Unaired CBS Clip: McCain Falsely Asserts Anbar Awakening History

jefferson_dem

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Tue Jul-22-08 10:38 PM
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Unaired CBS Clip: McCain Falsely Asserts Anbar Awakening History

Edited on Tue Jul-22-08 10:40 PM by jefferson_dem

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWy9-TgAwQw

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McCain Falsely Claims The Surge ‘Began The Anbar Awakening,’ But CBS Doesn’t Air It
from Think Progress by Ben

During an interview with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), CBS Evening News host Katie Couric noted that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said recently that “there might have been improved security even without the surge” and asked McCain, “What’s your response to that?”

McCain called Obama’s claim “a false depiction of what actually happened” but McCain then falsely claimed that the surge “began before the Anbar awakening“:

McCAIN: I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

But in a puzzling move, the CBS Evening News did not actually televise McCain’s false claim tonight. As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported, “CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric’s question, but in response, it inserted part of McCain’s answer to another question instead.” (See the full transcript here.)

CNN’s Anderson Cooper obtained the CBS clip and aired it tonight. Watch it:

In fact, the Sunni revolt against Al-Qaida in Iraq’s Anbar province — commonly referred to as “The Awakening” — “began” long before Bush even announced his “surge” policy in January 2007. As the New York Times noted in April 2007:

The turnabout began last September <2006>, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

But also, President Bush himself noted this fact in a speech to the Naval War College in June, 2007:

Last September <2006>, Anbar was all over the news. It was held up as an example of America’s failure in Iraq. The papers cited a leaked intelligence report that was pessimistic about our prospects there. <…>

About the same time some folks were writing off Anbar, our troops were methodically clearing Anbar’s capital city of Ramadi of terrorists, and winning the trust of the local population. In parallel with these efforts, a group of tribal sheiks launched a movement called “The Awakening” — and began cooperating with American and Iraqi forces.

Spencer Ackerman notes that the colonel McCain cited is “now a one-star general” and had explained the “Awakening” to a reporter in September 2006 “before it even had a name.” “For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice,” added Ackerman.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/22/mccain-anbar-history/