Washinton Times News: Security counsel members deny meeting Kerry

[Felix The Assassin]

Wow, streching the boundries before the election? What is he trying to do? Could it be that the Senator suffers from CRS? And to think, he finally got bill clinton to assist him on the campaign trail. Hmm, where were the Kerry daughters?

From the Times


Security Council members deny meeting Kerry


By Joel Mowbray
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.
Click here to claim your $500 Gift Card
At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.
"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable," Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.
Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."
But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.
The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.
Ambassador Andres Franco, the permanent deputy representative from Colombia during its Security Council membership from 2001 to 2002, said, "I never heard of anything."
Although Mr. Franco was quick to note that Mr. Kerry could have met some members of the panel, he also said that "everything can be heard in the corridors."
Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's then-ambassador to the United Nations, said: "There was no meeting with John Kerry before Resolution 1441, or at least not in my memory."
All had vivid recollections of the time frame when Mr. Kerry traveled to New York, as it was shortly before the Nov. 7, 2002, enactment of Resolution 1441, which said Iraq was in "material breach" of earlier disarmament resolutions and warned Baghdad of "serious consequences as a result of its continued violations."
Stefan Tafrov, Bulgaria's ambassador at the time, said he remembers the period well because it "was a very contentious time."
After conversations with ambassadors from five members of the Security Council in 2002 and calls to all the missions of the countries then on the panel, The Times was only able to confirm directly that Mr. Kerry had met with representatives of France, Singapore and Cameroon.
In addition, second-hand accounts have Mr. Kerry meeting with representatives of Britain.
When reached for comment last week, an official with the Kerry campaign stood by the candidate's previous claims that he had met with the entire Security Council.
But after being told late yesterday of the results of The Times investigation, the Kerry campaign issued a statement that read in part, "It was a closed meeting and a private discussion."
A Kerry aide refused to identify who participated in the meeting.
The statement did not repeat Mr. Kerry's claims of a lengthy meeting with the entire 15-member Security Council, instead saying the candidate "met with a group of representatives of countries sitting on the Security Council."
Asked whether the international body had any records of Mr. Kerry sitting down with the whole council, a U.N. spokesman said that "our office does not have any record of this meeting."
A U.S. official with intimate knowledge of the Security Council's actions in fall of 2002 said that he was not aware of any meeting Mr. Kerry had with members of the panel.
An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations remarked: "We were as surprised as anyone when Kerry started talking about a meeting with the Security Council."
Jean-David Levitte, then France's chief U.N. representative and now his country's ambassador to the United States, said through a spokeswoman that Mr. Kerry did not have a single group meeting as the senator has described, but rather several one-on-one or small-group encounters.
He added that Mr. Kerry did not meet with every member of the Security Council, only "some" of them. Mr. Levitte could only name himself and Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock of Britain as the Security Council members with whom Mr. Kerry had met.
One diplomat who met with Mr. Kerry in 2002 said on the condition of anonymity that the candidate talked to "a few" ambassadors on the Security Council.
The revelation that Mr. Kerry never met with the entire U.N. Security Council could be problematic for the Massachusetts senator, as it clashes with one of his central foreign-policy campaign themes — honesty.
At a New Mexico rally last month, Mr. Kerry said Mr. Bush will "do anything he can to cover up the truth." At what campaign aides billed as a major foreign-policy address, Mr. Kerry said at New York University last month that "the first and most fundamental mistake was the president's failure to tell the truth to the American people."
In recent months, Mr. Kerry has faced numerous charges of dishonesty from Vietnam veterans over his war record, and his campaign has backtracked before from previous statements about Mr. Kerry's foreign diplomacy.
For example, in March, Mr. Kerry told reporters in Florida that he'd met with foreign leaders who privately endorsed him.
"I've met with foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly," he said. "But, boy, they look at you and say: 'You've got to win this. You've got to beat this guy. We need a new policy.' "
But the senator refused to document his claim and a review by The Times showed that Mr. Kerry had made no official foreign trips since the start of 2002, according to Senate records and his own published schedules. An extensive review of Mr. Kerry's domestic travel schedule revealed only one opportunity for him to have met foreign leaders here.
After a week of bad press, Kerry foreign-policy adviser Rand Beers said the candidate "does not seek, and will not accept, any such endorsements."
The Democrat has also made his own veracity a centerpiece of his campaign, calling truthfulness "the fundamental test of leadership."
Mr. Kerry closed the final debate by recounting what his mother told him from her hospital bed, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity."
In an interview published in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Kerry was asked what he would want people to remember about his presidency. He responded, "That it always told the truth to the American people."

[Illumina Drathiran'ar]

Where can I use that gift card?

[Lucern]

LOL I noticed that too.

