary and failed its responsibility to corroborate Chalabi’s claims. Now, even Chalabi admits he was lying in order to topple Iraqi regime. “The CIA’s number one objective in Iraq was never disarmament, it was always the elimination of Saddam Hussein.”
Really, Who is doing the lying here?
This from National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/apostolou200410080926.asp
“Saddam turned Oil-for-Food into the best oil lobby since Prince Bandar arrived in Washington. Money skimmed off of U.N.-supervised oil sales ended up with men like Shakir al-Khafaji, an Iraqi American in Michigan. Al-Khafaji provided former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter with $400,000 to make the anti-sanctions film In Shifting Sands. Oil-for-Food money rewarded French, Chinese, and Russian companies for their governments’ loyalty in arguing Iraq’s case at the U.N.”
Amazing that the left would rather take the word from a Scott Ritter who produced a Pro-Saddam movie financed by a recipient of the U.N. Oil for Food Scandal. Very Sad
Donna
I was wondering If you had any luck? It is much easier to read the article with the links at Townhall
post #29 or click townhall up top
They really cant look at any other facts objectively because it would be painful for them going up against their own preconceived notions.
The minute they start looking into evidence on both sides its going to unleash misery on the their world that they cant make other people own.
I suspect many smart lefties know already but use denial as a un-penetrable coping shield. Kind of like the deflector shield in Star Trek
Thank you, yes, and I found these articles at CNSNews, too.
I have come to the conclusion that President Bush has no respect for the American people and thus feels no responsibility to keep us informed of the truth.
What over reason could there be for his administration’s total silence on these matters? There is value in simply speaking the truth; why doesn’t he know that?
It’s very frustrating.
Inspector’s Report Bolsters Credibility of Iraqi Intelligence Documents
http://www.cnsnews.com/SpecialReports/archive/200410/SPE20041013a.html
Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\\SpecialReports\\archive\\200410\\SPE20041004a.html
CNSNews.com Publishes Iraqi Intelligence Docs
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewNation.asp?Page=\\Nation\\archive\\200410\\NAT20041011a.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040920-11.html
Q Mr. President, my brother is an NYPD, emergency service unit, Truck number 2. I just wanted to say — you mentioned the — his partner in the State of the Union address. You mentioned his father, John Vigianno, and the two boys.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I know them well.
Q I just want to say, thank you, as being a beacon of strength at a time of need for our country.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, sir. (Applause.) Your brother was their partner?
Q My brother-in-law is Rob Beeger (phonetic,) Truck number 2.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, yes.
Q I’ve got a picture of them with you.
THE PRESIDENT: What a great family. You’re not going to believe this family. Two sons go in the rubble and don’t come out. It’s really important we never forget that day. It’s just important. It’s a part of our history.
You know, I — you’ve got a question, or do you want to keep going?
Q I actually have a question for you, as well.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. (Laughter.) I was about to wax eloquently. (Laughter.) Or at least wax. (Laughter.)
Q Is that from the top of my head? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: See, you probably appreciate my comments about Vice President Cheney. (Laughter.)
Q I just don’t have the curls, either.
THE PRESIDENT: That’s right. (Laughter.) Go ahead.
Q I hear a lot of things in the press in regards to what’s happening in Iraq. I don’t appreciate the fact that the press only presents a certain point of view. I hear different things, and one thing I’ve learned — I did a little bit of studying — I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about Salman Pak. And we know about Zarqawi and how he’s causing all sorts of problems in Fallujah.
And the other question I have, real quick is, is that I watched a special on Fox News last night on the U.N. — the oil for food scandal. And the thing is, is that when it comes down to the oil for food scandal, we have a lot of countries that opposed us at the very beginning of the war that have a lot of money staked in with Saddam. And I was just wondering if, when you address the U.N., do you plan on bringing it up to these countries? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: No. (Laughter.) There is an investigation going on. Paul Volker is leading the investigation, and it’s best that the investigation run its course.
