Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Lie #786: Rummy Weighs In
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair's pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes. [2/10/04] http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040210/pl_afp/iraq_us_britain_rumsfeld_040210221018
White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes
Gist Was Hussein Could Launch in 45 Minutes
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003;
The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.
The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17424-2003Jul19?language=printer
Follow-up: Bush on Meet the PressI certainly wouldn’t submit myself to such torture…can’t bear to watch. But, I read the transcript. Firstly, commentators aren’t rushing to ponder the meaning of Bush’s comment that we can pre-emptively attack a country if they have “the capacity to have a weapon.” So, if a country has the capacity to plan to build a weapon that they could use, then, look out!
The mis-statements are way too numerous to chart. So, I provide a link that did: (Center for American Progress)
"President Bush wouldn't have agreed to an hour long network interview without a good reason and today he had one: in the span of a week he's faced the dual challenges of a loss of credibility on the war in Iraq and his management of the economy.
"His statement this morning that he would cut the deficit in half is simply laughable. Analyses by independent organizations like Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for Economic Development, and Decision Economics all project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, even assuming a return to strong growth."
"The President's statement that there is 'good momentum' on the job creation front is dishonest: while we are averaging 72,000 new private sector jobs created per month, at that pace, it would not be until May 2007 that this President would have created his first net job. President Bush is well on his way to having the worst job creation record since the Great Depression. His bragging today only served to reinforce his lack of credibility on managing the nation's economy.
"And what the President referred to as a "word contest" regarding the threat from Iraq is, in fact, his attempt to change the rationale for going to war and rewrite the history of what has occurred. His argument today that Iraq had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and pass them into the hands of shadowy terrorist networks is inconsistent with the intelligence provided to him.
INFORMING CONGRESS OF INTELLIGENCE CAVEATS
CLAIM: "I went to Congress with the same intelligence. Congress saw the same intelligence I had, and they looked at exactly what I looked at."
FACT ? CONGRESS WAS OUTRAGED AT PRESENTATION BY THE WHITE HOUSE: The New Republic reported, "Senators were outraged to find that intelligence info given to them omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had
characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war."
According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), many House members were only convinced to support the war after the Administration "showed them a photograph of a small, unmanned airplane spraying a liquid in what appeared to be a test for delivering chemical and biological agents," despite the U.S. Air Force telling the Administration it "sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03; Wilkes Barre Times Leader, 1/6/04; WP, 9/26/03]
9/11 COMMISSION
CLAIM: "We have given extraordinary cooperation with Chairmen Kean and
Hamilton."
FACT ? WHITE HOUSE HAS STONEWALLED THE 9/11 COMMISSION: According to the Baltimore Sun, President Bush "opposed the outside inquiry" into September 11th. When Congress forced him to relent, Time Magazine reported he tried to choke its funding, noting, "the White House brushed off a request quietly made by 9-11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean" for adequate funding. Then, the NY Times reported, "President Bush declined to commit the White House to turning over highly classified intelligence reports to the independent federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, despite public threats of a subpoena from the bipartisan panel." And as the Akron Beacon Journal reported last week, "the 9/11 panel did not receive the speedy cooperation it expected. In a preliminary report last summer, the panel's co-chairmen, Thomas Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat and former congressman from Indiana, complained about lengthy delays in gaining access to critical documents, federal employees and administration officials. They warned the lack of cooperation would prove damaging, ensuring that a full investigation would take that much longer to complete, if at all."
[Source: Baltimore Sun, 6/14/02; Time Magazine, 3/26/03; NY Times, 10/27/03; Akron Beacon Journal 2/2/04]
And, Bush claimed that his Administration has slowed the growth of discretionary federal spending. Actually, the average annual growth rate during Clinton’s eight years was 2.4% while it has been 11.8% during Bush’s first three years. http://slate.msn.com/id/2095184/ http://www.factcheck.org/printerFriendly.aspx?docid=139
What’s Happening, Iraq:Casualties are moving further back in the newspapers. Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s bombs each killed more than 50 Iraqis, but there weren’t American deaths, so… The is classic guerilla strategy, aiming to frighten off those who cooperate with the Occupier. The police are especially targeted.
WMD- Michael Massing in the NY Review of Books- A Strong summary:
This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922
What’s Happening, Afghanistan:Progress- or lack thereof report. From the leftist rag, the Wall Street Journal (Barnett Rubin)
In his State of the Union address, President Bush proclaimed that Afghanistan "has a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women." At the meeting of G-7 finance ministers last weekend, Afghanistan's minister provided a sober analysis of what it will take to make the constitution's words a reality: $28 billion over seven years, with about $6 billion supplied directly to the government's budget.
