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April 30, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:27
April 30, 2007, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know, we right wingers are used to being under siege, and we are especially under siege right now.
What's President Bush's popularity rating at right now?
Like 9%?
Is he at least still in double digits?
Congress may be lower, but admit it, we're we're way down there.
We supported the guy.
I voted for him myself twice.
And there he is with miserable popularity ratings.
The war in Iraq being dissed by the entire American public, even Republican presidential candidates out there on the campaign trail talking about modeling their presidencies after not Bush, not even the last Bush, but Reagan, they've got to go back 30 years in order to find a Republican role model.
I admit all of this.
This is the landscape that we're under.
However, those of us who actually believe in things, as opposed to put our little fingers up in the air like Democratic politicians do, and figure out which way the wind is blowing, are going to stay true to our convictions.
Nonetheless, it's a very difficult time to be a conservative, and you're being assaulted.
As a talk show host myself, I can tell you the lefties are out of the woodwork.
After hiding for about 20 years and not wanting to admit that they are liberals, they're in your face now.
I told you Bush was stupid, I told you he'd screw up the war, I told you there's a bad war, on and on and on and on and on.
And the fact of the matter is is that we do have to in part take part of living in a democracy and a representative government means that the majority of the people may turn against you from time to time.
I also understand that if a war is presumed to not be going well, a lot of people who initially supported that war are going to turn tail.
I understand that.
I understand that you can have an entire Democratic Congress that voted for the war, now trying to pull out of the same war.
And I understand that they're not going to be called on it by the mainstream media.
There comes a point, however, at which you have to stand up and say, enough is enough.
And that point is today, of all people, of all people who have absolutely no business to be lecturing us or lecturing President Bush or lecturing Secretary of State Rice.
Who in the world is George Kenneth to open up his mouth and write a book?
If President Bush made one mistake with regard to the war in Iraq and with regard to foreign policy, if he made one mistake in setting up his administration after he was elected in 2000, his biggest mistake of allowing George Kenneth to stay on as director of the CIA.
Let me remind you who hired George Tennett.
He was hired by Bill Clinton.
Bush cleaned house all the Clinton Knights were thrown out of Washington.
Remember?
Remember how they complained about the purge, even Carrera civil servants are being threatened.
Why this guy is just trying to clean house for the purpose of cleaning house?
That was all the complaining they did in January of 2001.
Bush did let one guy stay.
He let George Tennett stay.
The bureaucratic hack that Bill Clinton had named to run the CIA was kept by President Bush.
And that turned out to be the biggest mistake of the Bush presidency.
If there is a problem with the war in Iraq, and if there is a problem on how the war in Iraq was sold to the American public.
it was because of bad intelligence.
And everyone acknowledges that.
We thought Saddam Hussein had a major stash of weapons of mass destruction.
He either didn't or we didn't find it.
President Bush thought that and he said it.
But so did everybody else.
Everybody else believed it, as did President Bush.
The first guy that tried to raise our awareness of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction was Bill Clinton, who spoke actually eloquently in the late 90s about how Saddam had them, has used them in the past, and would use them again.
President Clinton was operating on the same intelligence as was President Bush.
Intelligence that he got from whom?
George Tennet.
Now let's fast forward to the war in Iraq.
There are a lot of things about this war that have gone swimmingly well.
We certainly did, however, miscalculate or underestimate the level of sectarian violence that would occur once a new government in Iraq was put in place.
There was a presumption on the part of all of the war planners, and probably from the president on down, that if the Iraqi people were given a chance to choose their own government, that we would be very, very popular, that if you knocked out Saddam and wiped out the Bath Party, that there wouldn't be much resistance.
We underestimated the desire of the Shiites to pay back the Sunnis.
We underestimated the resistance of the Sunnis to being part of a nation that was led predominantly by Shiites.
We underestimated that Al Qaeda would make Iraq the place for its last stand.
All that is true.
And we're reacting to it now and trying to figure out how to deal with it.
But there was an underestimation of what would happen in Iraq after a new government was put in place.
What was that a result of?
Bad intelligence.
That's why we have a CIA, right?
