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June 20, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - June 20

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Together America and Europe are laying the foundations for a future of peace and prosperity. And yet the terrorists are threatening this progress. So at our summit this week, we'll take new steps to cor -- to strengthen our cooperation on counterterrorism, to improve transportation security, and to crack down on terrorist financing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, that is the president, of course, before he left for where he is now, which is Vienna, Austria, for the E.U. Summit with the -- with the U.S. Some political observations -- analytical observations now on this issues from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the "Weekly Standard"; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call"; and Mara Liasson national political correspondent for National Public Radio. FOX News contributors all.

Well, you know, the story in the previous recent summit has been all the discord that they were either airing in the open or hiding under a paper trail of friendly resolutions. That seems not be so much to be the case this time.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, he might face certain number of protests in the street where European public opinion might be against the U.S. I think, he's going to Europe a time when the leadership the United States are remarkably on more or less the same page when it comes to Iran and other issues. Now, I don't know if they're getting anywhere, but they at least have decided that they are going to try a diplomatic approach. In the past they've diverged about how you deal with these kinds of problems and these states that are dangerous, and right now they're all on the same page. I think that's good. I don't know if it's going to get the results that they want.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": Now, I mean look, this summit is not a big deal, especially on the Iran front.

HUME: This is not a big deal because they agree or because they're not planning on doing anything?

(CROSSTALK)

KONDRACKE: No. Besides that the major leaders of Europe are not going to be there. This is a U.S.-E.U. Summit. This is the E.U. Commission plus the Austrians and stuff like that. Chirac's not going to be there, Tony Blair's not going to be there, Angela Merkel's not going to be there. The people who count are not going to be there, Steve Hadley the president's national security advisor, at a briefing, said one, they're not going to be there and two, the Iranians haven't budged so don't expect a lot. So, the president is going to use this, I'm sure, to put pressure on the Iranians and talk about it a lot, and I would guess that the Europeans will start haranguing us more about, you know, closing down Guantanamo and we're going to do what we're going to do on that score as quickly as we can do it after the Supreme Court decides. So, I mean, I think that the -- that beyond all that, what's important here is I think that there -- that under Condi Rice there's a kind of a new Bush foreign policy, which the "Wall Street Journal" calls neo-realism. You know, it's less sticking our finger in their eye, more negotiation, more cooperation. Now, I don't know that the European populations appreciates it, but I think the European governments do.

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": The -- Bush has an idealistic foreign policy, he's and idealist like Ronald Reagan, he's not a realist. And a part of his policy was not to poke his finger into people's eyes, Mort, that wasn't it...

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: I saw a policy document. It said point No. 1, poke finger in European eyes.

KONDRACKE: In the first term there was a lot of poking -- a lot of poking.

BARNES: Oh, come on.

KONDRACKE: (INAUDIBLE)

BARNES: The Europeans just didn't want to do anything about all those violations of U.N. resolutions committed by Saddam Hussein. They didn't want to do it. President Bush, Tony Blair, some other countries did want to do something about it. It's as simple as that. They disagreed. This will be a friendlier summit than President Bush has had. And the good thing is the do have -- the Europeans have a real vested interest in quashing the Iranian effort to have nuclear weapons. I mean, look, they're just being pests when they raise things like Guantanamo and things like that, because they don't have a vested interest in that. I mean, they don't want those terrorists released and coming to their country, that's for sure. So, I mean, they'll raise it just to be -- just because they're Europeans poking their finger in President Bush's eye, but it doesn't mean much. If the president can use this, as Mara was saying, to really bolster the Europeans and the world to do something about Iran and its potential nuclear weapons, then this will be worthwhile.

LIASSON: And you know something else that's strange, is not just that the United States had decided the European approach was better. It's that on a practical level there's only so many wars you can fight at one time. The U.S. has never considered going to war with Iraq to stop it from getting a nuclear weapon, this is what makes sense practically and it just so happens to be what the Europeans also want to do.

KONDRACKE: One interesting thing, you know, there's a Pew poll of the world about every year, and the temperature of respect of the United States and all that has not risen a lot. But what's really interesting is that fear of Iran, a nuclear-armed Iran has tripled in the western European countries. So, I think Bush is getting someplace with this. I mean.

HUME: In terms of getting the Europeans in.

LIASSON: Not anywhere with Iran.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: But is there any evidence that any of this is really effective or is this just.

KONDRACKE: If the public fears Iran, that will help the leaders there be able to sell sanctions or engage in sanctions that the public will support. I mean, I think that's important.

BARNES: There really is a double standard with the Europeans, particularly Germans. Remember the great German anti-nuclear movement involving millions, they poured people out in the streets. They had one in England, too. I forget what they called it in England. And, but it was all aimed at the U.S. and nuclear weapons we had. Now the Iranians are building a nuclear weapon, their country is led by a madman. Where are the anti-nuclear movements now? They don't seem to exist. That's Europeans for you.

