Republican strategist Karl Rove and NBC’s "Meet the Press" guest host Tom Brokaw got into a tussle on that program Sunday over whether the Bush administration had planned to use oil money to partly fund the Iraq war. Rove also overstated opposition to Democratic health care legislation.
We’ll start with the health care claim. Rove, a former top adviser to President George W. Bush, said:
Rove, March 14: If you step back for a minute, it’s a pretty remarkable year that we’ve had,
Q: Was it recently revealed that the U.S. found uranium in Iraq after the invasion in 2003?
A: No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false.
Q: Is the U.S. government paying factions in Iraq not to fight us?
A: We are paying Iraqis, some of whom were formerly hostile insurgents, to police areas and fight terrorists.
Summary
Vets for Freedom, a group made up of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched a new ad this week that falsely attributes a quote to the Washington Post. The ad gives the impression that the Post was a critic of the surge in Iraq and is now admitting it was wrong. But the words the group uses are the views of the head of the CIA,
Former Sen. Fred Thompson got the facts straight for his GOP debate debut Oct. 9. But former Mayor Rudy Giuliani added to a lengthening string of exaggerations and misstatements:
A liberal coalition calling itself Americans Against Escalation in Iraq is running a TV ad that says the U.S. will be in Iraq for a decade to come and that the military draft will be reinstated. But the ad supports those conclusions by twisting the words of two senior generals.
The Democratic presidential hopefuls faced CNN host Anderson Cooper and a handful of citizens who submitted questions in video format. We found a few misstatements.
We caught a few candidates off base at the third debate among Democratic contenders for the 2008 presidential nomination.
An ABC News survey of public opinion in Iraq found much pessimism as the fourth anniversary of the war approached. A British poll’s summary sounded less gloomy, but was actually similar.
While President Bush was right on the facts he cited in his Iraq speech, there were some notable omissions.