To be out there around the world spying, to have a bunch of analysts have a bunch of Valerie Plaims analyzing the world brilliant as they claim they are, to tell us what's going to happen and what's the landscape of the rest of the world.
We got bad intelligence.
Who ran the CIA?
George Tennett.
He's the Achilles heel of the Bush administration.
He's the biggest screw up the president has had.
The intelligence from George Tennet's CIA was bad from day one.
I admit it's not all his fault, although he is a career guy.
The CIA was dismantled by Bill Clinton.
After being rebuilt by President Reagan and Bush won.
The CIA deteriorated throughout the 1990s.
It moved away from covert operations.
It moved away from intelligence gathering and became an analytical agency.
The CIA under Clinton became an agency in which everybody's sitting around in offices in Langley, assessing things and pondering things.
And they ended up making a lot of assumptions that weren't based on hard information that certainly weren't based on any sources on the ground.
That was a major flaw, and Clinton is to blame for it.
And it happened in the end under his last CIA director, Tennant, who Bush carried over.
I don't mean to be overly harsh with regard to Tennant's role because the entire intelligence community accepted the version that came from the CIA.
But of all the people to now be running around, writing a book and showing up on 60 Minutes last night, George Tennett gets to pass himself off as an expert.
George Tennet gets to say, I told you so.
Well, what do you mean I told you so?
What did he tell us?
He told us it was a slam dunk that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
He's the guy that came up with every intelligence plan that was used in the planning of this war.
And the left embraces him now.
So anybody That criticizes Bush or criticizes Condoleezza Rice is automatically the friend of the left.
You know the old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So I guess if you turn on Bush, as Tennant now is, that you're going to be embraced by the American left.
Well, what happened to Bush, lied, people died.
If Bush lied, the lies were being fed to him by the CIA and by George Tennett.
I mean, I do understand that public opinion is fickle.
And I also understand that the Democratic Party has no morality anymore, and they are going to turn on policy that they support if they think there's a political edge in it.
And I also understand that from time to time, if you're going to defend a philosophy and defend an ideology and defend a point of view, that you're going to be up against public opinion.
I'm sorry, we should not have to take this from George Tennant.
He's actually going to have people buy his stupid book.
Here's a guy whose entire work on Iraq has been wrong.
He's been wrong about everything.
The intelligence, admittedly, was terrible.
And he gets to write the book and say I told you so.
I mean, that's just absurd.
But he's not being called on it by anyone.
He goes on 60 minutes and does a softball interview where no one challenges him.
Even though this was his intelligence.
Bush's grave mistake was not going outside the CIA when he became president in 2001.
Bring in a CIA cynic, bring in someone who is critical of what Clinton had done to the agency.
Maybe had someone come in with a more open mind, they would have found that there were flaws in the intelligence.
The president didn't do that.
Instead, he accepted the intelligence that was given to him by Bill Clinton's guy.
George Tennet was Bill Clinton's guy.
This is why Bill Clinton said the exact same things about Iraq and weapons that President Bush did.
Of all people, to now have to be lecturing the president, lecturing the Secretary of State, and lecturing us, George Tennett.
It is a ridiculous situation that's bordering on caricature.
To have to be told off by this guy.
My name is Mark Delling.
Rush isn't here today, so I'm in for him.
I'm Mark Delling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
From time to time when I'm fortunate enough to be sitting here in the big chair behind the golden microphone, we do interviews.
Didn't it occur didn't occur to us, you know, authors, people pitching books and so on.
It did not occur to us to have Tenet on, did it?
Well, you have him on.
George, tell us exactly about that great intelligence.
George, tell us how President Bush was not dialed into the Iraqi threat.
George, tell us into your knowledge of Al-Qaeda.
I'll tell you this, the questions would be a lot better than the ones that the mainstream media are going to give him.
He's not going to be called on any of this.
It's time to fight back at some of this stuff.
For him to be the guy that's out there doing the second guessing is as ridiculous and absurd a situation as you could imagine.
Let's go to the telephones on Russia's show.
Let's go to White Plains, New York, and Greg.
Greg, it's your turn.
I am Mark.
