Lying, traitorious, former Hussein Iraqi Air Force’s number two General George Sada pulls his CIA stooge routine and, like some Bushie puppet, outlines the Iraq WMD program (and it’s pre-war removal) on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. Not on CNN or NBC News, mind you—Christiane Amanpour and Keith Olbermann aren’t particularly interested in such clearly opportunistic book fodder (unless it comes from say, Richard Clarke or James Risen)—but on Comedy Central.
Which, while I realize this is where many young people get their news, still says something about a legacy media who is committed to a particular—and what they hope to be permanently fixed—narrative about Saddam and his pre-war weapons programs: they simply didn’t exist. Instead, one of the world’s worst tyrants voluntarily and secretly disarmed, then refused to prove that he’d done so to the international community, because, why, exactly?—he felt like playing chicken with the US? He didn’t want his neighbors in the region to know he’d gone soft, so contrite was he over the gassing of Kurds and Iranians? Who knows? All that matters is that Bush lied and rushed us to war. [related: Duelfer Report]
More on Sada (and Ali Ibrahim, who confirms Sada’s version of events) here; but check out the video yourself and see if you find him credible. Or else, perhaps you can wait and hope to catch him telling his story on a Chuck Norris / Christie Brinkley infomercial.
(h/t Rightwingsparkle)
****
Video number two (Real Video): Wingnut hack supreme, the Weekly Standard‘s “whore” and resident “crank” (as he’s been described by some of my recent anti-war commenters), Stephen Hayes, appearing on yesterday’s Washington Journal, where he discusses the growing evidence of a Hussein / al Qaeda connection.
Or not: he is, after all, a loony, lying Bush Kultist, and we know there were no connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda because, well, because we just do. The NYT disagreed with this provisional, contingent “truth”, as did the 911 Commission Report—but then the goal posts moved. Now the proper denial is that there has never been shown “evidence” of “operational ties” between Hussein and Al Qaeda. Like, say, a signed contract, or video of the two men consecrating the relationship with a sweaty exchange of mustache love.
Unsurprisingly, this lack of evidence has been shortened for rhetorical convenience by many in the anti-war camp, and has now morphed into “we know Saddam had no ties to terrorists”—which is not quite the same thing, but it is much more pithy, you have to admit. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear, after the next rhetorical shorthand has been applied and the meme generated and disseminated, that “There was never any evidence anyone named ‘Saddam’ ever existed.”
But again, judge for yourself. Hayes has pursued this story doggedly from the very beginning, which is why, in my opinion, the opprobrium being directed at him recently (now that the translated documents are beginning to trickle out) is reaching fever pitch. It seems one of the main objectives of the anti-war sites over the last few weeks has been to try to discredit, through a variety of personal smears, anyone who refuses to join the bandwagon and accept the “official” narrative of Iraq-as-abject-failure that they see manifested in recent polls. Suddenly, the right is RIFE with impotent faux-intellectuals and deluded, conspiracy-minded cranks, whereas before it was peopled by clever evil manipulators who were able to fool the American people with their carefully-crafted subterfuge.
(h/t Allah)
related: Iraq’s WMD: What Would You Have Done?
This comment is for the future “I told you so” file: (1) The unreleased cache of documents from Iraq contains plenty of dynamite re WMD & AQ;
(2) The MSM knows this, and also knows that it would make a devastating “October Surprise” in favor of the rethugs; ergo
(3) The MSM will hint at them now, in a dismissive and sceptical fashion, so that later this year they can say “Hey, that’s old news, we’ve already covered it; but what about the failure to capture OBL, and the dynamited levees, etc.?”
Well, honestly I was thinking about doing just that. I hear the perks are great! You get to skip out on work to march in protests and seriously, OTJ training in paper mache. I mean, you can’t buy that kind of skill on your resume.
Also: BECAUSE OF THE VALERIE PLAME!
Can I get an Abramoff from the choir?