KONDRACKE: Don't forget that in 1984, though, that in spite of the demonstrations, the Germans elected a government that was going to stand with us against the Russians and that was the end of the nuclear freeze.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, is the case about the killings of those Iraqi civilians in Haditha holding together or not? We'll get into that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUME: So this is what the "L.A. Times" reports about the investigation into whether there was a cover-up in the case of Haditha in Iraq. "Nothing in the report," according to the "Times," "points to a knowing cover-up by the facts by the officers supervising the Marines involved in the November incident, the officials said. Rather, he said, officers from the company level to the staff of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Baghdad had failed to demand a thorough explanation of what had happened in Haditha."

No knowing cover-up found. This was by General Bargewell who is detailed to do that inquiry. Now, that's not the time word and he is a military man, but it does go directly to one of the issues in this case, A, were there atrocities by American forces that led to the deaths of about two dozen Iraqis civilians in the town of Haditha and was there a military cover-up? Well, the military investigation so far says no, but what about this whole case? Because in the beginning it seemed like a slam dunk, something terrible had happened, U.S. forces implicated. How does it seem now -- Mara.

LIASSON: Well, it seems there are two sides of the story. I mean, the reports that we read were that civilians were killed intentionally. Then you started hearing from some of the men who were accused of this, though their defense attorneys, saying that just wasn't the case, that the rules of engagement were not violated. That civilians were killed and a tragic, um, incident, but it wasn't done on purpose. Now you have this investigation and at least they determined that there was no cover-up.

HUME: Knowing cover-up.

LIASSON: Knowing cover-up. Now they have to decide whether there was any intentional killing of civilians. But, it means that this thing is being investigated and eventually, hopefully, we'll come up with something close to the truth.

KONDRACKE: You know, what's distressing is there's so much so much leaking in advance. The -- now granted there was film that some -- in "Time" magazine got information from Iraqis that a massacre had been committed and then the investigation started. And, but then the Pentagon started leaking or somebody started leaking and even people were making public statements, high-ranking generals and stuff like that, strongly indicating without saying so, that something terrible had happened.

HUME: Well, something terrible did happen, but you had people like Jack Murtha saying that the Marines killed these -- the Marines under due pressure, because of the policy there, had done this in cold blood and that there was certainly a cover-up. One wonders how he, "knew that."

KONDRACKE: Right, it depends on which accounts you read. I mean, the "New York Times" had a fairly detailed account of all this indicating from and quoting Pentagon sources and investigators and so on, indicating that the Marines did shoot people in what sounds like cold blood. Then you have the "Washington Post" account that comes from the Marines and from their lawyers indicating that they were pursuing rather aggressive rules of engagement whereby they were spraying rooms with gunfire after they thought that they were under attack.

HUME: They'd take fire, or believed they'd taken fire.

KONDRACKE: Right, and they threw fragmentation grenades and stuff like that and killed civilians.

BARNES: There is every reason to believe they did take fire. This is a terrorist town, this is one where Zarqawi had been. This is one where the Marines where in with the Ohio Marine Reserve Unit, last summer many of them were killed there. There's a lot of blood spilled there. So, you have this IED go off and it killed one of the Marines in the convoy of four humvees and then they see these -- a car and the "New York Times" story said it was the five young men in the car, the killing of them which is probably the worst thing that happened.

Now, the Marines say, look, they yelled in Arabic to these guys to not run away, to stop. They knew -- they obviously heard them. But when they got out of the car and didn't, they shot them on the assumption they were terrorists and maybe they were. Then half an hour later, and this differs from the accounts of some of those people there, who I think, the Iraqis, Sunni Arab Iraqis in a terrorist town, are not the most credible people in the world and we already know this guy who's taken these pictures, or the films of it, made charges of a massacre has presented false credentials as to who he is. Remember, he said he was a member of the.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: He was associated with the Hammurabi Human Rights Watch, which turns out to be him and one other guy. And they are associated with the world group, Human Rights Watch, which is no friend of the United States, anyway, but it turns out Human Rights Watch disavows these people.

BARNES: So, there's very reason to just be skeptical of what they're saying. Then they went into two houses and followed the procedure that they follow when you're going into a room and you think terrorists are there. You roll in a grenade first and then you go in and spray it. The stories that I think are probably the most unverifiable, at least, are the ones that said they executed people. The Marines say there were no other people in the room. Unfortunately, they killed them all. There were no witnesses in either house to what went on and they claim they were following rules of engagement and being aggressive in taking care of themselves as their commanders had asked them to -- and told them to.

KONDRACKE: Well, some of the accounts here say that the people were killed with a clean shot. It was not spray.

BARNES: How would they know that? (INAUDIBLE) The bodies have not been exhumed.

KONDRACKE: Look, listen, I'm repeating it third hand here from a newspaper. So the.

HUME: Oh, good.

KONDRACKE: Well, what else do we got to rely on? But, General Bargewell is an esteemed guy. The chief investigator, I'll wait for his report.

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