You're excited that he's responsible for the biggest problem that they have with the war in Iraq, but I think he's also responsible for the second biggest problem because the media has only had a couple of things to seize upon over the last few years that anybody in the administration has done to make it sound like the war was going to be a layup.
You know, the banner on the aircraft carry mission accomplished.
Right.
Um, something Cheney said which I can't remember, but it was that slam dunk thing that I think I've heard a hundred times out of context being referred to the overall war effort was going to be a slam dunk.
Well, and that was George Tennant who gave us that.
I mean, this guy was wrong all along.
There are a lot of things about the war with Iraq that went right.
Our initial battle plan was brilliant.
We got into the country, we secured the oil fields, we secured the infrastructure of the nation, we controlled the ports, we immediately marched toward Baghdad, then stopped, regrouped, had the supply lines ready so that we could take Baghdad,
moved into Baghdad, did so without major Iraqi casualties, did so with very limited losses to American soldiers, immediately got control of the country, protected the oil fields, and then sat there and gradually allowed a transition government to come in place.
All of that was done brilliantly.
While there have been problems with the war, they weren't associated with that.
Everything about the war that has been a problem stems directly from intelligence.
And I'm not suggesting that Tenet was a dunce for believing this because everyone in the intelligence community believed it, and everyone in both political parties believed it.
John Kerry's statements on this were as strong as Bush's back in the early days of the war.
Clinton's comments were the same comments that President Bush made.
Everyone came to the same conclusions because they were all operating off of bad intelligence.
And Tennet's predecessors at the CIA thought the same thing.
The point that I make here is that for this guy to become the Monday morning quarterback is just absurd and it's unfair.
And then he gets to write a book and make money off of it when he was the guy that was the one that was wrong from the beginning.
It's just not right.
I don't understand why he wouldn't write in the book that no one's ever accounted for any of the weapons programs or weapons they had back in the day.
And so he could have made the case that no one's checked in Syria or Iran yet and they could still be out there.
You know why he's not writing that book?
Because he won't get on Katie Couric.
That's exactly right.
That one isn't going to sell because it doesn't play into the message that the media wants to hear, and it doesn't play into the message that the Bush critics want to hear.
George Tenet knows that right now that if you rip President Bush on anything, I mean literally anything, you get a free pass.
The Republicans are lukewarm at best in their support of President Bush.
The Democrats and the moderates have completely turned against him, and because of this weakness in the polls, people who in the past were afraid of taking on the president are very willing to do so.
So Tennant recognizes that all he has to do is criticize Bush, and he's going to be given a big platform for doing that.
And he doesn't have to worry about any backlash directed to him because who's going to offer it other than the conservative talk show as people like myself and Rush.
So he gets a total free ride here.
Well, that free ride has to end and needs to be challenged on this.
If anybody made a mistake in the administration, it was the one guy that President Bush held over Clinton.
The biggest screw up he's had so far was Tennant.
That's just accurate.
The CIA itself has been nothing but trouble for President Bush.
It was the CIA that you know, where you had these people that were challenging the president on his statements that he was making during the war.
The CIA is a bunch of Valerie Plaims, and it was run by George Tenet.
And now for George Tennant, who gave the president and authorized all these intelligence reports that the president acted upon, not only in his war planning, but in his speeches that he gave to the American public and of the justifications they gave to Congress and in the testimony they gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee, both on and off the record, all that came from the CIA, and it was all signed off on by George Tenet.
And he's the guy now writing the book saying, well, Bush was wrong about this.
No one was more wrong than him.
Thanks for the call, Greg.
Let's go to Las Vegas and Scott.
Scott, it's your turn on Russia's show.
Thank you very much, sir.
You know, I'm really tired about the oversimplification of this war.
Because you know, we went over there for a lot of reasons, not just weapons of mass destruction.
We went over for that and the oil.
But the real reason we went over there is this is man-to-man stuff.
They hit us on our own soil, and we have to make a statement to the world that if you hit us on our own soil, we're coming after you.
We cannot protect ourselves from inside our shoreline.
We have to go over there and engage them.
It's the only way we can solve this long-term problem.
Well, a lot of people on the left argue that you can't say that Iraq hit us on our own soil because Al Qaeda and Iraq are separate entities.
