Frank Rich lied
Today’s New York Sun Staff Editorial:
Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It’s one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It’s another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.
The NYSun explains that
- The words “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” But those 16 words are neither bogus nor fictitious. They were and are true
- Two major reports that looked into the matter of the administration and intelligence did exonerate the president
- But it’s undisputed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Jordanian, Zarqawi, who shares with the rest of Al Qaeda, including the September 11 terrorists, the goal of re-establishing the caliphate
- , the DIA report is not much different from what Bush administration officials were saying publicly at the time. On February 6, 2002, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, made a similar argument in public testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying, “Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qa’ida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible – even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.”
Moreover, the notion that the secular Baathists and the Islamic jihadists are so ideologically divergent that they will not work together has been disproven by what is going on now in Iraq, where they are cooperating against Iraqi moderates and American troops. - the Times, in reviewing Mr. Bamford’s 2001 book, remarked on Mr. Bamford’s “palpable distaste for the Israeli state.” Said the Times review, “Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists.”
- The Associated Press’s Nadia Abou El-Magd interviewed Firas Adnan, whose tongue had been cut off with a box cutter by a Saddam loyalist. Mr. Adnan, “his slurred words barely comprehensible,” said of Saddam, “He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him.” Susan Sachs of Mr. Rich’s own New York Times reported from the mass graves of Hilla: “On April 11, 1991, a few weeks into the Shiite rebellion, Iraqi helicopters dropped leaflets over Karbala ordering everyone to leave or be attacked with chemical weapons. Mr. Mohani piled his relatives into a pickup truck and a car and fled. About four miles south of the city, the escape route was blocked. There, he said, he saw Mr. Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, executing people randomly at a checkpoint. ‘He was telling people to get out of their cars and then he would shoot them, shoot them until his arm was too tired to do it anymore.'”
Frank Rich should have kept to doing movie reviews.
Pamela has more on Saddam, AlQaeda, and 9/11, and asks,
How do they compare Bush’s eight months in office to Clinton’s eight years of squandered prosperity, inaction on terrorism and missed opportunities to get Bin Laden?
Why Is No One Blaming Bill Clinton for Understating [the] Terror Threat?
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