BECAUSE OF THE TRIBAL CASINO DONATIONS!
Evidence, shmevidence, eh?
Spin it all you want, rethuglican wingnuts, but this proves SADDAM HIMSELF never met with Osama.
All this because of the evil we know as ROVE!!!!!!!!
You rethuglicans always forget:
Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam.
Clinton never shook hands with Saddam.
Case ~ Closed ~
WMD? You rethuglicans wanna know what WMD is, huh? Well, you rethug christofascist Bush-kultists, Bush is a WMD.
The GOP is a WMD!
The Jesusland Confederacy of redneck clansmen are WMDs!
And Jeff and his echo chamber of Natsis is teh stupid.
Bush is a crazy-azz cracker who done blew up the whole world.
A Detroit pimp, Dollar-Bill, at the corner of Gratiot and Eight-Mile.
Jeff tortures animals into electrified echo chambers; he calls it ‘dancing!’ The bastid. He has a serious hard-on for armadillos, but since he is a rethug, and a cracker, he’s only hung like a light switch.
Brunehilde, Vercingetorix’s 350lb dominatrix and spokesmen for Jesustown’s chapter of PETA.
[Someone help me]
I shook hands with Gene Autry once.
Nice to have you back, Jeff. Looks like your mental health has been restored to full power.
Observing the media on this issue, and today with their reporting of the rescue (sorry….”release”, is it?) of the Christian Peace Activists in Iraq, they seem to be enthusiastically abdicating their journalistic reponsibilities because they have so much invested in narratives like “Iraqi democracy will fail”, or “the war is a quagmire”. Their projections prior to the war were so dire, so defeatist, that to change course would leave them in a position of having to do a lot of explaining as to why the change of heart? An enormous dissonance would remain that they don’t want to face.
runinrebel,
AND AFTER HE GLORYFYED THE GENOSIDE OF THE NADIVE AMERIKANS???!!! YOU BATSARD!!!
What will the U.S. History text books say 20 years from now when it makes a brief account of the Iraqi War?
Will it say, “GWB lead the U.S. invasion of Iraq based on WMDs. None were found by U.S. investigators. The majority of citizens viewed the war as a failure of Republican policies”
Or will it say, “GWB lead the U.S. invasion of Iraq based on WMDs. None were found by U.S. investigators. Iraqi documents and first hand accounts represented existence of WMDs. The WMDs were sent to Syria or scuttled in the weeks leading up to the invasion.”
A variation of one of these accounts will be in the text book. History will be concluded. Future generations will consider the account as absolute fact. I do not want the liberals to control the narrative and rewrite history. They’ve all but succeeded by doing so with the Civil Rights Movement.
Corvan,
Why do you think I wanted to shake his hand?
(evil facist laughter)
Yeah, but I shook my Johnson at “that woman” and I shook my finger at the TV Camera, and I shook in my boots when the Polls were bad. I shook a lot of things…at a lot of people, so there! I even shook, shook, shook, my booty!
William Jefferson Clinton
The meme will be “Bush administration forged these documents, which explans the delay in releasing them”.
Only a matter of time.
I shook hands with Oliver North once. I’m pretty sure that makes me the anti-Christ or something.
So what? If “fake but accurate” works for the left, what’s to keep the right from making the same claim?
[OK, maybe this needs to be focus-grouped a bit.]
I found it interesting that none of the Dem-supporting callers to the Hayes segment made any sort of substantive headway against him. And a large fraction resorted to the same ad hominems we see flung about by some of Jeff’s less charming visitors: Neocon, Bush Kultist, etc.
The body of official pronouncements 1993-2000 on Iraq is a very stubborn obstacle for the “Bush Misled Us Into War” camp—or at least it should be.
And the potentially dangerous outcome of the attempt to revise the pre-Bush conventional wisdom about Iraq’s WMDs is that it gets in the way of figuring out what happened to those material balances. If you want to assume them away, this isn’t a task one has to perform.