We can argue that forever.
Now I'll point out that we seem to be fighting Al Qaeda right now in Iraq.
The group that we're fighting over there is calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq.
But the one thing we can stay with say with certainty is whatever connection there was between the terror community and Saddam Hussein was laid out by the intelligence community and by the CIA.
It was laid out by Tenet.
So if people on the left have a problem with Bush linking Iraq to terror, who do you think was giving him that linkage?
That was the consensus of the CIA, and it was the reporting that we got from CIA director George Tenet.
And for him to be the guy that's now writing the book, offering all these criticisms is really silly.
I'm Mark Ellingon for Rush.
I want you to imagine something.
I want you to imagine Rumsfeld writing a book.
And I guess everybody writes a book, so he'll write a book.
Critizing the way we fought the war in Iraq.
Be absurd because everybody knows that it was Rumsfeld that was the closest thing we had to an architect.
The war in Iraq.
Now the media would not allow Rumsfeld to get away with it because they hated him.
But because Tenet's got the Clinton connection, they're gonna cut him slack, and they're going to allow him to make all of these allegations about what the president did wrong and of the president wasn't dialed in in Iraq, even though this was his intelligence operation.
You can disagree with the decision to go into Iraq, and you can even make the argument that the administration should be held accountable for bad intelligence.
But if you're gonna hold the administration accountable, that means you've got to hold Tenet accountable.
And he gets to write a book?
Where are the profits from that book going to go?
Into George Tenet's pocket.
Tell me how this isn't absurd.
There wouldn't be a market for second guessing the president if the war was still overwhelmingly popular with the American people.
But it isn't, and I understand that.
And I understand that pot shots are going to be taken by people who would not have taken them if the public opinion polls were different.
I gotta draw the line somewhere, though.
It's bad enough that Democratic politicians and Democratic presidential candidates who voted themselves for the war, operating on the same intelligence that the Bush administration had, are now running around demagoguing on the war and demanding that we withdraw and saying that the whole thing was a mistake.
But to get it from within the administration, from the guy who gave intelligence to both President Clinton and President Bush, and the guy that gave intelligence to the Congress of the United States is utterly ridiculous.
To Damascus, Maryland to David, it's your turn on Russia's program with Mark Billing.
The situation is just another new strategy of the left.
Give a multimillion dollar contract to an ex-administration official to butt bash the president on 60 minutes in the entire talk circuit.
Mark, this is why at Media Reform.com there is a revolution beginning to take our country back from the media.
It's no longer the Democrats that are giving us a problem, Mark.
Thank you for the call.
Well, he makes a point with regard to the media.
But what Tenet realizes is that there are certain shots that you can take now that give you a free pass from anyone.
And that's why he's taking these shots.
I do believe, and I don't want to be misunderstood here, I do believe you can criticize the intelligence that we used to justify the war with Iraq because the intelligence was wrong.
I still believe the war was the right thing to do.
And I believe the world is better off because Saddam Hussein and his barbarians don't run Iraq.
I believe that you had a dictator standing up to the free world and standing up to the United Nations and thumbing his nose At it, and he was doing so in a part of the world that is the most important part of the world that we have right now.
For all of those reasons, we needed to fight the war with Iraq.
Not to mention the fact that we thought there were weapons of mass destruction there.
You're never going to know for sure.
But we thought they were there.
We thought they were there because the agency that is set up to tell us what's going on in the rest of the world was dead wrong.
And that was George Kenneth's agency.
If there was overselling or misleading information that came out of the Bush administration, it came out from the agency run by George Tennett.
And he writes a book.
Do they not have any shame at all?
It would be as silly as if Rush came out right now and said that Bush was wrong to fight the war with Iraq.
Well, everybody knows that Rush on his program took a stand in support of the administration.
We all made the best decision at the time according to the facts that we had at the time.
Just remember what the source of the facts was.
It all goes back to the CIA and the intelligence they delivered.
That's the agency that gathers intelligence.
President Bush himself didn't have the luxury of prowling around Iraq looking to see what Saddam Hussein had.
He used the administration that was given to him by the American agency that is charged with gathering information.
