CyberAlert -- 09/10/2002 -- NBC Trumpets Scott Ridder

NBC Trumpets Scott Ritter; ABC's "Magical" Iraq Solution; Cronkite: Terrorism a "Revolution of the Poor Against the Rich"; Liberal Environmentalism Will Appease Enemies; Reuters Blames U.S.

1) On Monday's NBC Nightly News, Ron Allen in Iraq trumpeted Scott Ritter's credentials: "Today Iraq got more ammunition from an unlikely American ally -- former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. marine Scott Ritter, leading his own tour to an Iraqi military camp, a base where the U.S. believes Iraq has trained terrorists. But Ritter...claims it's a base for hostage rescue training." FNC's Brit Hume showed how Ritter has done a 180 since 1998 and in the morning, CBS's Jane Clayson at least challenged Ritter when he claimed that Hussein has no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.

2) Charlie Gibson's Magic Kingdom. The co-host of ABC's Good Morning America kept pressing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Monday to provide evidence of Iraq's weapons, leading to this question: "So if inspectors went in tomorrow and somehow found all of his weapons development programs and were able to magically make them go away, that wouldn't be enough?" Rumsfeld retorted: "I don't know why a hypothetical question like that's terribly useful, because it isn't going to happen."

3) Walter Cronkite suggested the U.S. has no one to blame but itself for the terrorist attacks a year ago. Cronkite told CNN's Larry King on Monday night that he believes "very definitely that foreign policy could have caused what has happened," before he asserted that anti-U.S. terrorism is caused by "this great division between the rich and the poor in the world." He warned: "We are suffering from a revolution of the poor and have-nots against the rich and haves and that's us."

4) CBS's Bob Simon suggested our enemies would go away if we would just pursue a liberal environmental agenda. Simon argued on Sunday Morning: "If we were to really live well, and by that I mean: being less greedy, taking better care of our poor and our needy, and stop making impossible demands on our planet's resources, I think we would plunge our enemies into shame. In fact, we'd end up with fewer enemies." Simon yearned for cars that get 40 miles to the gallon, so we wouldn't need any more Saudi oil.

5) An update. It wasn't just a Reuters photo, it was an entire Reuters story about how "human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. 'war on terror' since September 11."

6) Letterman's "Top Ten Saddam Hussein Tips for a Romantic Evening."

Corrections: The September 9 CyberAlert misstated the name of the ABC News series hosted by Peter Jennings. It is "In Search of America," not "Search for America." The same CyberAlert also mis-attributed the target of a question from Matt Lauer. He asked House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, not Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, this question about arming pilots: "Are you at all worried that this could come back to haunt Congress?"

1

After obligingly relaying how Iraq says it is only conducting "peaceful research" on "medical" and "pharmaceutical" matters at a facility U.S. intelligence pinpoints as dedicated to nuclear weapons research, NBC News reporter Ron Allen in Iraq treated the claims of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter as credible.

On Monday's NBC Nightly News, Allen trumpeted Ritter's credentials and recounted one of Ritter's absurd-sounding claims: "Today Iraq got more ammunition from an unlikely American ally -- former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. marine Scott Ritter, leading his own tour to an Iraqi military camp, a base where the U.S. believes Iraq has trained terrorists. But Ritter, who says he is also an expert in counter-terrorism, claims it's a base for hostage rescue training -- an example, he says, of how the Bush administration is making a case for war that's not based on the facts. He's convinced the U.S. has no reason to go to war."

Who exactly takes hostages in Iraq against the wishes of Saddam Hussein?

FNC's Brit Hume recalled what Ritter said about Iraq in 1998, showing how he's done a 180 on the threat posed by Hussein, a turnabout which could be attributed, the Weekly Standard suggested last year, to Ritter's collaboration with the Iraqi regime on a film.

In the morning on Monday, CBS's Jane Clayson at least challenged Ritter when he claimed that Hussein has no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.

Allen checked in from Baghdad for the September 9 NBC Nightly News, as taken down by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth:
"Today Saddam Hussein's deputies aggressively counterattacking charges this country still has weapons of mass destruction, and strongly denying Iraq has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Senior Iraq officials today take journalists to the outskirts of Baghdad for a close up look at one of the country's most controversial nuclear sites, the Tamuz reactor facility, heavily bombed by Israel in 1981 and again ten years later by allied warplanes during the Gulf War. The Iraqi officials insisting scientists use the plant's four new buildings for peaceful research -- medical, pharmaceutical -- dismissing charges by President Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Blair that recent satellite photos show new building activity since weapons inspectors left in 1998, raising suspicions about Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. Iraqi officials say it is not true they are conducting prohibited nuclear weapons activity."
Dr. Saeed Hassan al-Mousawi, Iraqi Foreign Ministry: "We've renovated some buildings but for peaceful research and in areas which has nothing to do with the nuclear area."