Hayes sounded a little skeptical of the Sada narrative when I heard him last night in a replay of Hayes’s appearance on CSPAN.
(Yeah, baby, it’s DC… we even get CSPAN on the FM radi-adio.)
I think Regis is going to have some concerns about the Hussein/bin Laden moustache love.
I don’t think he’s in the manner of tolerating murdering tyrannical dictator/murdering terrorist love like that.
A great article on the history and future of warfare, with emphasis on the future of Iraq and Pakistan in particular.
People have no knowledge of history, and how many people were dying simultaneously in multiple wars across the world, at every other time in history.
Ahhh, my old stomping grounds (7 & Gratiot). Only a Michigander would have known this.
From there, Vercin?
TV (Harry)
‘Stache Osama, ‘Stache Saddam
Do the “Kill Great Satan” down in mustache land
Can you feel it? Saddam’s gonna deal it
They simmer and glimmer and jangle
Ramsey Clark can’t do nothing but dangle
Donks got to find a new angle
Looks like mustache lo-o-o-o-oove
Sorry, I’ll go back to work now.
Thank you.
Agreed that Hayes was skeptical of Sada’s sources. Not sure how much credence I’d give the commercial-airliners theory myself. Trucks, that’s a different story.
Hey, can someone convert that Daily Show Windows Media feed into something more Linux-friendly?
“Check out the video yourself and see if you find him credible 
Frankly, no…
The man was a second-tier infantry officer from the country’s miniscule Chaldean Christian community: not your typical “Saddamist insider†from Tickrit Central!
General Sada was not even remotely linked with (the inoffensive remnants of) Iraq’s feeble military R&D program…
I guess that’s just another “breaking news†churned out by some Orwellian .gov or .il website
My moustache had crabs, but my beard opted for the seared scallops with citrus & white wine reduction.
Right. No Chaldeans to be found there.
You really are a relentless fucking anti-semite, aren’t you?
I’m still a little skeptical of Sada’s story as well. It seems to me entirely possible that he could have seen props other generals were using to convince Saddam he did have WMD at his dispooal, but wasn’t let in on the secret because they thought he would tell Saddam the truth.
I’m going off the short Stewart interview- so correct me if he says something in his book or other interviews to contradict this possibility.
I guess I would need some evidence he say these weapons tested at some point, perhaps?
Some Guy
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your request for proof of a test of the weapons, but if you think about it, I am sure you will come up with at least a couple instances in which these weapons were ‘tested’ by the regime.
From what I remember the ‘tests’ were horribly effective.
Having just watched the Stewart interview with Sada what struck me is when Stewart admitted that he had no idea what he is talking about. He didn’t know how WMD could be weaponized (i.e. put into an artillery shell or dropped ordnance) and didn’t understand some of the referrences Sada was making. I know he considers his show “the fake news” but his criticism is real enough, and totally uninformed.
The funny thing about this thread is that the first dozen comments are pretty much the same as at Balloon Juice. The only difference is that over there, they’re serious.
it was a somewhat rhetorical request- indeed we have examples of tests…such as the use of WMD against Iran and the Kurds, and I’m not trying to set that standard of proof for WMDs in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
I guess my concern is based on this line of thought: Assume some group of Saddam’s officers were lying to Saddam about the country’s current development and stockpiles of WMD (this is not an absurd possibility, correct? it could turn out to be false based on Sada, but for the moment I’ll take it as something that could have happened under Saddam). At some point, I would imagine, these officers would have had to produce props so that Saddam or Saddam-loyal officers couldn’t simply show up at a WMD site, see it empty, and kill all these officers. How would/could Sada have distinguished between these “props” and real WMD or the materials needed to produce WMD?
If Sada saw a barrel labeled “Mustard Gas”, is it possible it was just full of mustard?
Again, I’m going of a very short interview with Sada, so perhaps he did see something like, say, experimental evidence showing that batches of chemical weapons were killing mice or something. I’m just proposing an alternate explanation of Sada’s beliefs.
