Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Fox News All Stars   [NRO Staff]

From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On George Tenet’s Book—

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, in fact, what Tenet is charging, and a I think the charges he's making on television now are much more sensational than what's in the book, and it's a way to sell the book, he had said that there was no discussion of imminence, the imminent threat from Iraq, but if you look at the book itself, he writes on page 328: It was never a question of known imminent threat, it was all about an unwillingness to risk surprise.

And in fact, the president's State of the Union Address in 2003, the president said, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." The president says, no, I don't — that's not the way to look at it after 9/11, you can't take the risk of waiting until the threat is imminent, so that is a phony charge. . . .

The most telling thing is what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said when he was arrested in Pakistan, "I'll talk to you in New York when I have a lawyer." He thought he'd attack the Clinton America in which acts of terror were treated as criminality and not as an act of war, and he learned a different lesson, and that's why in treating him not as a criminal, but as a war criminal and an enemy, we got information, which is why we haven't had second attack since 9/11.

—On Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank—

MORT KONDRACKE: He arrives in 2005 and he realizes that there's a conflict of interest problem because one of the bank employees is his girlfriend, so he goes to the ethics committee of the World Bank and says I want to recuse myself from everything to do with her. . . . [H]e signed off on this agreement whereby her pay, she went to the State Department, her pay was raised by $60,000, and the ethics committee signed off on this twice. Not once, but twice. And now it's all coming back and even the chairman . . . of the ethics committee who signed off on this who is one of his major accusers. . . .

KRAUTHAMMER: It'll depend on the bank, on the board, the hanging jury that's in place. And it is about politics. It's a frame-up of a first order. And the reasons are myriad. The first is that Paul Wolfowitz is an idealist. And as head of the World Bank he wants to actually help poor people.

And one of the reasons that money of those loans aren't helping the poor, is because the money gets ripped off on the way to the poor. So, he instituted a big anti-corruption campaign and there's a lot of resistance in the bureaucracy of the World Bank because they get judged in how much money is pushed out the door, not on how many of the poor are helped. . . .

HUME: Will he survive this?

KRAUTHAMMER: I'm not sure. It's such a corrupt institution he may not.

05/01 11:45 AMShare