Over video of Allen walking with Ritter, Allen relayed Ritter's claims: "The media tour -- the fifth this month of various plants -- part of Iraq's campaign to prove it is not building illegal weapons. And today Iraq got more ammunition from an unlikely American ally -- former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. marine Scott Ritter, leading his own tour to an Iraqi military camp, a base where the U.S. believes Iraq has trained terrorists. But Ritter, who says he is also an expert in counter-terrorism, claims it's a base for hostage rescue training -- an example, he says, of how the Bush administration is making a case for war that's not based on the facts. He's convinced the U.S. has no reason to go to war."
Ritter: "If there's a time and a place to go to war, I'll be there. I'll fight that war. But I'm not going to go to war based upon a fabrication."
Allen concluded: "Ritter also warning a punishing attack seems inevitable unless Iraq lets inspectors back and proves it has no weapons of mass destruction. But Iraq continues to allow, continues to refuse to allow those inspectors back in until the U.N. agrees to a comprehensive deal, including a timetable for ending 12 years of economic sanctions, conditions the United States still finds unacceptable as the standoff moves closer to war."

NBC at least followed up with a piece from Andrea Mitchell about evidence of Hussein's quest to obtain nuclear capability.

During the panel segment on Monday's edition of Special Report with Brit Hume, FNC viewers saw the text on screen for what Ritter believed just four years ago.

-- Ritter on August 28, 1998: "Iraq retains the capability to launch a chemical strike."

-- Ritter on August 30, 1998: "Six months is a very reasonable time scale for Iraq to resume weapons capabilities...If people do not change course, the end result will be that Iraq will be able to retain these capabilities."

In a piece in the November 19, 2001 Weekly Standard, "Saddam Hussein's American Apologist: The strange career of former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter," Stephen Hayes suggested a reason for Ritter's change of heart:
"Ritter was welcomed back to Baghdad in July 2000, with the blessing of Saddam Hussein. The reason for his trip? To produce a documentary film, 'In Shifting Sands,' that would chronicle the weapons-inspection process and, he says, 'de-demonize' Iraq. The 90-minute film, which he says he is close to selling to a broadcast outlet, was produced with the approval of the Iraqi government and features interviews with numerous high-level Iraqi officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.
"U.S. intelligence officials and arms control advocates say Ritter has been played -- perhaps unwittingly -- by Saddam Hussein. 'If you're Scott Ritter,' says one arms expert, 'the former 'cowboy' weapons inspector, kicked out by Saddam Hussein, you're not going to get back into Iraq unless Saddam Hussein invites you and wants you there.'"

Hayes recalled Ritter's concern about the danger posed by Iraq expressed as late as the end of 1998: "All inspections stopped in December 1998. That same month, in an article written for the New Republic, Ritter again warned of the continuing Iraqi threat, this time in much greater detail. 'Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed,' he maintained. 'Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas....'"

For the Hayes piece in full: http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/000/524dplvk.asp [1]

Ritter appeared via satellite on Monday's The Early Show on CBS. Jane Clayson set up the segment noted by MRC analyst Brian Boyd:
"American Scott Ritter is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He's been critical of the U.S. position, he's actually in Baghdad this morning. Mr. Ritter, good morning. I'd like to ask you first up what your reaction is to this report from the International Institute of Strategic Studies that says Iraq could assemble nuclear weapons within a few months."
Ritter was condescendingly dismissive: "Well, what an absurd statement to make..."

Clayson challenged him: "You say it's absurd, but let's look at the evidence. What about Iraq's recent tests of ballistic missiles, and you know this report over the weekend that Iraq has made several attempts to buy several thousand aluminum tubes that would be used to enrich uranium and create nuclear weapons. Is there any doubt in your mind that Saddam Hussein would love to get his hands on a nuclear weapon?"
Ritter: "Yeah, there's all sorts of doubt. You just come to Baghdad and take a look at this city and take a look at this country and understand what war would mean to these people, because any effort by Iraq to reacquire weapons of mass destruction would be used by the Bush administration to go to war. Saddam Hussein and the government of Iraq knows that weapons of mass destruction especially nuclear weapons are a suicide pill for them and that if they get caught even trying to think about reacquiring weapons, we won't be talking about war, we'd be at war. So, you know, let's not talk about aluminum tubing for highly enriched uranium. This is ridiculous, that tubing has to go into a factory, that factory needs to be operational, and if it's operational it would be detected. So rather than talk about the tubes, let's talk about the factory."