That’s fairly standard for Stewart. He want’s to appear as an authority on everything, except when he’s called to task. Then he backs into the ‘ha-ha I’m funny’ mode so he can de-legitimize factual information. He’s a fucking hack. I miss Craig Kilborne.
However, his “Indecision 2004” coverage was priceless. The epiphany of impending liberal defeat sucked the life right out of him. I so enjoy watching self important ass-clowns realize their own impotence.
Ballon Juice? Oh, right. The sad, ugly, humorless, fat, older sister to Protein Wisdom.
“You really are a relentless fucking anti-semite, aren’t you?â€Â
No. Not to my knowledge.
Neither “anti†nor “philo†for that matter: criticism of The White House and/or the Israeli government has nothing to do with ANCIENT “Semitic†culture and civilization.
FYI. “Semites†were a linguistic group, NOT a race contrary to what people like Hitler and Sharon would like us to believe…
3,000 years ago you actually had black Semites in Ethiopia and blue-eyed Semites in Anatolia…Today, the word means nothing except maybe for KKK types and ultra-Zionist jingoists.
Thanks for the history lesson Dr. Vic.
Dr. Vic hates Jews.
Is that concise enough?
Jackass.
With a dripping yeast infection so putrid that puss drips all over the comments board. Though that hardly bothers the demented decaying zombies that reside there. They just lick it up and keep going.
Some Guy
Fair enough. I agree that determining the truth from those within a dictatorial regime is not the easiest thing to do. Sada may well have believed that he saw WMD and then again he may well have seen it. He may also be lying. How are we to know given all of the lies that Saddam spun over the years?
To me, that last part is the most important, and the primary reason why the invasion was justified even on just the WMD claim. The UN said he had to account for it all. He didn’t. We went to war.
I shook hands with Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan.
Not that the idiot will learn, but: The term “antisemitic” was invented by a 19th century German author who found the term “Judenhass” (“Jew hatred”) a little too ugly to fit into his writing. Since he was, frankly, trying to promote such things, he created a “softer”, more “palatable” term. Since the only Semitic people in Germany at the time were Jews, it was quite clear who he was talking about.
Today, the only people who whinge about the term and play stupid games with the definition are, frankly, the Jew-haters.
And on that point I agree as well. Now, just to convince the league of nuianced individuals who are oh-so-smarter than I of such.
Or I could just order a pizza.
come on Robert, the meanings of words never change. Just like crusade.
Oh, except for “jyhad”. Or “overtop”- which might mean “breach” when necessary.
The notion that Saddam shipped weapons to Syria prior to the invasion isn’t far-fetched at all. Alliances in the ME are as fluid as fig nectar.
Recall during Bush vs. Saddam I, when Hussein shuttled his fighter jets to IRAN, an avowed enemy, rather than have them destroyed by our fighter jocks.
Considering Syria is also tyrannized by a terrorism-supporting Baathist regime, and how dependent Syria’s economy had become on Iraqi oil, the likelihood of Assad accomodating Saddam’s weapons isn’t much of a stretch…
I shook hands with a guy who once shooks hands with George Wallace. I guess that makes me an apologetic racist……
I “shook hands with The Mayor” this morning.
T/W nevermind
Madeline Albright shook hands with Kim Jong Il…
…but of course that was only because his all powerful ‘fro was absolutely irresistable to women. ‘Cause of the juche! That’s why Regis is so powerful. Us damn yankee running dogs stole the secret juche formula and are using Regis as a test subject.
[Shows what I get for reading KCNA…]
No matter my other sins, I have never shaken hands with Doctor Vic.
Igniting forever the eternal fires of sectarian violence throughout the Middle-East was exactly what the pyromaniac Neocon Neros of Washington had in mind when they launched their attack on Iraq, deliberately targeting the only secular republican regime of the Arab world.