Zarqawi — look, here’s the situation. It’s tough as heck in Iraq right now because people are trying to stop democracy. That’s what you’re seeing. And Iraqis are losing lives, and so are some of our soldiers. And it breaks my heart to see the loss of innocent life and to see brave troops in combat lose their life. It just breaks my heart. But I understand what’s going on. These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave. That’s what they want us to do.
And I think the world would be better off if we did leave — if we didn’t — if we left, the world would be worse. The world is better off with us not leaving. It’s a mistake to pull out. Can you imagine what Iraq would be like today if Saddam Hussein were in power? It would be terrible for them, and we’d be dealing with a guy who had just totally ignored the demands of the free world. The sanctions weren’t working. We know he had the capability of making weapons and it was just a matter of time.
No, we didn’t find the stockpiles we thought would be there. But his desire to make weapons and the ability to make them and the ability to work with these terrorist organizations was a threat we could not afford to take. (Applause.)
Secondly, if we put an artificial timetable out there on withdrawal, all the enemies says is, we’ll wait them out. Our mission has got to be to help to train the Iraqis, get them on the path to stability and democracy as quickly as we can, and then our troops come home. But to complete the mission. It makes no sense to pull out of there early. If we pull out of there early, Iraq will come even more dangerous. (Applause.) See, we’ve got to get it right in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we will. And now, it’s a matter of will.
You asked me what’s it’s like there. It’s tough. But Prime Minister Allawi is the best way to — the best person to talk to there. He said, this is — this is desperation by these people. They’re watching TV screens, too. They’re watching the reactions of people around the world. They see countries pull out of Iraq. They saw what happened when one country pulled out after a citizen was beheaded. They saw what happened after elections in Europe. They know that people are — can grow weary of this battle. We’ve got to be firm and strong. I believe we’re right in what we’re doing. And I believe democracy in Iraq is going to happen, and I believe the world will be better off for it. (Applause.)
Jveritas has a good understanding of why the White house remained hesitant to define WMD and terrorism links. If he catches this post he explains better than I.
I remember that you told me about your conversation with the President :)
Donna
In my opinion the administration is more concerned about winning the current war than going back and justify the reason for it including Saddam WMD programs and his strong relation to terrorism. Despite the many facts that Saddam did not stop his WMD programs and despite the facts that Saddam has very strong relation with terrorism, the administration opted not to fight this battle but fight the entire war and win on the battlefield. I know it is frustrating for us but the most important thing is to win the war and all the rest will become history.
LOL, you were charming!
I don’t even expect the President to actually speak the words. In the old days, administrations used columnists and surrogates to get information out - straight talk for adults, not just spin.
What supporters need, is something to discuss at the water cooler that is not defensive or reversed the next day.
I find it disrespectful to citizens who need and want to know more. We have never followed our elected leaders blindly - they are supposed to represent our wishes, not cut us out of the story.
I’m offended by the President’s attitude and I take it as a danger to the republic! He should have learned the importance of public opinion from Vietnam.
review
The best way to describe President Bush’s strategy is to look at a quote from Soren Kierkegaard “Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.”
Democrats and the left have organized many obstacles which the President has to find ways around fighting terrorism. The left have become useless idiots setting up rules in place to undermine the war on terrorism. The CNSNews report by Scott Wheeler talking about thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated. The NY Times pressured Democrats to pull the Docex Project that would of allowed us to have more documentation on Salman Pak. Nobody knows that better than Jveritas who was in the midst of translating these documents before the program was pulled off the shelf.
Donna We have a monolithic bias press with an ideological agenda. I had a conversation with Jveritas talking about when President Bush releases info to the press it has to be overwhelming and unspinnable. If any Republican President has the appearance of being reactive to the press rather than being proactive with the press the Republican party could very well be considered sunk.
The Surge is working and it is easier to defend the truth than a lie. I understand your anger and frustration and cant wait till the Docex Project documents are made available again so we can ram evidence about Salman Pak down the face of every Democrat that gleefully have been cheerleaders for failure in Iraq.
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