Five Civil Questions for John McCain

[existentialist]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/five-civil-questions-for-_b_21452.html?view=print


By Jonathan Schwarz


In a recent comment on the Huffington Post, you expressed your deep unhappiness about the recent events at the New School commencement. You stated Jean Rohe's remarks were "an act of vanity," and said she and other New School students may in the future become ashamed of their actions.

. . .

3. The Reagan and first Bush administrations gave Saddam critical financial, political, and strategic support, even though they knew he was using chemical weapons against Iranians and his own people. In April, 1990, Republican Senator Alan Simpson (a close friend of Dick Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense) met with Saddam and told him his problem lay "with the Western media and not with the U.S. government." Sen. Simpson also called the media "haughty and pampered." Just four weeks before this meeting, Saddam had executed Farzad Bazoft, a journalist with the British paper The Observer.

Again, Sen. McCain has compared Saddam's actions to those of Hitler. What would he say about politicians who offered comparable support to Hitler during the Holocaust? Does he believe the same should be said about Reagan, Bush Sr., and Simpson?


4. In 1995, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected from Iraq to Jordan. Kamel had supervised Iraq's WMD programs before the Gulf War in 1991. After his defection, Kamel told the CIA that Iraq had not been honest about its pre-Gulf War programs. However, he also told us Iraq had no remaining WMD and that its nuclear weapons program had ended four years previously. We now know everything Kamel said was accurate.

. . .

Also, Sen. McCain served on the commission investigating the intelligence failure regarding WMD and Iraq. The commission's report mentions Kamel repeatedly, but never refers to his statements that Iraq was disarmed.
Why does the report fail to mention this?

[joemurphy]

1. As to #4, it was an inconvenient fact that McCain though best

ignored. Inconvenient facts are the kind you don't want the public to know about.

[existentialist]

2. There seem to be just lots of inconvenient facts these days.

Don't you think so?