Clayson pointed out: "You haven't been to Iraq in four years and Secretary of State Colin Powell says you are no longer 'in the intelligence chain,' so how can you be so certain that Saddam Hussein doesn't have or soon will have nuclear capabilities?"
Ritter became insulting: "Well, first of all, I acknowledge I'm not in the intelligence chains, especially the American intelligence chain. Frankly speaking, given the quality of intelligence that American provided the weapons inspectors for seven years, I wouldn't want to be in that intelligence chain. Because invariably it was inaccurate, almost certainly misleading and was politically motivated almost all the time..."

2

Charlie Gibson's Magic Kingdom. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pointed out to Gibson, on Monday's Good Morning America broadcast live from the Pentagon, that regime change in Iraq has been the U.S. government's policy since the Clinton years, an exasperated Gibson retorted:
"So if inspectors went in tomorrow and somehow found all of his weapons development programs and were able to magically make them go away, that wouldn't be enough?"

Rumsfeld, MRC analyst Jessica Anderson noticed, soon made fun of the preposterous hypothetical: "The world would be a lot safer place if, as you say, it all magically happened, but I don't know why a hypothetical question like that's terribly useful, because it isn't going to happen."

The exchange on the September 9 GMA came after Gibson repeatedly pressed for the administration to do more to prove what it claims about Iraq. Some of the questions and exchanges:

-- "But do you think Americans are prepared to send sons and daughters to war on the belief that he might have nuclear weapons?"
Rumsfeld: "Well, I don't think that would be the basis. It seems to me what you've got is a terrorist country that has weapons of mass destruction already, has already used them on his own people and his neighbors."
Gibson: "Didn't use them in 1991 in the Gulf War."

-- Gibson: "One of the seminal moments of my life was when John Kennedy went on television and showed satellite photos of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil. Isn't it going to take, and do you have that kind of direct evidence to get Americans to support the war?"

-- "But you can't go to war without American public support, and I'm asking don't you need that kind of direct evidence or do you have it to get the American public support or to get a coalition put together?"
Rumsfeld suggested: "Think of the books that have been written -- 'Why England Slept,' 'Pearl Harbor: What Happened?' Think of the congressional hearings going on today trying to connect the dots about September 11th. What do those pieces of information mean? What might we have done before the fact? The task today is to connect those dots before a weapon of mass destruction is used against the West; that's a more difficult task."

-- "Why not, under the criteria we've established, go after Iran? They, we know, have weapons of mass destruction. They, we know, have taken care and harbored terrorists. Why not go after them?"

-- "So is the goal to disarm Saddam Hussein or is it regime change?"
Rumsfeld: "The goal is what the President has said, and that is that the Congress passed a regime change piece of legislation a number of years ago in a prior administration, and regime change has been the policy of the United States government. The question of disarmament is clearly what the task is."
Gibson: "So if inspectors went in tomorrow and somehow found all of his weapons development programs and were able to magically make them go away, that wouldn't be enough?"
Rumsfeld: "The Congress's regime-change legislation would still stand, and obviously, when one thinks about the extent to which the people there are repressed and the conventional threat that Saddam Hussein poses to his neighbors, those problems would still be there, but the world would be a lot safer place if, as you say, it all magically happened, but I don't know why a hypothetical question like that's terribly useful, because it isn't going to happen."

3

Blame America First. The 9-11 attacks were our own fault, former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite contended on Monday's Larry King Live on CNN, because we hog so much of the world's wealth while many are destitute.

Cronkite said he believes "very definitely that foreign policy could have caused what has happened," before he asserted that anti-U.S. terrorism is caused by "this great division between the rich and the poor in the world." The people of the world "who don't have adequate housing, don't have adequate hospitalization, don't have adequate medical care, don't have adequate education," Cronkite warned, "are not going to live forever in the shadow of the riches that we display constantly."

Walter Cronkite attributed terrorism to U.S. policy and world poverty: "We are suffering from a revolution of the...have-nots against the...haves and that's us."

