CNS New Iraq documents on Web

CNSNews.com Publishes Iraqi Intelligence Docs By David Thibault CNSNews.com Managing Editor October 11, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - When CNSNews.com published an article Monday, Oct. 4, entitled, "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," we decided against publishing all 42 pages of the Iraqi intelligence documents in our possession and on which the article was based.

We published only the first page, fearing that if more were made widely available on the Internet, they might end up being altered or otherwise manipulated. We offered credentialed news organizations and counter-terrorism experts the opportunity to view and receive copies of the documents so that they might check for themselves on the authenticity of the documents and judge their importance in the debate over whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and/or had ties to international terrorist organizations.

Duelfer Report Completely Repudiates
Entire Kerry Approach to Foreign Policy

October 8, 2004

Listen to Rush…
(...focus on the key part of the report on Saddam, which devastates Kerry)

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

You know, folks, I tell you, I was on the airplane last night and I was coming back. I'm going back and forth between the baseball game and some of this other stuff. I was in Houston yesterday, and I'm watching this report that Duelfer gave us. It is one of the most destructive reports to the whole Kerry foreign policy I have heard yet. It totally repudiates the entire Kerry foreign policy -- and yet the media, because they've got a "gotcha," focuses on weapons of mass destruction, which we already knew. There weren't any weapons of mass destruction, and they're trying to say that this report says that all we had to do was leave the inspectors in there and we could have contained Saddam, and that's what Kerry's saying, and that's not true. That's not what the Duelfer report says. We couldn't have contained Saddam. Saddam was making plans, no matter what, whether it be because of Iran or he wanted to be a stud in the Arab community or whatever it was.

He was not going to be and wasn't "containable," and that the action taken was necessary. We could not have maintained the status quo is the bottom line. But let me focus on the part of this report here that is just devastating to Kerry. John Kerry has been saying that we have to work through the international community, has he not? Now we learn in explicit terms that the specific countries in the "international community" he wants to work through -- France, Russia, Germany -- were on the take! The bottom line is, ladies and gentlemen, Saddam Hussein used the Oil-for-Food program and bought off the United Nations Security Council. He simply paid them off. The coalition of the bribed was the U.N. Security Council, ladies and gentlemen. The coalition of the bribed and coerced was the United Nations Security Council doing Saddam's bidding while opposing us at the same time, and in the process, that whole event undercuts and undermines and repudiates the entire John Kerry foreign policy.

Where is his policy now? He's without a policy! The Germans and French say, "We will not help in Iraq if he's elected." (story) The UN was on the take. I'll tell you, we have to do what the left does here, folks, and move the target. We concede nothing. Don't sit out there and don't get all down in the dumps about this weapons of mass destruction business. Everybody already knew that. There's nothing new about the weapons of mass destruction in this report. Cheney and Bush tried to do that, move the target, yesterday. Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer killed a million or more people, invaded two neighbors, paid for homicide bombings. Our opponents are wrong. Saddam does have ties to al-Qaeda. Or had, as the 9/11 report made clear, and we have to act before the threat is imminent -- and then after doing that, the guns have to be turned on the left. Turn the guns on Kerry. Kerry wanted sanctions, Kerry wanted inspectors. He would have played right into Saddam's hands, according to this report. The .N was never going to act. The UN was being bought off!

Had we done what John Kerry says in this very campaign he would do, the whole oil-for-food program would still be underway. Saddam Hussein would still be paying off the people he had bought off. He would still be in power and in the process of being paid back, he would be strengthening himself. All as John Kerry's foreign policy specifically spells out he would do! This is a 100% repudiation of Kerry's foreign policy. This report has... I mean, some of the things in this report are damning. They completely destroy Kerry's approach to foreign policy. Now, I know the president doesn't want to rip the United Nations. He's not going to do it. But you can rip the corruption without ripping the institution, or the UN itself. We can rip the fact that the sanctions regime has been breached. The whole notion of sanctions, that's what the oil-for-food program was, folks! It was sanctions. We were sanctioning Saddam. He could only sell oil if he would take the resources that he gained and use it for humanitarian purposes for his own people to rebuild after the Gulf War of '91.