Bingo Felix. Stretching the truth, omitting certain truths, using the half of the truth that fits you, erecting an elaborate shchema of plausible deniability - let no politician have a monopoly on lying.

As for the journalist, he's got a bit of editorial in there. Joel Mowbray's work is suspect anyway. He basically characterized General Zinni as an anti-semite after the general expressed his concerns about Iraq (in 2002), and as an irregular reporter he seems to only write pieces that detract from challengers to a neoconservative agenda. That includes moderate conservatives like Zinni.

Not to say it couldn't easily be true that Kerry didn't meet with all the security council members. It wouldn't surprise me. It'd just be more credible coming from, well, someone credible.

[ 10-26-2004, 03:30 AM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

[Cerek]

My first question is this: WHY would the entire U.N. Security Council even want to meet with a relatively unknown Senator from Massachussetts before passing Resolution 1441? Kerry was not a Presidential Candidate at the time and it certainly seems (to me, anyway) that the Security Council members would have been far more concerned with meeting members of the current Administration at that time.

I do give Kerry credit for apparantly seeking out some members of the U.N. for their opinions, but this article definitely shoots a dart right through the heart of his credibility and "Honosty Platform".

And while the agenda of the journalist himself may be suspect, he certainly seems to have sufficient data to back up his claims. He has interviewed the Council members in question themselves AND has seen (or had) a study of Kerry's travel itenerary done in an attempt to document his previous claims of foreign endorsement. He isn't making blanket statements against Kerry - he is saying the documentation doesn't back up Kerry's claims.

To be honost, I find the statement "Kerry's travel documents do not provide an ample opportunity for him to have met foreign leaders" to be FAR more credible than the statement "I've met with foreign leaders that fully endorse me, but I can't reveal their identities because they can't endorse me publicly."

Huh???? I didn't realize that ANY foreign leaders were having problems criticising Bush and his Administrative policies, so why CAN'T these "unnamed foreign leaders" give their support to Kerry publicly?

Very curious.

[ 10-26-2004, 04:34 AM: Message edited by: Cerek ]

This story fits right in with the theme started with Kerrys latest fib....

http://drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm

[Cerek]

Originally posted by MagiK: This story fits right in with the theme started with Kerrys latest fib.... http://drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm

Dang It!! Don't you know that Kerry and Edwards have to just HATE it when facts get in the way of good rhetoric. [img]graemlins/biglaugh.gif[/img]

[Timber Loftis]

From today's NY Times.

Funny to watch a newspaper report on itself. Even calls itself "The Times." Almost metaphysical.
-------------------------------------

October 26, 2004
THE CANDIDATES
Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign
By DAVID E. SANGER

DAVENPORT, Iowa, Oct. 25 - The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as "one of the great blunders of Iraq" and said President Bush's "incredible incompetence" had put American troops at risk.

Mr. Bush never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism. Instead, evoking images of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and traveling with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, at his side, Mr. Bush made an impassioned appeal to voters to let him "finish the work we have started." But he also charged that his opponent had abandoned the defense principles of Democrats like John F. Kennedy.

"Senator Kerry has turned his back on 'Pay any price and bear any burden,' " Mr. Bush said, "and he has replaced those commitments with 'wait and see' and 'cut and run.' "

Yet even as Mr. Bush pressed his case, his aides tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times.

In several sessions with reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, alternately insisted that Mr. Bush "wants to make sure that we get to the bottom of this" and tried to distance the president from knowledge of the issue, saying Mr. Bush was informed of the disappearance only within the last 10 days. White House officials said they could not explain why warnings from the international agency in May 2003 about the stockpile's vulnerability to looting never resulted in action. At one point, Mr. McClellan pointed out that "there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Asked about accusations from the Kerry campaign that the White House had kept the disappearance secret until The Times and CBS broke the story on Monday morning, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said the White House had decided "to get all the facts and find out exactly what happened in this case, and then whether there are other cases."

Ms. Bartlett went on to say, "So doing it piecemeal - I don't think that would have been the responsible thing." He said that so far, no other large-scale cases of looting of explosives had been found.

Others in the Bush campaign characterized Mr. Kerry's attack as another instance of his willingness to say anything to be elected.

In New Hampshire on Monday, Mr. Kerry wasted no time seizing on the news to bolster his contention that Mr. Bush lacks the competence to act as commander in chief.

"Now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics," Mr. Kerry said. "This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and his administration has put our troops at risk and put our country at greater risk than we ought to be."

By the afternoon, Mr. Kerry's surrogates, including his adviser Joe Lockhart and Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, were deployed on the airwaves to repeat the case, describing in detail how many car bombs, larger explosions or nuclear triggers could be fabricated from the high explosives.

