Stolen from today's headlines:
In remarks published Tuesday, the official, L. Paul Bremer, said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003 to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation — throwing new fuel onto the presidential campaign issue of whether the United States had sufficiently planned for the post-war situation in Iraq.From the alternate parallel universe of the West Whing comes...
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said during an address to an insurance group in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. The group released a summary of his remarks in Washington.
"We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said...
The White House refused to say Tuesday whether the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's ouster had asked the president for more troops to deal with the rapid descent of postwar Iraq into chaos...Well and good. Scotty might have gotten off the hook (as he usually does) with the normal "hey, look it's the Goodyear Blimp" routine, but the Bush campaign apparently doesn't know when to take Bill O'Reilly's advice and STFU:
White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to say whether Bremer had pleaded with Bush for more troops. "We never get into reading out all the conversations they had," McClellan said...
Later, in an unusual public acknowledgment of internal dissent, the Bush campaign said that Bremer and the military brass had clashed on troop levels.Huh?? Wait a second. Something doesn't match. Did Scotty and/ or Jonesy tell an anti-truth? In 2003...
"Ambassador Bremer differed with the commanders in the field," said campaign spokesman Brian Jones. "That is his right, but the president has always said that he will listen to his commanders on the ground and give them the support they need for victory."
Before the war began, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told Congress that "several hundred thousand" forces could be necessary to stabilize Iraq after a war. Several days later, Wolfowitz told another congressional committee that far fewer troops would be needed, calling Shinseki's estimate "way off the mark."So, Shinseki was then unceremoniously dumped from TeamWarCrimes, and as Sy Hersch noted a few weeks into the war...
...Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.I also clearly recall, after a bloody chain of events in June or July of 2003, when it looked like the wheels were coming off the bus, that Bremer was recalled to Washington on a moment's notice for "high level discussions". The public was never made privvy to the details of the discussion.
“And six times, I write. They went specifically on six specific occasions, they went to Rumsfeld, gave him the plan that had been approved all the way up, top to bottom of the military chain of command, and Rummy sent it back. He said too many forces. He asked for what they call inside a redo,” Hersh explained.
Twisting the facts, or anti-truth? What category does "ass covering" come under? Come on, media whores - you've got Lexis Nexis - I'm just doing this crap with Google!
