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Gregory was a refreshing change from Chris Matthews. I thought the Michael Smith piece was good. Gregory didn't interrupt him or impose his own viewpoint on him -- something that Matthews does all the time.
Unfortunately I felt having administration shills like James Woolsey and David Kay on for rebuttal was rather weak. If Gregory was looking for reasoned debate from them he was mistaken as they were very much Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Woolsey, we may all remember, was in the forefront of those clamoring for us to take on Iraq. I remember him trumpeting the need for enforcing UN Resolutions on an episode of the Diane Rehm show way before the hostilities started. Interestingly, Woolsey was all for enforcing a 3-year old UN Resolution that Iraq was violating while turning a blind eye to Israeli violations of a plethora of UN Resolutions. Woolsey was also adamantly opposed to soliciting the help of allies or taking our case to the UN before commencing hostilities. I always found it ironic that he, and other neocons like him, wanted to justify the war by claiming to enforce a UN resolution while opposing going to the UN in advance to get its OK to do so. R. James Woolsey (along with his buddies,Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Bill Bennett)was an original signatory to The Project for a New American Century's 1998 Letter to Bill Clinton urging Clinton to use force to take out Saddam. He's the same sort of nutcase that got us into the Iraq mess. Now 1,700 dead Americans later, and many more legless, armless, or maimed in other ways, he has the gall to tell us that Saddam was a bad guy anyway and the whole endeavor was worth it.
David Kay, you may also remember, was the weapons inspector most emphatic about Saddam having WMDs prior to the war. He played the part of Bush administration counterweight every time Scott Ritter tried to tell everyone that Saddam had been defanged. He spent millions of dollars searching for weapons after the war in a fruitless endeavor to find what Saddam had destroyed in 1991. He's a worthless blowhard in my opinion. Just like Woolsey. I don't see why they have any credibility anymore.
Neither Woolsey nor Kay, both Americans, and non-linguist have any special expertise on instructing the American public on the semantics of how the Brits use the word "fixed". Anyone interested in that might care to look at a Usenet Group for linguists called sci.lang which recently had a rather colorful and instructive thread on just this matter. The Brits explaining the term on the thread were unanimous in saying that, as used in the DSM, "fixed around" meant that the intelligence was being "cooked" to fit the policy.
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