Kerry to Imus: “They Were Hell Bent for Leather, to Take Out Saddam"

[kpete]

(Kpete: I do not know if anyone posted this, but I thought Kerry was great!!!)

Kerry Talks to Imus: “They Were Hell Bent for Leather, to Take Out Saddam Hussein”
December 9th, 2005
John Kerry was on Imus in the Morning today. Amid the humorous banter between Imus and John Kerry, about whether or not Kerry will run again (he’s still not talking), there were discussions over the recent right wing twist on Kerry’s “Face The Nation” interview; withdrawing troops from Iraq; the mis-leading information that was used to justify the war in Iraq and on Kerry’s call for Rumsfeld to resign.


IMUS: OK — that they lied. Why mislead us?

KERRY: Because they were hell bent for leather, determined to take out Saddam Hussein and go to war on a theory of Middle East transformation. And it was the theory of Mr. Wolfowitz and Doug Feith over at the Pentagon and others who had this view. And in retrospect, that’s what was driving things.

IMUS: Remember, for a long time, they tried to tie — I mean, for a long time, you take these polls, people thought that Iraqis were in those planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

KERRY: Yes, they did. And in fact — in fact, the president helped lend to that belief.

Last year during the election, we observed that about 70 percent of the American people or higher, 77 percent of the people supporting George Bush believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Now, they didn’t just get there by accident.

And what’s really disturbing about this — and it ought to be to every single person in New York, especially, is that the people we were after who did what they did to New York, and to the Pentagon, and to, you know, the country, came out of Afghanistan, out of al Qaeda, out of Osama bin Laden.

We had Osama bin Laden trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora . But the president and Donald Rumsfeld decided not to use Americans, the best fighting in the world — we have SEALS on the ground there. I’ve talked to some of them.

They wanted to go up after Osama bin Laden. And the orders were never given to bring in the 82nd Airborne or the Marines, or others, surround that mountain, do anything necessary. We outsourced that job to Afghans, who went up in the hills and Osama bin Laden escaped.

There were other ways we could have gotten Osama bin Laden. I think the whole beginning of the war, you know, the three weeks of bombing, lost us the opportunity to take advantage of the fact that we knew they used cell phones, we knew they traveled in convoys.

We have the best special forces in the world, and I think that was the time to have an entebbe-type raid, where you take the time to know with certainty where they are, and then you envelop, and then you go in, and then you can do your bombing and the other things necessary. But the object was to get Osama bin Laden, and frankly, through a series of decisions, they allowed Osama bin Laden to escape.

And I think that’s a much larger issue than a lot of people focus on.

The whole interview at:
http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/