Experimenting With Bias: Four Articles - One Story

Today in Englewood, Colorado, John Kerry gave a news conference. This impromptu question and answer session revealed Kerry's lack of any moral fiber, his complete lack of mettle, and his total and utter lack of comprehension regarding the serious state of the world today.

One of the pool reporters asked Kerry a hard question regarding his constantly waivering firm stand. He replied with something to the effect of, "I know what I know...", and after a few more journalists pelting him, he ended with, "I don't know..." and abruptly ended the conference.

When the text of the news conference is available, I will post it into this thread.

Here we go (in no particular order):

Article 01

My San Antonio
Round 2 Starts Before the Bell
Web Posted: 10/08/2004 12:00 AM CDT
Gary Martin
Express-News Washington Bureau

ST. LOUIS — President Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry sharpened their attacks on each other Thursday as they prepared for their second televised debate.

The candidates engaged in a verbal brawl on the eve of tonight's showdown that likely will include questions about Iraq and a new report that concluded Saddam Hussein didn't have the weapons of mass destruction cited as a reason for last year's U.S.-led invasion.

Bush conceded Thursday that Saddam lacked the weapons, but not the will to redevelop the program.

"I believe we were right to take action, and America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison," Bush said at the White House before traveling to St. Louis, where the debate will be held at Washington University.

The statement brought a quick response from Kerry, who told a Colorado news conference that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "may be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth."

"My fellow Americans, you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact," Kerry said.

The president defended his position at a Wisconsin rally, where he reiterated his characterization of Kerry as indecisive — first supporting and then opposing the war — and unfit to be commander in chief.

"My opponent tries to say that I made up reasons to go to war. Just who is the one trying to mislead the American people?" Bush asked.

The exchanges were an extension of the first debate, when Kerry insisted the Bush administration's rush to war allowed 9-11 instigator Osama bin Laden to slip away in Afghanistan.

Kerry accused the president of misleading the country about Saddam's weapons program to shift focus from al-Qaida to Iraq, leaving America more vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

This week, Bush said Kerry's vacillation on Iraq would create a danger for the United States and the free world.

The heated attacks come as a poll out Thursday shows Kerry gaining a slight lead over the president with just 23 days before the Nov. 2 election.

Tonight's debate, the second of three, will be a town-hall style event in which the audience will ask questions on Iraq, foreign affairs and domestic policy.

The audience will be composed of undecided voters chosen by the Gallup Organization.

All major television networks plan to air the 90-minute debate, which begins at 8 p.m. CST.

Polls show Kerry's performance in the first debate on foreign policy gave him a boost among undecided voters.

It also raised expectations for the president to blunt that momentum with a strong showing in the second encounter.

In the first, Bush seemed peeved and annoyed with Kerry's criticisms, at times scowling and pursing his lips.

"The president did not come across well. That is an image he needs to eliminate," said Frank Harrison, a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio.

"I'm not sure he can survive one or two more debates where that is the perception," said Harrison, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania.

The president was widely judged to have lost the first debate. Earlier this week he responded with a retooled stump speech that sought to draw even sharper distinctions with Kerry.

Bush branded Kerry as a "tax and spend liberal" who voted 98 times during a 20-year Senate career to raise taxes. He also said Kerry's claim that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake is a "strategy of retreat."

"It's a new and very shrill attack on John Kerry and John Edwards," said Joe Lockhart, a Kerry campaign spokesman.

Democrats characterized the new Bush speech as a desperate measure to regain his footing after a poor debate performance and a week of stinging revelations about Iraq.

Monday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he knew of no direct tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida.

And Paul Bremer, the president's handpicked administrator in Iraq, said the United States failed to put enough troops in country to quell insurgent uprisings after the invasion.

A report by Charles Duelfer, a U.S. weapons inspector, released to Congress on Wednesday, concluded that Saddam eliminated his weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War in 1991.

He found no evidence to suggest that there were any concerted efforts to restart his weapons program before the U.S. invasion.

Bush acknowledged the lack of weapons, but cited passages of the report to bolster his case that Saddam planned to rebuild his arsenal after UN sanctions were lifted. He said the invasion was justified.

The president said the Iraqi leader "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction, and he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies."

gmartin@express-news.net

Article 2

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kerry: 'Bush won't face truth about Iraq'
Published on: 10/07/04

Democrat John Kerry charged Thursday that President Bush had "fictionalized" the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and that his misjudgments are responsible for the "chaos on the ground" in Iraq.

Kerry's criticism of the president, his strongest yet, came in response to a report Wednesday by weapons inspector Charles Duelfer that Iraq had "essentially destroyed" its illicit weapons stockpile more than a decade ago.

Faced with the report, Bush conceded early Thursday that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he had used as justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year.

But Bush insisted that Saddam had retained the "means and intent" to produce weapons of mass destruction and that the United States was right to use military forces to depose him.

In his first public comment on the Duelfer report, Bush referred back to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden, arguing that "in a world after Sept. 11, [Saddam] was a threat we had to confront."

Similarly, Vice President Dick Cheney, a chief architect of the war in Iraq, said Thursday that a danger existed in Iraq and it was right to invade.

"Delay, defer, wait wasn't an option," Cheney said at a campaign rally in Miami. "The president did exactly the right thing in taking down Saddam Hussein."

Kerry told reporters in Colorado, where he was preparing for tonight's debate with Bush, that "the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq."

He also charged that the evidence Bush and Cheney presented in arguing for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam was "all designed, all purposefully used to shift the focus from al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, all with the result that the president shifted the focus from the real enemy to an enemy that was aggrandized and fictionalized."

Kerry said events this week have "provided definitive evidence as to why George Bush should not be re-elected president."