Applying liberal logic which seeks to blame the U.S. for all the world's ills, Cronkite declared: "We are suffering from a revolution of the poor and have-nots against the rich and haves and that's us."

In fact, the al Qaeda terrorists were hardly poor and the vast majority of the world's poor do not support terrorism. The common elements amongst those targeting the U.S. is Islamic extremism and nation's without respect for individual liberty.

Cronkite's liberal ranting came about 45 minutes into the live September 9 interview tied to the 9-11 anniversary.

King prompted Cronkite by wondering about "foreign policy's affect on what might have caused 9-11?"

That set off Cronkite: "Yes, I think very definitely that foreign policy could have caused what has happened."
King interjected: "Doesn't excuse it."
But Cronkite plowed forward without acknowledging King's caveat, so he presumably did not agree with it: "We have been warned by other terrorist attacks elsewhere of the dislike for us and the intensity of organization to express that dislike in various terrorist acts around the country -- the two embassies that were blown up in Africa, the Destroyer Cole, for instance, episode, and that sort of thing.
"It should be apparent to us, it should have been apparent to us a long time ago and it certainly should be apparent now -- it should be, for goodness sakes understood now, but it is not, that the problem is this great division between the rich and the poor in the world. We represent the rich. Each of our citizens is not rich, of course, but as a country we are exceedingly rich. As a country, all of these, most of these other nations of Africa, Asia and South America and Central America are very, very poor. The people in those countries who don't have adequate housing, don't have adequate hospitalization, don't have adequate medical care, don't have adequate education, they are not going to live forever in the shadow of the riches that we display constantly in our movies, in our travels around the world, in our airlines, in our shipping.
"They're not going to put up with that forever. This is a revolution in effect around the world. A revolution is in place today. We are suffering from a revolution of the poor and have-nots against the rich and haves and that's us."

Yes, it's all our fault and Osama bin Laden is just trying to help the world's downtrodden improve themselves.

4

Outlining some of the policy prescriptions behind Walter Cronkite's claim, outlined in #3 above, that terrorism is simply the poor lashing out at the rich in the U.S., on CBS's Sunday Morning reporter Bob Simon suggested our enemies would go away if we would just pursue a liberal environmental agenda.

Simon, a veteran CBS News foreign correspondent who is a regular on 60 Minutes II and a contributor to 60 Minutes, contended on the September 8 show:
"If we were to really live well, and by that I mean: being less greedy, taking better care of our poor and our needy, and stop making impossible demands on our planet's resources, I think we would plunge our enemies into shame."

Simon's "one concrete example" of something he'd like to see: "If we were to make sure new American cars got 40 miles to the gallon, we wouldn't need any more oil from Saudi Arabia. We could tell the Saudi royals to stuff it until they changed their ways." Simon maintained, "I don't think it would be an enormous sacrifice," but, he seemingly sarcastically added, "if we're not up to it there is another option. We could always send half a million troops back to Saudi Arabia and watch with joyful revenge in our hearts as they hoist American flags over all those wells."

Simon's remarks occurred during a series of "Dispatches" from CBS News reporters on Sunday Morning caught by MRC analyst Brian Boyd. In each, the reporter offered his perspective on a topic area. Simon delivered his comments with a black background behind him as viewers saw only his head.

