In “Interview,” Hannity Excuses Missing WMD’s And Justifies Iraq War For Rumsfeld
Reported by Ellen - February 9, 2011 -
Donald Rumsfeld got an extra special dose of Republican Rehab on Hannity last night (2/8/11) as Sean Hannity dispensed with the softball questions and went straight to justifying the Iraq war on Rumsfeld’s behalf before letting him speak about the never-found WMD’s. Oh, and Hannity also went on to help Rumsfeld throw Bush under the bus over the now infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner.
In the middle of an hour-long infomercial interview with Rummy, Hannity said, “You know what was interesting is – and I know that you’re gonna be asked extensively and exhaustively about the issue of weapons of mass destruction as you go out and you write about this. But we had video of the Kurds where they used chemical weapons. (Hannity forgot to mention that happened in 1988!).
Rumsfeld: Absolutely.Hannity: We had video when (Saddam Hussein) came to power. Remember when he came to power, there’s actual video of this, he called out people by name. Those people were never seen or heard from again.
Rumsfeld: No.
Hannity: And they were murdered. So, as, as people, you know, say, ‘Well, Mr. Secretary, you got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction.'
Rumsfeld (grinning broadly): Yeah.
Hannity: What do you think about the media as it relates to that side of Saddam that they didn’t want to bring up? We’ve shown that video on this program.
Predictably, Rumsfeld went on to talk about how Saddam Hussein used “chemical weapons against his own people” plus other atrocities. “It was a brutal, vicious regime and the world is clearly better off without it,” Rumsfeld concluded.
Hannity: How did we get it wrong on weapons of mass destruction? At one point, when it was clear we didn’t have them, you had stated publicly that, ‘Yeah, but I know where they are.’ And you discuss this in the book that you had misspoke. But how did we get it so wrong, number one. Do you think he had ‘em and shipped ‘em out in the lead up to the war?”Rumsfeld: I don’t know for sure. We know he had them. We know the United Nations inspectors knew that he had large quantities and he would not or could not show that he had disposed of them. The assumption, therefore, was that they still existed… It was a perfectly rational, reasonable judgment in my view.
Of course, that assumption has been proved wildly wrong. But hey, Rumsfeld is willing to say that radical Islamists are itching to take over the world - so who cares if thousands of Iraqis and Americans have been killed and wounded and we’ve spent trillions on a war based on a false premise and a false promise that the war probably would not last six months – eight years ago.
Now those were words nobody on Hannity wanted to say!
But wait, there’s more. After he was done excusing discussing the WMD’s, Hannity helped Rummy throw Bush under the bus over the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Hannity said,
“You also, apparently, had a conversation with the president about the idea of ‘Mission Accomplished’ and the speech that he read. And you felt that it was setting the wrong tone and as it turned out, it was not helpful.”
Maybe the next Republican Rehab recipient can stay home and Hannity can just tell his viewers everything he thinks they need to know to remake their image.
