I was watching CNN last night and found this segment to be amazing. Today I am hearing only of the confrontation by McGovern but nothing about what he said to Cooper on CNN, which I found most interesting. I can't believe liberals aren't all over this today. Here's the best excerpt - in which I fixed the spelling of something. Plus, this paragraph was erroneously attributed to Cooper but it was most certainly McGovern speaking:
MCGOVERN: We have the minutes of his discussions with Tony Blair, the British prime minister. On the 31st of January, 2003, where the president says, there really, really aren't any weapons of mass destruction to be found, but we need some way to make this war. Maybe, yes, that's a good idea, maybe we'll paint one of our U-2s with U.N. colors and hope that it gets shot down. Or maybe we'll get a defector out that will attest to the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Or there's an outside chance we can just assassinate Saddam Hussein. That's on the record. The British will vouch for that.
We also have the Downing Street memos where the head of British intelligence came back from consultations with George Tenet in July 2002 and said, the intelligence and the facts are being fixed around the policy.
The evidence on ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, OK, that's what we're really talking about, 69 percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 when we went to war with Iraq. That was exactly what the administration wanted.
HERE'S THE ENTIRE TRANSCRIPT
COOPER: Today Donald Rumsfeld was asked, point blank, why he lied about Iraq. The defense secretary said he didn't lie. But the questions continued. Asking them was a civilian, a man named Ray McGovern. He's a former CIA analyst. He's also an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, who was attending Mr. Rumsfeld's speech in Atlanta.
I spoke with Mr. McGovern earlier about what Secretary Rumsfeld now thinks about the case for war.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Do you think he still believes that there were WMD?
MCGOVERN: I think still is the wrong word there.
COOPER: You don't think he ever believed it?
MCGOVERN: No. It's very clear that this was a very cynical attempt to do what they wanted to do, namely make war on Iraq, and that they decided to do that shortly after 9/11.
And my former colleague Paul Pillar, who is the most senior national intelligence officer for the Middle East and for counterterrorism, when he says, as he did just yesterday, that there was an organized campaign of manipulation of the intelligence to prove a tie between Iraq and al Qaeda; the objective, of course, to make the American people think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
When Pillar comes out with that information, then I think we need to make sure the American people know that we knew at that time that there was no such tie.
COOPER: He didn't answer or respond to the bulletproof question at first. You asked basically, you reiterated the bulletproof and said that he indicated there was bulletproof evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. He then came back to it, though, and said well, it's a fact that Zarqawi was in Iraq. And you pointed out that -- well, what did he say then?
MCGOVERN: Well, you know, I was so glad that he disingenuously offered that, because Zarqawi was not under any al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein control. He was in the northern part of Iraq where no one held sway, not Saddam Hussein, certainly not al Qaeda. And so to adduce Zarqawi as a link with al Qaeda was disingenuous.
COOPER: He did then go on to say, well, he was also in Baghdad. And you pointed out, yes, when he went to the hospital.
MCGOVERN: Yes, right. Baghdad was where the best hospital was when he needed treatment. See, Rumsfeld is above the fray. And he believes that the audience and most of the audience there today, of course, fits this mold. They won't question him on these things. Who knows these details? Well, we know them. Why? Because it was our profession to follow such details. And we used to be able to apply our techniques and our trade craft to foreign leaders. And it's ironic in the extreme that we need to do media analysis and leadership studies on our own leaders to find out whether they're telling the truth, or they're telling lies.
COOPER: How can you prove, though, a lie? I mean, you're alleging an intent to mislead, a belief that they knew there were no WMD, that they knew Saddam wasn't really an imminent threat, and they chose to go to war anyway. And they faked, they manipulated, they handpicked intelligence.
Others will argue, you know, they -- maybe they, you know, they believed they had it and so they looked for the intelligence that matched their belief, but that they actually did believe it.
MCGOVERN: We have the minutes of his discussions with Tony Blair, the British prime minister. On the 31st of January, 2003, where the president says, there really, really aren't any weapons of mass destruction to be found, but we need some way to make this war. Maybe, yes, that's a good idea, maybe we'll paint one of our you toos (ph) with U.N. colors and hope that it gets shot down. Or maybe we'll get a defector out that will attest to the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Or there's an outside chance we can just assassinate Saddam Hussein. That's on the record. The British will vouch for that.
We also have the Downing Street memos where the head of British intelligence came back from consultations with George Tenet in July 2002 and said, the intelligence and the facts are being fixed around the policy.
The evidence on ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, OK, that's what we're really talking about, 69 percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 when we went to war with Iraq. That was exactly what the administration wanted.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: And that was Ray McGovern, the man who confronted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today.
AI
