Tuesday, October 26, 2004
CBS News admits attempted election hijacking
According to the LA Times, "60 Minutes" had been planning on running the apparently fraudulent story about missing explosives in Iraq on Sunday, October 31, giving the Bush Adminstration just one day to respond to the spurious charges.
Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it.""Distraught?" Because his Halloween Suprise was sprung too early?
The tip was received Wednesday, and reporters from both organizations were in place Thursday, but by Friday, when the story came together, only a single TV interview had been taped, said one person familiar with the chronology. Over the weekend, the newspaper got wind that other journalists were on the story, and decided it had to break the story Monday, this source said....
Fager "reluctantly" agreed when the New York Times said it had to go with the story, one person involved said, adding that Fager was "distraught but understood." The Times agreed to credit "60 Minutes."
I wonder what other fraudlent stories are scheduled for this weekend, and who will be dumb enough to believe them.
Update
Who is the "source" mentioned above? That question probably has an interesting answer!
Cliff May has an inside source:
The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Update II
Little Green Footballs is on the case!
Update III
So much for "being straight with the American people." The Daily Recycler catches Kerry telling lies... On tape!
Update IV
The Bush Administration suspects that the UN is attempting to sabotage the reelection of President Bush with this suspiciously timed story:
Bush administration officials suspect political motivation behind a letter focused on the disappearance of 377 tons of explosives sent yesterday from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the United Nations Security Council....
"The timing of this seems puzzling," the spokesman for the American U.N. mission, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun yesterday....
The loss, according to the Iraqi official quoted in the letter, Mohammed Abbas, occurred "after [April 9] 2003, throughout the theft and looting of the governmental installations, due to lack of security."
But one U.N. official who is well versed with monitoring procedures told the Sun that there is no way for the Iraqis to know whether the material was looted at that date or was hustled out of Iraq earlier, during the war.
Update V
The NY Times cover-up begins. Today the NY Times reports that a US military commander was ignorant of the importance of the weapons site, seemingly contradicting the Bush Administration, headlined "No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says"
White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.Wow, that would seem to make the US Military plan seem to be pretty amatuerish, and expose the Bush Adminstration as liars. But The Belmont Club exposes the NY Times:
But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.
[T]he NYT's use of an interview with the Col. Anderson is totally worthless. They interviewed the wrong unit commander. It was a 3ID outfit that searched the place with the intent of discovering dangerous materials nearly six days before. The 101st had no such mission.Captain's Quarters reveals that the NY Times should have talked to Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division. Contemporaneous news reports show that the U.S. did indeed search the site, and did find "laboratory samples of the HMX and/or RDX, but not the massive amounts the IAEA claimed was stored at Al Qaqaa."
U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives.Honest mistake, I'm sure.
Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex just south of Baghdad. ... The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.
Update VI
Bush reponds to the charges:
After repeatedly calling Iraq the wrong war, and a diversion, Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq is a dangerous place, full of dangerous weapons...
If Senator Kerry had his way…Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would control those all of those weapons and explosives and could share them with his terrorist friends. Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, "We do not know the facts." Think about that: The senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts…..
Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it's ongoing. And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.
