Reuters sports wood over W's mix-up.
With a slip of the tongue, U.S. President George W. Bush briefly turned Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein on Monday.
Bush momentarily switched the names of his two greatest nemeses in a news conference at the White House where he was defending his decision to authorise eavesdropping on Americans suspected of links with al Qaeda and other organisations in the U.S. war on terrorism.
"In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone and then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak," Bush said.
"And guess what happened. Saddam ...Osama bin Laden changed his behaviour. He began to change how he communicated. We're at war. And we must protect America's secrets."
The Bush administration sought to convince Americans before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government had links to bin Laden's al Qaeda. No such links have been proven.
I haven't seen or heard the mix up, I'm sure it's available somewhere, but I'm doubting there was some deep psychological reason behind this warranting a Reuters article. But since they wrote one, are Osama and Saddam W's very own personal "nemeses." Are they the Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam to his Bugs? In Reutersworld he's the only guy on the planet who has a problem with them. The rest of us are just passively watching their little three-way. This has to rank high on the list of most immature professional news reporting of all- time.
I could go on but Philip at Theep Doughts pretty much sums it up.
So this article's sole purpose was to ridicule the President, trivialize the dangers we face, and lastly, to advance the New History as Reuters sees it. To say that "no such links" have been found is a blatant falsehood, and Reuters knows it. Saddam offered asylum to Osama, Saddam paid suicide bombers, Saddam had a known terrorist training camp at Salman Pak complete with a fuselage of a 727 aircraft. These details are not new, but the media has conveniently forgotten what many of them reported in 1999...