His piece in full:
"Revenge gets a pretty bad rap most of the time. We all feel the need for it on occasion, we usually think it's justified, but it rarely gets a ringing endorsement from pulpits or from pundits. Certainly not when compared with brotherly love or compassion or turning the other cheek. But after September 11th, we needed it and quickly, it was that simple. So we attacked Afghanistan which was probably as good a choice as any. Afghanistan had sheltered our enemies. Of course, Saudi Arabia had bred, educated and financed them, but Saudi Arabia was on our officially sanctioned list of allies and besides there was all that oil.
"Now the President says he wants to attack Iraq. And I can't help thinking there's an element of revenge here too. After all, Saddam Hussein did try to kill Bush's father. In 1993, Saddam tried to assassinate Bush senior in Kuwait. There's something almost Greek about this, the son reeking revenge on the enemies of the father. And I like Greek tragedies, but I don't want to pay more than twenty bucks to see one, I certainly don't want to pay with the blood of American soldiers.
"Now Saddam is a nasty piece of work, but he always was. Even back in the '80s when we armed and supported him because he was waging war on Iran. What I want to know is, if he's so dangerous, why didn't we go after him eleven years ago when we had 140,000 combat troops 48 hours from Baghdad and the famed Republican Guard was busy guarding its derrieres. Sometimes, I suspect, we're going after Saddam because we can't seem to get the revenge we really want which would be seeing Osama bin Laden on television hanging by his toes.
"But there's another form of revenge which is a little less obvious. Almost 400 years ago a British poet wrote, 'living well is the best revenge.' It's not as immediately gratifying as some bloodier forms but it's worth thinking about.
"If we were to really live well, and by that I mean: being less greedy, taking better care of our poor and our needy, and stop making impossible demands on our planet's resources, I think we would plunge our enemies into shame. In fact, we'd end up with fewer enemies but that's almost beside the point. This may sound a bit soppy but here's one concrete example: if we were to make sure new American cars got 40 miles to the gallon, we wouldn't need any more oil from Saudi Arabia. We could tell the Saudi royals to stuff it until they changed their ways. I don't think slightly more energy efficient cars would radically change the American way of life. I don't think it would be an enormous sacrifice, but if we're not up to it there is another option. We could always send half a million troops back to Saudi Arabia and watch with joyful revenge in our hearts as they hoist American flags over all those wells."

For a bio of Simon with a picture of him: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/01/04/60II/main26916.shtml [2]

Back during the Gulf War in 1991 Simon was detained by Iraq for two months.

5

An update. It wasn't just a Reuters photo, it was an entire Reuters story about how "human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. 'war on terror' since September 11."

The September 5 CyberAlert reported how the caption on a Reuters photo, distributed on September 3, of a picture of Ground Zero taken in March, read: "Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as 'ground zero' in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. 'war on terror' since September 11. REUTERS/Peter Morgan."

That was posted last week on Yahoo!, but was since removed.

On Monday, The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported that Reuters spokeswoman Nancy Bobrowitz "says the caption was a 'mistake' because the information, drawn from an accompanying story, was taken 'out of context.'"

No, it turns out the photo caption writer did an excellent job of summarizing the news story since he simply lifted the first sentence of it, James Taranto noted in Monday's "Best of the Web" column for OpinionJournal.com (www.opinionjournal.com/best [3]).

(The Reuters photo on Yahoo! appeared as part of a gallery of Reuters photos of news of the day and so did not appear with any news story. And the news story, as posted by Yahoo!, is not accompanied by any photo, yet presumably the two were sent as a package to Reuters clients.)

Here's an excerpt from the September 3 Reuters news story Taranto tracked down on the Yahoo! site for Britain and Ireland. "Rights the first victim of 'war on terror,'" announced the headline over the story by Richard Waddington which was datelined Geneva. The excerpt:

Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. "war on terror" since September 11.

In the year since Muslim extremists flew hijacked planes into New York and Washington, killing some 3,000 people, many Western governments have armed themselves with greater powers of arrest and curtailed the legal rights of detainees as they hunt for accomplices.

The pursuit of the al Qaeda organisation of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, accused of planning the bloodiest attack on the United States since World War Two, has also triggered backlashes against immigration and immigrants and a greater readiness to expel non-citizens, human rights activists say....

In the United States, hundreds of people, mainly of Middle Eastern origin, were rounded up as law enforcement officials sought anybody with possible links to the hijackers....

Declaring itself in a state of war, the administration of President George W. Bush also proposed special military tribunals to try suspected "terrorists".

The announcement sparked an international outcry, with many jurists arguing such courts violated international conventions....

END of Excerpt

For the entirety of the story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020903/80/d8q2i.html [4]

6

Inspired by ABC's upcoming airing of Claire Shipman's interview with a Saddam Hussein mistress, from the September 9 Late Show with David Letterman on CBS, the "Top Ten Saddam Hussein Tips for a Romantic Evening." Late Show Web site: www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow [5]

10. Splash on a little goat's blood

9. Play romantic music to drown out the cries of tortured dissidents

8. Shampoo and condition your mustache

7. Don't be a cheapskate at the movies -- buy the large hummus

6. Have a violinist brought over to your table and executed

5. Show sensitive side by releasing her family from prison

4. "Say it with toxic nerve agents"

3. Sit on porch swing and watch twinkling United States reconnaissance satellites

2. Name a camel after her

1. Ask if she wants "to inspect your biological weapon"

There's something for Scott Ritter to do. -- Brent Baker [6]

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