Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
WASHINGTON - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.
As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit — the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," Barber said.
A brief rehearsal ensued.
"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"
full at:
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051013/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_iraq>
The fact that this and other accounts of the event (there were similarly blunt stories in the NY Times, NPR, etc) are comparatively veil-free is somewhat interesting but not the most interesting element to be sure -- careful White House event scripting has been an open secret since not long after Bush took office and Rove set his bullshit emitter to its most powerful setting.
What we appear to be witnessing is the piece by piece dismantling of Bush's aura machine. You can't help but wonder what meetings took place at elite levels -- and the mood informing those meetings -- to permit an un-spun tale of the White House's mechanisms to be sent out into the world from multiple sources.
.d.