In addition to the Duelfer report, he cited comments this week by the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, suggesting that the Bush administration had not provided enough troops to prevent violence in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

"President Bush's decision to send in too few troops, without thinking about what would happen after the initial fighting was over has left our troops more vulnerable, left the situation on the ground in chaos, and made the mission in Iraq much more difficult to accomplish," Kerry said.

Kerry, when asked if he would commit more troops to Iraq as president, said conditions there could deteriorate further over the next few months, making it difficult to know what to expect.

"I don't know what I'm going to find on January 20th, the way the president is going," he said. "If the president just does more of the same every day and it continues to deteriorate, I may be handed Lebanon, figuratively speaking."

Lebanon descended into civil war in the 1980s — a conflict in which Westerners were routinely taken hostage and in which the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 killed 241 American servicemen. Months after the bombing, then-President Reagan withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon.

Kerry said he rejected Bush's argument that Saddam still had the "means and intent" to produce weapons of mass destruction, recalling that the president had claimed prior to invading Iraq that such weapons existed.

Looking straight into the television cameras at his news conference, Kerry said, "Mr. President, the American people deserve more than spin about this war. They deserve facts that represent reality, not carefully polished arguments and points that are simply calculated to align with a preconceived perception."

Later, at a rally in Wisconsin, Bush blasted Kerry's criticism as a continuation of the Democrat's "pattern of overheated rhetoric."

"He now claims that I somehow misled America about weapons, when he himself cited the very intelligence about Saddam's weapons as the reason he voted to go to war," Bush said.

"Two years ago this Saturday, back when he was for the war," Bush told the crowd, "my opponent said on the floor of the United States Senate, and I quote, 'Saddam Hussein, sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, is a different matter. In the wake of September 11, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region?' "

Bush also quoted Kerry as telling the Senate that there was no certainty that "this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater — a nuclear weapon — then reinvade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambitions."

"Now today my opponent tries to say that I made up reasons to go to war," Bush said. "Just who is the one trying to mislead the American people?"

Kerry issued a statement saying the quotes had been taken out of context.

Article 3

Rocky Mountain News
Kerry Assails Bush on Iraq
By The Associated Press
October 7, 2004

ENGLEWOOD — Democratic Sen. John Kerry said today that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have failed to recognize a deteriorating situation in postwar Iraq and "may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth."

In his strongest statement yet, the Democratic presidential nominee suggested that if Bush fails to recognize the severity of problems in Iraq, then if Kerry takes office in January he will face a situation as chaotic as the Middle East in the early 1980s.

"If the president just does more of the same every day and it continues to deteriorate, I may be handed Lebanon, figuratively speaking," Kerry told reporters at a brief news conference.

In 1983, suicide attacks against the U.S. embassy in Lebanon killed 63 people, and the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut six months later killed 241 American servicemen. Dozens of Westerners were taken hostage during that period.

President Reagan ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from Lebanon just a few months after the Marine bombing.

Kerry made the comments as he wrapped up a low-key stop in Colorado to prepare for Friday night's debate against Bush, their second encounter in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

Kerry spoke the day after Charles Duelfer, the U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, reported that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated by the time of the U.S.-led invasion last year. Kerry said the report "provided definitive evidence as to why George Bush should not be re-elected president of the United States."

Faced with that evidence, Bush conceded today that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he had warned of before the invasion last year. But he maintained that Saddam retained the "means and the intent" to produce weapons of mass destruction and the United States was right to take action against him.

Kerry rejected the argument, saying that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction that the administration presented to Congress was why he and other lawmakers voted to give Bush the authority to go to war.

"My fellow Americans, you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact," Kerry said. "Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq."

Kerry then looked into the camera and posed his challenge directly to Bush.

"Mr. President, the American people deserve more than spin about this war," Kerry said. "They deserve facts that represent reality, not carefully polished arguments and points that are simply calculated to align with a preconceived perception."

Kerry said he still believed that Saddam was a threat, but dozens of other countries have the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction or are home to al-Qaeda operatives.

Kerry said the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was overblown and designed to "purposefully used to shift the focus from al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, to Iraq and Saddam Hussein."

Kerry has argued that the Iraq was a diversion from the overriding U.S. effort to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks and hunt down its mastermind bin Laden.

Article 4

Turkish Press
Kerry Blasts Bush For 'Pattern of Deception' on Iraq

ENGLEWOOD, Colorado, Oct 7 (AFP) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, stepping up his attacks on George W. Bush, accused him Thursday of serious errors and a "pattern of deception" on Iraq that has undermined the overall war on terror.

"The president of the United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq," Kerry told a news conference on the eve of his second debate with Bush.

The Massachusetts senator, running neck and neck with the Republican less than four weeks before the November 2 election, ran down a litany of criticisms of Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq that came out this week.

"The result is that President Bush's serious errors in judgment have left us more vulnerable and less safe as the terrorists continue to murder school children and target our brave soldiers," he said.

Kerry accused Bush of a "pattern of deception" on Iraq and other issues, and of ignoring criticism such as a new official report that said Saddam Hussein had years ago gotten rid of the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war.

He also picked up again on comments Monday by Paul Bremer, the former US civilian overseer in Iraq, that the administration had not deployed an adequate number of troops to keep order after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.

The Democrat said Bush "left our troops more vulnerable, left situation on the ground in chaos, and made the mission in Iraq much more difficult to accomplish. That is the truth."

Kerry again accused Bush of "not being straight with Americans," diverting attention from Al-Qaeda terrorists to Iraq, ducking responsibility and launching "dishonest" attacks on his White House rival's positions.

"For President Bush, it's always someone else's fault, denial, and blaming someone else," the senator said. "The truth is, the responsibility lies with the commander in chief."