That's not what was going on, and yet that's what Kerry wants to do: keep the sanctions in place. The sanctions led to the fraud. The sanctions led to the scandal called oil-for-food. I mean, the evidence is right there in the report. We can rip the fact that Kerry's approach would have been a complete failure, and it will be a complete failure if he gets a chance to implement it. In this report, if you haven't heard it, Mr. Duelfer said the elimination of Saddam Hussein was a good thing. I mean, there was a great exchange he had with John Warner. He says, in essence, that if we hadn't stopped Hussein, he would have tried to reconstitute his weapons, and it is better that he's gone. The status quo was not tenable. Now, I think everybody needs to be encouraged about one thing above all others in this report, and that is that we can turn it into a complete repudiation of Kerry's foreign policy. I'm going to sound like a broken record going through this. I made some notes last night about this.

I was so... When I got home late last night, I started camping up on what I'd missed yesterday and somebody had sent me Howard Fineman's latest piece at MSNBC.com and that I just blew a gasket, because it was nothing more than a retread, rehash of the whole weapons of mass destruction thing and how Kerry now had the momentum and Bush had nothing to say and of course -- one more thing about that. What the Dems are trying to say, what Kerry is trying to say today is (sing-song voice), "Well, you seeeeee? We made a mistaaaaake. We shouldn't have gone in thereeeee. We know that now, and the president, we need a new plan. We neeeeeed a new ideaaaaa. Yeah," Kerry says, "I don't know what the new plan will be till I get there January 20th. I don't know what Bush is screwing up." Here's the real thing even if -- and I'm just going to give you a hypothetical -- even if you think that it was a mistake now to go in, congratulations on your hindsight.

But even if you think it was a mistake to go in, what happened then is irrelevant. I'm saying what happened is now irrelevant. What happened, happened. Can't go back and pretend it couldn't have happened or didn't have happened or wouldn't have happened because it has happened. So the question now is: What do we do? The only answer to that question, is: We win. Therefore, the question is: Who's best equipped to do that? Who is more trustworthy to do that? Who more than the other has it in him to win the war? And all you have to do is listen to John Kerry and understand one thing: He has no clue about winning it because it's not in his vocabulary; it's not in his lexicon. What he wants to do is get out of there. He wants to come up with a strategy that's going to get us out of there. He doesn't talk about victory except when somebody says, "Well, that's not going to work." Then it's: "Make nooooo mistake: I want to wiiiiin." We haven't yet heard how he intends to win because he hasn't been on the winning side in his life. The only time the winning side in his life won was the Viet Cong.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The media has fully aligned now and it's oriented toward the destruction of George Bush and his presidency. Peter Beinart, today, the New Republic, has a piece. I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen, his piece in the New Republic today is (summarizing) that well, it's totally understandable that Kerry cannot come up with a plan to win or save the day in Iraq because Bush has so screwed it up that Kerry has no clue what he will do. Nobody knows how bad it really is. You can't expect anybody to come up with a plan. It's Bush fault that Kerry can't tell us what he would do to win the conflict. Now, I have a question. This Duelfer report, the president commissioned this, right? The president commissioned the report. Now, the Democrats, Terry McAuliffe -- I saw it yesterday when I was flying to Houston, McAuliffe is out there on Fox & Friends. He's on there with Fred Gillespie: "The president lied! The president lied! The president lied about the weapons of mass destruction. The president ought to just admit that he lied and let's bring our troops home," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, Kerry is not even saying it that pointedly, but you have to assume if the chairman of the Democratic National Committee position is, "Bush lied! Bush lied! Bush lied! This report proves Bush lied. This report proves Bush lied. You know, we need to get out of Iraq. We need to bring the troops back and get on with hunting Osama," or some such malarkey. Well, my question is: The president commissioned the report, right? And the report comes out and the report says there aren't any weapons of mass destruction. The report comes out when? The report comes out three weeks before the election. How in the world can the president be accused of lying when his own report says there aren't any weapons of mass destruction? If the president wanted to lie about this, it would be a different report.

It would be different details in the report. I mean, this report nukes the whole concept that the president lied! The president is getting the truth out, and in the process, we have to focus on the truth in the report about Saddam's intent and the corruption of our allies and how all of this totally repudiates John Kerry's foreign policy. I told you I'm going to be a broken record on this. John Kerry has insisted for months that we should have relied more and longer on the UN and a bigger coalition, meaning France and Germany. France was on the take. France was being bought off. France was a member of the "coalition of the bribed," bribed by Saddam Hussein. Both France and Germany have said they will not now join a Kerry coalition. Kerry will not be able to even maintain the existing coalition because he's insulted them all. His sister's in Australia trying to undermine that member of the coalition by defeating the current prime minister. He has called the others "irrelevant." They "haven't contributed."

