Standing By Your Sex-Hobbyist -Man; Because It's Your Fault Too?

STEPHEN F. HAYES - PUT DOWN THE KOOL-AID!!

I got to watch REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER this week and saw the performance of writer Stephen F. Hayes, who was roundly laughed at by the audience and Maher. I was so disgusted I wanted to call and get him into some sort of a rehab program for the hopelessly delusional.

Just who is this clown?

Here's what Wikipedia says about Hayes:

Hayes is well known for his writings postulating an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. (See Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda).

He ended one of his articles by this sentence: "...there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans."

Hayes authored a book on this subject entitled: The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America [ISBN 0-06-074673-4].

A major source for the articles and book was a memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the U.S. Congress on 27 October 2003. The so-called Feith Memo was based on leaked intelligence, which the Defense Department subsequently rejected as "inaccurate," noting that the information leaked "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."

Hayes published a commentary on the Defense Department's response. They also said:
"Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."

Hayes gave this verdict on the Feith Memo:

CIA Director George Tenet was asked about the Feith Memo at a Senate hearing in March and distanced his agency from the Pentagon analysis. He submitted another version of the document to the committee with some "corrections" to the Pentagon submission. My understanding is that there were but a few such adjustments and that they were relatively minor (although my book challenges two of the most interesting reports in the memo). Some of the stuff — telephone intercepts, foreign-government reporting, detainee debriefings, etc. — is pretty straightforward and most of the report tracks with what Tenet has said publicly; it just provides more detail. That said, there were two items that seemed to require more explanation and, when weighed against available evidence, seem questionable.

The arguments raised by Hayes about the Saddam/al-Qaeda relationship have mostly discounted; they have been rejected by almost all counterterrorism experts and intelligence analysts, as well as by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and by the Bush administration itself. What Hayes called "perhaps the government's strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11," for example, has been described by some other analysts as a mere confusion over names that sounded alike.[8]

Former head of the Middle East section of the DIA W. Patrick Lang told the Washington Post that the Weekly Standard article which published Feith's memo "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" And, according to the Post, "another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather 'data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.'

I am going to let a greater pundit than I will ever be slice & dice this jerk. Jon Stewart. Stewart brings up a point I have made many times myself. That the Right tends to "label" anyone who doesn't agree with them with some bullying term like 'Defeatocrat' or 'Cut-and-Runners' or 'Traitors.' We disagree on how things should be handled - but to call the left or anyone who disagrees with you PERSONALLY DISPARGING NAMES? Grow up!

And I publish an excerpt from his interview here:

On The Daily Show, during an interview with Stephen F. Hayes, author of Cheney: The Untold Story of American's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, (HarperCollins, July 2007) about Hayes' characterization of Vice President Dick Cheney, Stewart said that "there's a real feeling in this country that your patriotism has been questioned by ... people in ... very high-level positions. Not fringe people."

Stewart continued: "I myself had some idiot from Fox playing the tape of me after September 11th -- very upset. And them calling me a phony ... because, apparently, my grief didn't mean acquiescence."

Hayes responded: "Look ... I think we can agree that ... we shouldn't be questioning other people's patriotism. On the other hand, I think it's totally legitimate to talk about different ways of handling the war on terror."

From the August 15 edition of Comedy Central's The Daily Show:

STEWART: Why didn't 2002/2003, Dick Cheney come out and say to the American people, this is gonna be chaotic. We went in -- the reason we didn't go in before was, we knew the issues. But they didn't. Person after person after person in the administration said, "It's going to be, like, a million dollars --

HAYES: Yeah.

STEWART: It's gonna take like a week.

HAYES: Yeah.

STEWART: These guys -- "Baahh."

HAYES: I know, I'm not sure --

STEWART: That's, that's --

HAYES: I'm not sure they said that.

STEWART: They came out person after person -- why -- that is the, the essence of, of people's anguish --

HAYES: Yeah.

STEWART: -- is they feel that they've been --

HAYES: I mean, I'm not sure they said exactly that, but I will say that -- that when I asked him -- when I --

STEWART: I was using hyperbole and also a funny accent. But the essence of their argument was, this isn't going to be a problem.

HAYES: Yeah, when I asked him about that it was interesting because, he did, I mean, as you've pointed out on your show numerous times, he's not somebody who likes to admit mistakes, and one of the things he did say was, we underestimated, obviously, how difficult it was going to be. He also spoke to, to the Coalition Provisional Authority and said that that was not the right way to have handled post-war Iraq.

STEWART: Then stop making the rest of us feel like idiots when we question their strategy in the war on terror. And stop making the rest of us feel like -- and I don't mean you, I mean them.

HAYES: Right.

STEWART: I think that they've gone -- they, they've seemingly gone out of their way to belittle people. You know, he's actually literally come out and said, "If you don't elect us, we might get hit again." That to me, I -- I can't jibe the portrait you paint of the steadfast leader with the fear-mongering, not-bright guy that I've seen.

HAYES: Yeah, but I mean, no, really -- I mean isn't it that case that, I mean, that's essentially what this debate has been about, the political debate has been about since 2001?

STEWART: No. They keep saying we don't understand the nature of this war. And critics keep saying, we understand the nature of it. You've been doing it wrong.

HAYES: Right, so why is that -- what's the, what's the quality of difference there?

STEWART: Well, no the, the difference there is, we're not calling them traitors.

HAYES: I don't -- yeah, but I don't think that the administration has called anyone a traitor. When has it happened? I mean, I'm serious. When has that happened? When has that happened?

STEWART: Let me say this. I -- I think that there's a real feeling in this country that your patriotism has been questioned by, by people in, in very high-level positions. Not fringe people. You know, I myself had some idiot from Fox playing the tape of me after September 11th -- very upset. And them calling me a phony --

HAYES: Right.

STEWART: -- because, apparently, my grief didn't mean acquiescence. So, I, I, I think that that's -- it's a fair point to say --

HAYES: Look, look I think we can agree that, that we shouldn't be questioning other people's patriotism. On the other hand, I think it's totally legitimate to talk about different ways of handling the war on terror --

STEWART: I agree with that.

HAYES: -- and then for them to make their case.

STEWART: If, if they were to make their case on that, I'm saying to you, I think we'd have a fair argument and agreement on how to move forward. They haven't done that, and the evidence that they haven't done that is, he made that case in 1994, he knew those were the problems, and they never brought it up in the run-up to the war.

SEE THE VIDEO HERE


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