An agency that was run by a guy that was hired by Bill Clinton.
Maybe if the president had made it 100% and totally purged his administration of everything Clinton, somebody else would have come in and would have seen problems or would have said we need to make a second look here.
Or we're assuming things we shouldn't be assuming just because Saddam had them in the past, maybe he actually did get rid of them.
I know it seems ridiculous.
Maybe if someone had taken that point of view, we would have had better intelligence.
I still believe we would have gone to war with Iraq.
The justifications that we offered the American public might have been different, but the case for Iraq still would have been there.
But the president didn't do that.
The president didn't do that.
He kept Clinton's guy.
And it was Clinton's guy that was wrong.
And now it's Clinton that's doing the lecturing.
Without anybody calling him on it.
To Barbara in Elizabeth, New Jersey, it's your turn on Russia's show.
Mark, you're a hundred and fifty percent right, and you're the only one I've heard open the door on what Bill and Hillary Clinton and I believe what Bill Clinton did to the Central Intelligence Agency is truly an impeachable act, along with what he did to the military.
But I'd like to say one thing about President Bush.
One of his shining hours is to have put General Hayden in charge of the CIA right now.
The CIA is not allowed to work in this country.
They can only work overseas, and I think it's time for the piece of the puzzle that's been missing to be put in place.
I have called the White House and asked President Bush to make an executive order or uh have Congress address only this.
The Central Intelligence Agency is to be given back the powers that they took by being bullied by Bill Clinton.
They took it away from the CIA and gave it to um uh Louis Free and the FBI, who almost destroyed the FBI.
Well, you have to see you have to understand that liberals have never liked the CIA as it was originally created.
They didn't like the notion of this sort of unaccountable agency going off and doing covert operations.
I mean, they've had a bug up there, you know what, about the CIA forever.
What when Jimmy Carter became president, he gutted the CIA too.
It's what they do, they're resented.
You had the whole after some of the abuses of the 70s, you had the church committee come out and they argued that the CIA should be defanged, the CIA can't do this, the CIA can't do that, the CIA gets in bed with evil doers.
Well, you know, you kind of have to if you're trying to find out what's going on.
The CIA is going to get in bed with bad people in the same way that police officers go undercover and get informants.
You have to do that in order to find out what bad people are doing.
But the left has never liked it.
The CIA has always been its whipping boy.
So when Clinton came in, he wanted to change the mission of the CIA.
He wanted to change the CIA.
It not only lost its authority to go out and do the kinds of things that it had been doing in the past.
He changed it from an action agency that did covert operations and went out there and maybe paid a few people to give them information, dug in, they stopped using moles, they stopped using some of these kind of slimy free agents that were out there getting in bed with both sides.
In other words, they stopped doing the things that were unpleasant but worked.
And instead, we made the CIA an agency that was just another part of the huge federal bureaucracy with eight zillion analysts sitting there in Langley, Virginia, evaluating things.
It became an agency of academics.
It wasn't people who rolled up their sleeves and got their arms dirty by going overseas, even though that's exactly what you need in the Middle East.
And it's exactly what you need when you're dealing with terrorists.
The terrorist world is the most seamy, ugly, immoral, depraved part of the world that there is.
And it's not a part of the world that's going to be understood by some egghead sitting there in Virginia.
It's not going to be understood by Valerie Plaim.
It's going to be understood by the use of fictional character, Jack Bauer.
That's who's going to understand it.
But instead Clinton altered the FBA the CIA and altered its role in put in charge of the whole thing, Tennet.
And if you find if we had bad information in 2001, which the president did, and if we had bad information in 2004, which the president also did about what would happen after we took control of Iraq, it all goes back to the fact that our intelligence was lousy.
Well, who was in charge of intelligence?
George Tennett was in charge of intelligence, and he now writes the book in which he's the expert and says Bush did everything wrong.
I mean, it it's is Tony Romo going to write a book now on how to be a good holder for the kicker.
Remember him, he's the guy that dropped the snap for Dallas and the game with Seattle.
My name is Mark Delling and I'm in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
If you follow public opinion polls on the war with Iraq, I mean it's like a straight line downward.