Without the resources needed to revive Afghanistan's legal economy, no one will be able to establish a stable government or implement the constitution. But Kabul is running out of money, and the amount offered falls far short of the need. Afghans cannot build a constitutional order on a criminalized base. The IMF says at least 40% of the economy is illicit: the drug trade, trafficking in emeralds and timber, smuggling of artifacts, land grabs by warlords, and trafficking of women. Income from illicit exports finances most of the imports and provides much of the demand for the remaining parts of the economy -- trade and construction. This illicit economy is the tax base for insecurity. Those who profit from it command resources to resist the rule of law. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107637522571725211,00.html?mod=todays%5Fus%5Fopinion%5Fhs
Kerry:
I never was a fan, and not just because he called me “Dick” even when I told him not to. But he will be tarred and feathered by unfair and outlandish charges. Today there were reports of a pathetic attempt to play the ‘race card’, referring to his “African-American wife”. [Teresa Heinz Kerry was born in Mozambique.] More importantly, he’s termed a captive of “special interests”. Well, of course all politicians are beholden, and Kerry’s not the most righteous in this respect [or almost any other]. But his PAC money contributions are 1/28th of what Bush’s are, so…
The Guardian noted Kerry’s backbone, reporting that Kerry would fight the GOP “smear machine”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3722161,00.html
Conservatives Getting Lukewarm re Bush
They’ll still vote for him, but the enthusiasm has waned. Combative Bill O’Reilly on Fox News was interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America”:
Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an inte
"What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.
O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since former weapons inspector David Kay said he did not think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040210-0550-campaign-bush-oreilly.html
Bush and Jobs: He Wants to Export ‘em!Gotta admire the honesty! (Not really) From the LA Times (Warren Vieth, Edwin Chen)
Bush Supports Shift of Jobs Overseas
The loss of work to other countries, while painful in the short term, will enrich the economy eventually, his report to Congress says.
The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.
The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.
"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."
The report, which predicts that the nation will reverse a three-year employment slide by creating 2.6 million jobs in 2004, is part of a weeklong effort by the administration to highlight signs that the recovery is picking up speed. Bush's economic stewardship has become a central issue in the presidential campaign, and the White House is eager to demonstrate that his policies are producing results. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-bushecon10feb10,1,6077937.story?coll=la-news-politics-national
A good sign that Kerry and other Democrats got right on it.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail, citing remarks by a top White House economic adviser, accused President Bush on Tuesday of encouraging companies to export jobs overseas.
"The Bush administration said that sending American jobs overseas is a good thing for America and good for the economy," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a statement released by his campaign.
"They've delivered a double blow to America's workers — three million jobs destroyed on their watch, and now they want to export more of our jobs overseas. What in the world were they thinking?" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/11JOBS.html
Military Analyst/Veteran David H. Hackworth on Scott Ritter
Like it or not, Maj. Scott Ritter had it right all along.
Most of the rest of us, from the president to his key advisers, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and Tenet, to the majority of Congress and to most of the talking heads – including the pre-Iraq War NBC analyst David Kay, who reported WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) behind every Iraqi sand dune – blew it big-time when it came down to the awesome arsenal that Saddam had supposedly squirreled away.
Ritter, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, took us all on – virtually alone, against incredible odds – stating, “Iraq is not a threat to the U.S.,” and begging the American people to take charge and not “sit back and allow your government to go to war against Iraq ... (without all) the facts on the table to back this war up.”
As per his reputation on training fields and battlefields, this granite-jawed former Marine stood his ground and never flinched. He reminds me of another two-fisted, tell-it-like-it-is Marine, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor, who was almost drummed out of the Marine Corps twice: Once in the 1930s for calling Benito Mussolini a “fascist,” and once again a few years later when he rattled the military-industrial complex by daring to declare that “War is a racket.”
Ritter, too, took serious punishment from his critics – and instead of doing proper due diligence or asking hard questions, the media quickly piled on. It was not Fox’s finest hour when that network gleefully painted him as a 21st-century Benedict Arnold – not that he had many prime-time advocates anywhere else. Even CNN’s usually evenhanded Paula Zahn said to Ritter six months before America unleashed its miscalculated military solution on Iraq, “People out there are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid.”