They're "not sharing any burden." They're the "coalition of the bribed and coerced," whatever and John Kerry, he will not have his precious France and Germany. They've been on the take. They're not going to give that up for him or anybody else. They're not going to give up their soldiers' lives for things they don't believe in. John Kerry, therefore, will not have his new precious coalition of allies. He has destroyed the current coalition. He has no foreign policy. This report has totally repudiated his foreign policy already. Do I hope I hear this tonight? Yes, my friends, I hope I hear this tonight. I wish I were in the debate. I wish CNN could find me and I could prove to them that I'm an undecided voter leaning Democrat -- which is who is going to be in the damned hall tonight first and foremost. All these "undecided voters" my rear end. It's going to be undecided voters leaning left.

I'm waiting for questions such as, "Mr. President! Mr. President!" Some ponytail person: "Mr. President, do you feel personally responsible for every soldier's death in Iraq?" I'm waiting for questions like that tonight, folks. Yeah, "undecided voters." St. Louis University the most liberal University in all of Missouri, including the University of Missouri. I saw the president, the chancellor, the Grand Poobah, whatever, of this university and I know about this university. I grew up in Missouri, and I saw this guy on television yesterday morning, and he was even asked, "Well, this is all..." No, it was not yesterday morning. It was the night before. Matthews was talking to this guy on Hardball, and Matthews is surrounded by the students and they're all liberals and Matthews says, "Well, there are a lot of liberals here." The president of the university said, "Well, you know, we are open to diversity of thought and so forth." The guy can't even admit that there aren't very many conservatives on this campus.

Now, I'm not saying students are in there but the idea that they've gone back to this university... What is it? Washington University or is it is St. Louis University? I'm having a mental block. I think it's Washington. It's Washington University, okay. That's it. I knew which one it was. I was having a mental block as to the name. Look at it on Fox right now. Look at the "political pulse" of Washington University. Tell me what you're looking at on Fox. The political pulse? Look at the people. What are we talking about here? You can spot them a mile away. The bottom... The bottom... I know. The term pencil-necked geek just came up. Anyway, I wish I were going to be in the audience. Wish I could pass myself off on an undecided voter leaning Kerry, but at any rate. What the president needs to do just briefly provide his defense of his position on Iraq and then pounce on John Kerry. What he needs to do tonight is talk about the need to clean up the UN, to get to the bottom of the corruption, and the payoffs.

He doesn't need to name any names, doesn't need to mention France, doesn't need to mention -- because he's not going to do it anyway. He's not going to be critical of another country. He's president. He's not going to be critical of the UN. He could be critical of what happened. He can use words like "corruption," clean up the UN, revitalize it, make it decent again, this sort of thing, but correct the notion that the UN is the savior of the earth and point out that it's the corruptive agent. This oil-for-food scandal is the largest scandal in the history of mankind in terms of dollars. Isn't it also interesting, folks, that John Kerry has neither 1) criticized the corruption of the oil-for-food program, nor has he altered at all his insistence that we should have relied on the UN in the face of all this corruption?

In the face of the bribes of Saddam Hussein buying off the Security Council right there in the report, in the midst of all this about the oil-for-food scandal, isn't it interesting that Kerry has yet to criticize any of the corruption or altered at all his insistence that we should have relied on the UN? I mean, he can't. He would repudiate his own foreign policy himself if he did this. Here we have billions of dollars which were intended for the children and the innocent people of Iraq. These billions were being mismanaged. They were lining the pockets of Saddam Hussein, and journalists in France and Germany, government officials in France and Germany -- and this is the policy Kerry endorsed! This is the policy he would have relied on; this is the policy he's promising us, and even today, he says nothing about any of this, and the reason he says nothing about any of this is because it would expose the bankruptcy of his position. He's been saying, "We have to work through the international community," and now we learn in explicit terms that France and Russia were on the take. Where's his policy now? He's without a policy when you get right down to it. That's what's the news in this report. John Kerry's without a foreign policy, period. The Germans and French say they will not help in Iraq if he's elected. The UN was on the take. Everywhere he says he wants to go to straighten this up is corrupt! What's he have to say to this? There better be somebody make him respond to this.

END TRANSCRIPT

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