"It's an outrageous mistake, and one I'm afraid we will pay for for a long period of time," Dr. Albright said on CNN.

And in Toledo, Ohio, Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, was hitting the same notes, telling a crowd: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."

The Republicans mounted a similarly vociferous counterattack, charging Mr. Kerry with seizing on the loss of 380 tons of high explosives and never mentioning what Mr. McClellan called "more than 243,000 tons of munitions" that had been destroyed since the invasion. "Coalition forces have cleared and reviewed a total of 10,033 caches of munitions; another 163,000 tons of munitions have been secured and are on line to be destroyed," he said.

On Monday afternoon, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, wrote a letter to supporters saying that "every day brings a new charge against the president and every charge is pulled right from the headlines of The New York Times."

"John Kerry will say anything he believes will help him politically," Mr. Mehlman wrote, "and today he is grasping at headlines to obscure his record of weakness and indecision in the war on terror."

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, also contended that The Times had chosen to run the article at the end of the campaign, though he argued that the explosives probably disappeared about 18 months ago. The Times article said it was based on a letter reporting the missing explosives dated two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Iraqi interim government. The Times and CBS confirmed the facts in the letter in an interview with the Iraqi minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar.

On Monday evening, Nicolle Devenish, the spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, noted a section of the Times report indicating that American troops, on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, stopped at the Al Qaqaa complex and saw no evidence of high explosives. Noting that the cache may have been looted before the American invasion, she said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated the administration's responsibility.

"John Kerry presumes to know something that he could not know: when the material disappeared," Ms. Devenish said. "Since he does not know whether it was gone before the war began, he can't prove it was there to be secured."

While the White House sought to minimize the importance of the loss of the HMX and RDX - two commonly used military explosives that can also be used to bring down airplanes or to create a trigger for nuclear weapons - the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, took the unusual step on Monday of writing to the United Nations Security Council to report that the explosives were gone. He usually sends a report every six months, and his last was just a few weeks ago.

"He doesn't do that to report trivia," a European diplomat familiar with Dr. ElBaradei's views said. "It's something that is considered grave."

Dr. ElBaradei said his agency, whose inspectors were barred from returning to Iraq by the Bush administration after the invasion, had informed the multinational force in Iraq of the disappearance 10 days ago, hoping for "an opportunity to attempt to recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain." However, he noted Monday's news coverage and said he had to inform the full Security Council.

The increasingly angry exchanges between the campaigns took place as Mr. Bush sped through three states critical to his re-election. Starting the morning at his ranch in Texas, he flew to Colorado, a state his aides said he had all but wonMr. Bush, Mr. Bartlett said, was unlikely to return to Colorado, whose nine electoral votes are considered safe. Mr. Bush won Colorado by about eight points in 2000.

Iowa, with seven electoral votes, is closer, Mr. Bartlett said, and Mr. Bush spoke on Monday in both Council Bluffs and Davenport. With Mr. Giuliani still at his side, Mr. Bush again returned to the terrorism theme, telling several thousand cheering supporters, "On good days and on bad days, whether the polls are up or the polls are down, I am determined to win the war on terror, and I will always support the men and women in uniform."

At every stop, Mr. Bush has added a new line of attack on Mr. Kerry, saying he was twisting the facts when he asserted, in the presidential debates, that Mr. Bush let Osama bin Laden escape in the mountains of Tora Bora by "subcontracting" the pursuit to unreliable tribal allies.

"This is unjustified criticism of our commanders in the field," Mr. Bush said, citing Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of the coalition forces at the time, who contends that intelligence at the time suggested Mr. bin Laden might have been in any of several countries at the time.

"This is the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking," Mr. Bush said of Mr. Kerry's criticism. "And it's what we've come to expect from my opponent."


Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting from Philadelphia for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Randal C. Archibold from Toledo, Ohio.

That article reall didn't point out that this is not NEWS..but in fact OLDS...as in over 19 months old...as in Back during the War with Iraq (as opposed to the war on terrorism)
The Times "broke" the story because it would confuse the issue and maybe get Kerry a couple of votes.


[ 10-26-2004, 11:46 AM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[Cerek]

If you take Kerry and Edwards at their words now, it certainly raises some interesting questions.

First of all, they both say this is a huge error for which President Bush is personally responsible. Yet sources indicate the munitions were quite possibly gone before Iraq had been secured.

So, in other words, they oppose the war in general, but are now blaming President Bush for not getting into Iraq quickly enough.

Also, there are NO WOMD'S - but these 380 tons of munitions that President Bush allowed to be taken can be used to trigger nuclear devices?

The more I read and hear, the less I'm sure what to believe.

It's just election time obfuscation Cerek. The only reason they aren't called liars is because they are called politicians and so it would be sort of redundant.