Prof. Thierry Meyssan of the University of Paris proved that the whole 9-11 circus was engineered by rogue rightwing operatives within the Pentagon and the office of the Vice-President- see link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thierry_Meyssan
Washington’s response was ruthless: Professor Meyssan was banned from entering the US territory for fear of him telling the truth about the Rumsfeldcheneysharon conspiracy… so much for “freedom of speechâ€Â!
Ironically, the storyline of September 11, 2001 echoes in many ways the plot of “The Long Kiss Goodnight†a 1996 action movie with Geena Davis and Samuel Jackson.
In the movie, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) discovers that her former boss at the Pentagon has allied with some US-trained terrorists in a plot to detonate a chemical bomb in New York, frame a moustached Arab for the crime and thus secure more funding for the Pentagon…
Sounds familiar?
Not that I have anything to add to what the esteemed Mr. Crawford wrote, but this is a typical semantic dodge. You’re a Kluxer with a library card.
I don’t need lectures on linguistics from you, sir, my wife’s in the business.
Ah yes, Hussein’s Iraq, the glimmering beacon. And care to add any more qualifiers to that list? Say, “only secular republican regime of the Arab world situated between Iran and Kuwait”?
TW: Say, why am I even encouraging this shitheel?
Yea, you cut-and-pasted this from another thread.
If your going to be an ass, at least be original about it.
You left out the pods that hatch into humanoid ghouls and the massing of whales to avenge Moby Dick’s death.
I haven’t seen your stuff since we ran you off from the Sacramento Union. Off your meds again?
Interesting someone should bring up Mr. Meyssan. We were discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories sometime back when a liberal friend mentioned the whole “the Pentagon was hit by a missile” schtick. Another (liberal) friend responded somewhat icily “I work opposite the Pentagon. I saw the plane go in.” That stopped that one right away. But what else do we expect from Dr. Vega?
Personally, I do thank the good doctor for absolution. I now have a ready answer for anyone who complains that the US is becoming a theocracy. I’ll just tell them that even a country whose ruler has a religious tome commissioned in his own blood is secular. (Well, someone’s blood, anyway. I’m sure the donors were happy to help Uncle Saddam build his legacy.)
My favorite bit of evidence against the Saddam=secular meme comes from the introduction to the second edition of “Republic of Fear” (xxii):
“The justification used by the Iraqi president for his new 1994 punishment laws is that the Shari’a, Islamic law, was being intoduced into Iraq . . .[but] there are no precedents, Islamic or otherwise, for chopping off people’s ears and branding their foreheads . . .”
IOW, the Saddam of the 90s was even worse than the Taliban – because he merged regular old fascist national-socialist thuggery with Islamism on crack with his own (and his cronies’
weird fantasies.
Now it’s definitely true that when Saddam first took power, he was a secular (national) socialist.
It’s equally true that he, like Milosevic (just to give one example), had no real ideology guiding his actions – or if he did, it gradually leached away, leaving only the id.
Then came the 1990-1 conflict. After that, it was any old port in a storm – and making nice with Islam was his out. He took it.
TW: What’s LEFT of the LEFT won’t open their eyes … so i LEFT them behind.
Inspector Callahan, from Flint…unfortunately (wa wa)
Did Dr. Viagra give up already? They must have upped the dosage.
Hey—I’m from Flint too! As is Rand Simberg (Transterrestrial Musings). I love this internet thing, I tells ya! =)
Pretty small world. If you go to a Starbucks or Borders, I’m sure we’ve met. [–>I’m an uber-nerd]
Dr. V. Vega sez:
How would you class Syria, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the like?
BRD
I still want to know why Dr. V has a bad attitude toward “.il” websites. What did the State of Illinois ever do to him?
I would imagine Doc would say that Trukey isn’t Arab – and he would be right. Might have a much harder time with all the others tho’…
MJ,
Good point. My bad.
BRD
I shook hands with me wifes best friend.