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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Walking back the Iran intel

Now, this is really unbelievable. Maj. General Caldwell, the US spokesman in Baghdad is trying to walk away from the inference that the Iranian government is supplying weapons to Shia militias, blaming the media, "I think people want to make an inference. I think people want to hype this up."

The reason this makes my head explode is that Caldwell is reported to have been one of the anonymous briefers who led the press to that connection in the first place. At the very least, he was certainly involved in setting the briefing up.

And, Joint Chiefs Chairman Pace's position that this is all nonsense is confirmed by his spokesman.

5 Comments:

  • ha goodness, wonkette has great rundown of today's Bush press conference.

    Theme of today’s briefing appears to be: Still working on this Iraq thing. Also fuck congress, the surge is happening already.

    By the way have you come across transcript yet? know it's early, but someone usually manages to get somethin gup pretty quick.

    By Blogger Matteo Tomasini, at 11:27 AM  

  • never mind AP is in process of getting it up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/14/AR2007021400830.html

    By Blogger Matteo Tomasini, at 12:16 PM  

  • Thanks a ton for the transcript. I just sat down and was looking for it.

    Probably oughtta add: we don't know if the Iranians were involved, despite our monthlong effort to convince you that they are. Don't let our ambiguity cloud the previous perception we created.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 1:14 PM  

  • yup. Also, I dunno why but I was struck by the number of times Bush used phrase "in other words." 7 times in opening statement alone. In other words, I think he has no idea what he is talking about.

    By Blogger Matteo Tomasini, at 1:26 PM  

  • I didn't notice that, but the whole point of this press conference was to get out the "we don't know about Iran" talking point. That's all they were really concerned about. Everything else was just filler.

    The thing that got me was the "Relative Peace" comment.

    See the post above this one.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 1:51 PM  

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