Hannity & Colmes

As reported yesterday by NewsBusters’ Mark Finkelstein, Katie Couric of NBC’s “Today Show” wondered aloud on yesterday’s program if Osama bin Laden might be getting information from the New York Times. It turns out that Couric isn’t the only media representative asking this same question. A just released Editor and Publisher article reported on more such media opining. First, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson said the following on that network’s “Scarborough Country” Thursday evening (full transcript to follow):

“By the merchants of war who financed Bush's presidential campaign, in the words of Osama bin Laden and many on the left. In other words, Halliburton is responsible for this war, every single talking point. I hate to think of Osama bin Laden reclining in his cave in Waziristan, reading the op-ed page of ‘The New York Times.’ But, clearly, he is. He's got every talking point. It's uncanny.”

According to E&P, Carlson wasn’t the only one to suggest that Osama is paying attention to the American press:

On this evening's (December 1, 2005) edition of Fox News' Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes misleadingly suggested that many or all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were "destroyed by Bill Clinton."

COLMES: ... And Bill Clinton and his pinpoint bombing in the Iraqi facilities in 1998 destroyed many of those weapons that President Bush and Cheney said were there.

GEN. TOMMY FRANKS (guest): I also want to point out, there was little doubt in David Kay's mind that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. I think we all know that he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people.

COLMES: But they were destroyed by Bill Clinton.

Colmes did initially say "many" of Iraq's WMD were destroyed (a problematic claim in its own right), but his response to Gen. Franks clearly implied that Clinton's 1998 strikes eliminated Saddam's WMD. Unfortunately, Colmes echoes a common deceptive talking point. The whole truth? David Kay has stated that he believes that the 1998 Desert Fox strikes simply played a contributing role in dismantling Saddam's chemical weapons. ("Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced -- if not entirely destroyed -- during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections." [link to Kay text]) Biological weapons and nuclear weapons are an entirely different matter. In Kay's 2003 speech, he mentions no such destruction of these weapons as the result of Desert Fox. (In fact, "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.")