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Hacks%20Target%20Homepage.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=52&rnd=257.75345692271156
-R
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair's pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes. [2/10/04] http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040210/pl_afp/iraq_us_britain_rumsfeld_040210221018
White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim On Iraqi Strikes
Gist Was Hussein Could Launch in 45 Minutes
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 20, 2003;
The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.
The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17424-2003Jul19?language=printer
Follow-up: Bush on Meet the PressI certainly wouldn’t submit myself to such torture…can’t bear to watch. But, I read the transcript. Firstly, commentators aren’t rushing to ponder the meaning of Bush’s comment that we can pre-emptively attack a country if they have “the capacity to have a weapon.” So, if a country has the capacity to plan to build a weapon that they could use, then, look out!
The mis-statements are way too numerous to chart. So, I provide a link that did: (Center for American Progress)
"President Bush wouldn't have agreed to an hour long network interview without a good reason and today he had one: in the span of a week he's faced the dual challenges of a loss of credibility on the war in Iraq and his management of the economy.
"His statement this morning that he would cut the deficit in half is simply laughable. Analyses by independent organizations like Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for Economic Development, and Decision Economics all project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, even assuming a return to strong growth."
"The President's statement that there is 'good momentum' on the job creation front is dishonest: while we are averaging 72,000 new private sector jobs created per month, at that pace, it would not be until May 2007 that this President would have created his first net job. President Bush is well on his way to having the worst job creation record since the Great Depression. His bragging today only served to reinforce his lack of credibility on managing the nation's economy.
"And what the President referred to as a "word contest" regarding the threat from Iraq is, in fact, his attempt to change the rationale for going to war and rewrite the history of what has occurred. His argument today that Iraq had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and pass them into the hands of shadowy terrorist networks is inconsistent with the intelligence provided to him.
INFORMING CONGRESS OF INTELLIGENCE CAVEATS
CLAIM: "I went to Congress with the same intelligence. Congress saw the same intelligence I had, and they looked at exactly what I looked at."
FACT ? CONGRESS WAS OUTRAGED AT PRESENTATION BY THE WHITE HOUSE: The New Republic reported, "Senators were outraged to find that intelligence info given to them omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had
characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war."
According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), many House members were only convinced to support the war after the Administration "showed them a photograph of a small, unmanned airplane spraying a liquid in what appeared to be a test for delivering chemical and biological agents," despite the U.S. Air Force telling the Administration it "sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03; Wilkes Barre Times Leader, 1/6/04; WP, 9/26/03]
9/11 COMMISSION
CLAIM: "We have given extraordinary cooperation with Chairmen Kean and
Hamilton."
FACT ? WHITE HOUSE HAS STONEWALLED THE 9/11 COMMISSION: According to the Baltimore Sun, President Bush "opposed the outside inquiry" into September 11th. When Congress forced him to relent, Time Magazine reported he tried to choke its funding, noting, "the White House brushed off a request quietly made by 9-11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean" for adequate funding. Then, the NY Times reported, "President Bush declined to commit the White House to turning over highly classified intelligence reports to the independent federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, despite public threats of a subpoena from the bipartisan panel." And as the Akron Beacon Journal reported last week, "the 9/11 panel did not receive the speedy cooperation it expected. In a preliminary report last summer, the panel's co-chairmen, Thomas Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat and former congressman from Indiana, complained about lengthy delays in gaining access to critical documents, federal employees and administration officials. They warned the lack of cooperation would prove damaging, ensuring that a full investigation would take that much longer to complete, if at all."
[Source: Baltimore Sun, 6/14/02; Time Magazine, 3/26/03; NY Times, 10/27/03; Akron Beacon Journal 2/2/04]
And, Bush claimed that his Administration has slowed the growth of discretionary federal spending. Actually, the average annual growth rate during Clinton’s eight years was 2.4% while it has been 11.8% during Bush’s first three years. http://slate.msn.com/id/2095184/ http://www.factcheck.org/printerFriendly.aspx?docid=139
What’s Happening, Iraq:Casualties are moving further back in the newspapers. Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s bombs each killed more than 50 Iraqis, but there weren’t American deaths, so… The is classic guerilla strategy, aiming to frighten off those who cooperate with the Occupier. The police are especially targeted.
WMD- Michael Massing in the NY Review of Books- A Strong summary:
This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922
What’s Happening, Afghanistan:Progress- or lack thereof report. From the leftist rag, the Wall Street Journal (Barnett Rubin)
In his State of the Union address, President Bush proclaimed that Afghanistan "has a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women." At the meeting of G-7 finance ministers last weekend, Afghanistan's minister provided a sober analysis of what it will take to make the constitution's words a reality: $28 billion over seven years, with about $6 billion supplied directly to the government's budget.
