For fans of Bill O’Reilly and Paul Krugman.
Mr. O’REILLY: …I’m appointing Russert as president of the United States right now, OK? I talked to Tommy Franks the other night, and I said, ‘You know, what’s this weapons of mass destruction deal?’ And he was the general that commanded the war. He said, ‘Before we went to war, Egypt and Jordan told me,’ Tommy Franks, all right, ‘that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I passed that along to President Bush.’ So you’re sitting there in the White House, Russert, OK–frightening thought, but you are–and you’re getting your top general going, ‘I just heard from Egypt and Jordan weapons of mass destruction are there.’ Blair’s telling you, ‘MI6–weapons of mass destruction.’ Putin’s telling you, ‘Russian intelligence–weapons of mass destruction.’ Your own CIA chief is telling you, ‘Slam dunk weapons of mass destruction,’ according to Woodward. Now the 9-11 Commission harshly criticized Clinton and Bush for not doing enough to get bin Laden. That was one of their main thesis, and I believe that and I think everybody does. So you’re told by Jordan, Egypt, Russia, Britain, your own guy, ‘Weapons of mass destruction.’ You know Zarqawi, a top al-Qaida lieutenant’s, sitting in Baghdad because he just had a leg operation, all right? You know that. You know, as the 9-11 Commission pointed out, there’s been repeated contacts between al-Qaida and Saddam. You know all this. And you don’t move against Saddam? So they did have the WMDs. Say there was an anthrax attack on Krugman’s apartment block, OK? You’re sitting there, you had all this information, you didn’t act. Impeachable offense. He had to act. That’s the truth.
Prof. KRUGMAN: No, the truth–look, you’re talking all about commissions and governments that were under political pressure, and we have some independent stuff, right? The best reporting was actually by Knight Ridder, which was talking to the analysts off the record and not to the top officials. And this is the fall of 2002. And all the analysts said, ‘You know, they’re exaggerating this threat. We’re under enormous pressure to go and find reasons to attack Iraq.’ And you’ve actually got people who are close to the administration, like, you know, editorialists at The Washington Post, Jim Hoagland saying– boasting about how we’re managing to put the screws on these CIA analysts who don’t want to believe that Saddam is such a threat. So, come on, this is rewriting history. And the fact of the matter, as…
Mr. O’REILLY: Like I’m going to believe a Washington Post editorial writer over all the people I’ve cited.
[…]
Mr. O’REILLY: Why doesn’t your newspaper, The New York Times, do some investigating? You did 48 Abu Ghraib front-page stories…
Prof. KRUGMAN: Oh…
Mr. O’REILLY: …but you haven’t been able to do any oil for food investigations. I wonder why.
Prof. KRUGMAN: Because nobody has any information, right?
Mr. O’REILLY: Nobody has any?
Prof. KRUGMAN: Nobody has anything except these claims of all this come from Ahmad Chalabi, who The New York Times has learned a little bit to be wary of.
Mr. O’REILLY: Well, maybe you assign a couple of reporters to do that, you know. I mean, Abu Ghraib, I think we got the story there.
Prof. KRUGMAN: No, we didn’t.
Mr. O’REILLY: Oh, we didn’t? Forty-eight front-page stories, we still don’t have it?
Prof. KRUGMAN: We didn’t. No. Read the appendices. Read the appendices to the Taguba report. There’s much, much worse than anything that most of the public has heard about yet.
Mr. O’REILLY: All right. Well, maybe it’s right. And if there is, I want to read about it.
Prof. KRUGMAN: Yeah. Well…
Mr. O’REILLY: And I know I will in your paper. But I ain’t gonna read oil for food investigation there.
Prof. KRUGMAN: But let me just come back. The…
RUSSERT: Bill, why are you suggesting The New York Times won’t be aggressive in pursuing oil for food?
Mr. O’REILLY: Because they use stories to bludgeon the Bush administration. They use their front page–here’s the deal.
Prof. KRUGMAN: Oh God.
Mr. O’REILLY: Abu Ghraib, horrible story, awful, OK. Off-the-chart bad. Twenty-eight front-page stories in the Chicago Trib, no bastion of conservatism. Forty-eight front-page stories, all of the last 20 just repetitive, what we already knew, in The New York Times.
Prof. KRUGMAN: So you…
Mr. O’REILLY: They use that story to drive public opinion against the present administration, which the paper despises, and that’s the fact.
Heh.
The National Debate has more.
kate…if you are really so smart…why do you keep bringing this stuff up when everyone knows its crap?
possibly true that sask canadians are bumpkins?
here, i have some nice dry land just north of new orleans for sale…real cheap too
Hey Bill – if your idea of “commenting” is to cut and paste entire transcripts, with little more than ad hominems to support your criticism, then I can only suggest you do like the rest of us – blog on your own dime.
Comments are for comments.
That goes for everyone else, too.
(August 10, 2004 — 02:07 PM EDT // link // print)
I truly wonder sometimes about the New York Times. Judith Miller was not the only reporter to be bamboozled by Ahmed Chalabi. But her case was one of the most long-standing, thorough-going and troubling — and it has never been fully or adequately
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addressed.
Today, Miller writes about the Volcker investigation into alleged corruption in the UN’s oil-for-food program. And Chalabi, though not mentioned by name in the article, is at the center of that story.
The investigation, you’ll remember, has several layers. Two key questions are a) whether the former regime skimmed money off the funds generated by the program (a given, and something that was known before the war) and b) whether the regime used oil-for-food funds to give bribes and kickbacks to various diplomats, politicians and international luminaries, including Benon Sevan, the head of the UN office that administered the program.
The second, far more inflammatory charge is the heart of the matter. Indeed, it is the accusation that got the whole series of investigations at the UN, on Capitol Hill and in Iraq under way. And that charge stems entirely from a series of documents discovered by members of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.
We’ve noted earlier Chalabi’s rather suspicious unwillingness to allow anyone who can even remotely be considered an independent observer to review these documents to determine their authenticity — something which, given Chalabi’s track record, is rather more than a matter of passing concern. And Miller’s article reveals that Volcker still hasn’t gotten to see them.
According to the Times, he has still “not yet received the original list of oil vouchers supposedly awarded to diplomats and United Nations officials, which was published by an Iraqi newspaper several months ago. Nor had he determined how his panel would vet such documents to see if they were forgeries.”
Perhaps it’s difficult at the moment for Chalabi to produce the documents and verify their authenticity given that he is apparently holed up in Tehran on the run from counterfeiting charges in Iraq. But then irony is no defense and he’s had plenty of time already.
Miller repeats the charges against Sevan, as well as his denial. But she would have done better to note the highly dubious source of the original allegations
but of course i could go further and explain what the comment means since you seem a bit thick today…it means the reason the press is ignoring the story about the UN folks taking bribes is because it has no merit, or won’t till the iraqi national congress lets us see the money so to speak…which…if there was any “money” would have happened months ago…but don’t let this stop you from going on and on like some demented talking doll.