Tuesday, May 2

Brit Hume: Caught In Another Lie

On today's Grapevine we see just one more example of how Hume's first allegiance is to Republican party partisan spin, with truth coming in a distant second.

Hume's claim:

Remember Michael Scheuer?

Speaking of Zarqawi: Remember former CIA official Michael Scheuer? He's the one who wrote the book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," which called the war in Iraq "unprovoked."

Well, he now says U.S. forces had Zarqawi in their sights "almost every day for a year before the invasion" of Iraq, but were told not to kill him because, he tells Australian TV, "the president and the National Security Council decided it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers."

Scheuer, by the way, once insisted Usama Bin Ladin was not a terrorist but a "resistance fighter," and once described the Al Qaeda leader as a "brilliant man."

But a quick look at the transcript of the interview that Hume is referencing (without attribution, of course) reveals that Scheuer did not, in fact, insist that Bin Ladin was not a terrorist, nor did Scheuer describe Bin Ladin as a resistance fighter as Hume implies. In fact, what Scheduer said to Tim Russert was the following:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you see him [Usama Bin Ladin] as a very formidable enemy?

MR. SCHEUER: Tremendously formidable enemy, sir, an admirable man. If he was on our side, he would be dining at the White House. He would be a freedom fighter, a resistance fighter. It's--and again, that's not to praise him, but it is to say that until we take the measure of the man and the power of his words, we're very much going to be on the short end of the stick.

Clearly Scheuer does not, contra Hume, "insist" that Bin Ladin is not a terrorist. Furthermore, Scheuer is also not saying that Bin Lain is a resistance fighter, no matter how hard Hume tries to spin things. What he says, instead, is that Bin Ladin is a formidable enemy, and if he were on our side, we'd be calling him a resistance fighter. And let's face it, we certainly were calling Bin Ladin a resistance fighter when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. So Scheuer has a point, to a certain extent.