Without the resources needed to revive Afghanistan's legal economy, no one will be able to establish a stable government or implement the constitution. But Kabul is running out of money, and the amount offered falls far short of the need. Afghans cannot build a constitutional order on a criminalized base. The IMF says at least 40% of the economy is illicit: the drug trade, trafficking in emeralds and timber, smuggling of artifacts, land grabs by warlords, and trafficking of women. Income from illicit exports finances most of the imports and provides much of the demand for the remaining parts of the economy -- trade and construction. This illicit economy is the tax base for insecurity. Those who profit from it command resources to resist the rule of law. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107637522571725211,00.html?mod=todays%5Fus%5Fopinion%5Fhs
Kerry:
I never was a fan, and not just because he called me “Dick” even when I told him not to. But he will be tarred and feathered by unfair and outlandish charges. Today there were reports of a pathetic attempt to play the ‘race card’, referring to his “African-American wife”. [Teresa Heinz Kerry was born in Mozambique.] More importantly, he’s termed a captive of “special interests”. Well, of course all politicians are beholden, and Kerry’s not the most righteous in this respect [or almost any other]. But his PAC money contributions are 1/28th of what Bush’s are, so…
The Guardian noted Kerry’s backbone, reporting that Kerry would fight the GOP “smear machine”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3722161,00.html
Conservatives Getting Lukewarm re Bush
They’ll still vote for him, but the enthusiasm has waned. Combative Bill O’Reilly on Fox News was interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America”:
Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an inte
"What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.
O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since former weapons inspector David Kay said he did not think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040210-0550-campaign-bush-oreilly.html
Bush and Jobs: He Wants to Export ‘em!Gotta admire the honesty! (Not really) From the LA Times (Warren Vieth, Edwin Chen)
Bush Supports Shift of Jobs Overseas
The loss of work to other countries, while painful in the short term, will enrich the economy eventually, his report to Congress says.
The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.
The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.
"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."
The report, which predicts that the nation will reverse a three-year employment slide by creating 2.6 million jobs in 2004, is part of a weeklong effort by the administration to highlight signs that the recovery is picking up speed. Bush's economic stewardship has become a central issue in the presidential campaign, and the White House is eager to demonstrate that his policies are producing results. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-bushecon10feb10,1,6077937.story?coll=la-news-politics-national
A good sign that Kerry and other Democrats got right on it.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail, citing remarks by a top White House economic adviser, accused President Bush on Tuesday of encouraging companies to export jobs overseas.
"The Bush administration said that sending American jobs overseas is a good thing for America and good for the economy," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a statement released by his campaign.
"They've delivered a double blow to America's workers — three million jobs destroyed on their watch, and now they want to export more of our jobs overseas. What in the world were they thinking?" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/11JOBS.html
Military Analyst/Veteran David H. Hackworth on Scott Ritter
Like it or not, Maj. Scott Ritter had it right all along.
Most of the rest of us, from the president to his key advisers, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and Tenet, to the majority of Congress and to most of the talking heads – including the pre-Iraq War NBC analyst David Kay, who reported WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) behind every Iraqi sand dune – blew it big-time when it came down to the awesome arsenal that Saddam had supposedly squirreled away.
Ritter, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, took us all on – virtually alone, against incredible odds – stating, “Iraq is not a threat to the U.S.,” and begging the American people to take charge and not “sit back and allow your government to go to war against Iraq ... (without all) the facts on the table to back this war up.”
As per his reputation on training fields and battlefields, this granite-jawed former Marine stood his ground and never flinched. He reminds me of another two-fisted, tell-it-like-it-is Marine, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor, who was almost drummed out of the Marine Corps twice: Once in the 1930s for calling Benito Mussolini a “fascist,” and once again a few years later when he rattled the military-industrial complex by daring to declare that “War is a racket.”
Ritter, too, took serious punishment from his critics – and instead of doing proper due diligence or asking hard questions, the media quickly piled on. It was not Fox’s finest hour when that network gleefully painted him as a 21st-century Benedict Arnold – not that he had many prime-time advocates anywhere else. Even CNN’s usually evenhanded Paula Zahn said to Ritter six months before America unleashed its miscalculated military solution on Iraq, “People out there are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid.”
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Hacks%20Target%20Homepage.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=52&rnd=257.75345692271156
-R