When we took Baghdad, it was like 80 to 85% support.
Everybody was for it then.
Now it's what?
35%, 40%?
The war has been orphaned by the American public.
You call people on that.
Say, do you not stand for anything?
Do you not believe in anything?
What?
You change your mind on whether or not we should have done something because of circumstances?
Whatever happened to have having the courage of your convictions.
If you believe something was the right thing to do, you say so.
Even if it doesn't turn out correctly.
I think that's what a consistent person does.
The response they will give you is, yeah, but I was misled.
I was for the war because I thought that there wouldn't be any resistance in Iraq once we took over.
I was for the war because I thought they had weapons of mass destruction.
I was misled, and since I was misled, I have the right to change my opinion.
You hear this all the time.
My retort to that is, well, you may have been misled, but it wasn't deliberate.
The information you were given was in good faith.
Clinton gave a great speech in 1998 when he asked Congress for the authority to conduct military action against Iraq.
He laid out the case from top to bottom about Saddam's defiance of UN sanctions, defy Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds, the statements from people who had gotten out of Saddam's nuclear program about what they were attempting to do with nuclear weapons.
Clinton spoke about Saddam's research into biological weapons, nerve gas.
Bill Clinton did that.
President Bush came in and used the same intelligence.
Leading United States senators, all of whom you may recall, voted for the war and took a lot of credit for it in the early days of the war.
You didn't hear any criticism of the war from John Kerry or John Edwards or Hillary Clinton when we were toppling the statue of Saddam and Baghdad.
They didn't criticize the war then.
Even the moveon.orgs shut up for a while.
Even they had to quiet themselves.
When it looked like this was an enormous political victory for Bush, instead of criticizing the president, they retorted, well, everyone agreed that fighting Iraq and deposing Saddam was the right thing to do.
We Democrats voted for it too.
I know nobody has a memory in this country anymore, but that's what they were saying.
They were saying Bush should be given no credit for this, that this was something that Clinton laid the groundwork for, and that all the Democrats voted for.
Then suddenly situ the circumstances in Iraq change.
And a lot of people run away from the war.
They disassociate themselves from it ever happening.
And they rationalize their own statements by saying that I was misled.
Well, who did the misleading?
The Congress of the United States, at least members of the intelligence community and the leadership, they're giving briefings on intelligence is just the same as the administration is.
They take an oath not to reveal that intelligence, but they get those briefings.
Everybody had the same information.
Colin Powell had the same information as did Madeline Albright, his predecessor.
Cohen had the same information, the guy under Clinton, as Rumsfeld did.
And Clinton had the same information President Bush had.
They all were operating off the intelligence gathered by the American intelligence community, which is predominantly the CIA.
The CIA, more than any other part of the American government, dealing with Iraq, screwed up.
They had bad intelligence.
Well, people do screw up.
And intelligence is an art.
It's not a science.
Yes.
Since you're dealing with forces in the world that aren't going to really tell you what they're doing, you operate on the best information that you have at the time.
And I understand that.
Demanding perfect intelligence is a fool's wish.
You're never going to get it.
Nonetheless, the CIA was wrong.
And decisions were made both in terms of how we'd sell the war to the American public and advice that was given not only the president but his predecessor President Clinton and the leaders of the Congress.
And that information was wrong.
It wasn't deliberately wrong.
I don't believe George Tennant lied.
He had no vested interest in saying that something was the case that wasn't.
I don't believe that the analysts in the CIA lied.
I believe they all sincerely went with the best information they had, but they were wrong.
To have the guy who was in charge of the agency that was wrong, join this copany of critics of President Bush and now write a book in which he wants to profit off of it is just reputant.
My name is Mark Gilling, and I'm in for Rush.
Limbaugh.
Do we even know the title of Tenet's book?
You guys know I don't what's it called?
Oh never mind?
Confessions of a turncoat?
I don't know the answer.
What I do know is this.
George Tennant had an opportunity to write a book that would have been instructive about why information that we thought was correct in turn fact turned out to be wrong.
He could have done that, but that isn't what sells right now and it wasn't his way to be a hero on to both the left and the media.
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