Amazing….
Does Bush actually (albeit inadvertently) tell the truth?

The following is a transcript of remarks by President Bush in a conversation on ’strengthening’ Social Security: Athena Performing Arts Center At Greece Athena Middle and High School Greece, New York , May 24, 2005 (PR Newswire)

“Now, a personal savings account would be a part of a Social Security retirement system. It would be a part of what you would have to retire when you reach retirement age. As you — as I mentioned to you earlier, we’re going to redesign the current system. If you’ve retired, you don’t have anything to worry about — third time I’ve said that. (Laughter.)
I’ll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
(Applause.)
- George W. Bush (May 24, 2005)

Read The Full Press Conference Here

It was Nazi filmmaker Fritz Hippler (one of Josef Goebbels’ most effective propagandists) who said that in order to make propaganda work you need to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand,” and to repeat the oversimplification over and over. If these two steps are followed, people would always come to believe the Big Lie.

And here is some more perspective from a true master of propaganda, not an amateur wannabe like our current president….
http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch06.html

“so this is how democracy ends…
… to thunderous applause.”
- Padme Amidala; “Revenge of the Sith”

Do you think Lincoln would have been pleased to have this PR(ropaganda) firm use his name for their marketing purposes?

The Lincoln Group has a K Street address and an executive in charge of “insight and influence.” It was not a household name in the Washington influence industry, however, when a controversy started after recent reports that the firm, while working under a U.S. military contract, had paid Iraqi journalists to place pro-democracy stories in the media there.

That’s because Lincoln was formed just two years ago, when two thirty-somethings, Christian Bailey, an Oxford University graduate from England, and Paige Craig, a former Marine who once attended West Point, decided that post-invasion Iraq would be a great business opportunity. And it wasn’t until last year that Lincoln won its first federal contract.

The founders’ initial plan in late 2003, to help commercial clients do business in the new Iraq and publish a business magazine there, stalled when the insurgency escalated in the spring of 2004, company officials said in recent interviews. But they said the same deterioration in security made the U.S. military realize that it needed to do more to reach out to the local communities.

Read the full article

You May Be Brainwashed By Corporate Media If You…
By Todd Smyth; Independent Media TV
http://www.independent-media.tv

… believe the 5 corporations who own almost all of the media in the U.S. are liberal.

… believe $300 billion of U.S. tax money, allocated for the war and reconstruction in Iraq is actually going to Iraq.

… are unaware Iraq had 650 million barrels of oil in reserve just before the war in Iraq.

… are unaware at least $8.8 billion is known to be missing in Iraqi oil revenue from the period the U.S. was in control of Iraq.

… are unaware 198 million in Iraqi dollars is missing from the Iraq treasury from the period the U.S. was in control of Iraq.

… are unaware that war is exceptionally profitable for a small number of investors.

… believe Halliburton’s no-bid contracts have nothing to do with former CEO, now Vice President Dick Cheney.

… are unaware that the Iraq war is the biggest case of war profiteering in human history.

… believe Saddam Hussein or Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

… are unaware the U.S. has killed more than 10,000 innocent women and children in Iraq with cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions.

… believe depleted uranium weapons are not radioactive or deadly weapons of mass destruction (they are 12% less radioactive than nuclear weapons grade uranium and very deadly).

… believe wealthy, warmongers can also be true Christians.

… are unaware stem cell research threatens the pharmaceutical industry by curing and preventing diseases which drug companies profit from by treating with drugs.

… are unaware the pharmaceutical industry is based entirely on treatment and is threatened by cures and prevention.

… are unaware the Food and Drug Administration does NO testing of food or drugs. They only set guidelines and review the testing corporations do of their own products.

… are unaware the Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act has been ‘re- estimated’ to cost U.S. taxpayers $1.3 Trillion (not the original $243 billion or the ‘adjusted’ $400 billion), and only pharmaceutical corporations and HMOs benefit from the increase.

… are unaware the Boston Tea party was a protest against corporate corruption (East India Company).

… are unaware our founding fathers intentionally made sure that corporations had no power over people or our government.

… are unaware corporations have fought aggressively and systematically over the past 200 years to increase their power and influence over our government.

… are unaware U.S. corporations are now protected under the 14th amendment as a legal ‘person.’

… are unaware the definition of fascism is: ‘The marriage of corporation and state’ — Benito Mussolini.

… are unaware well known U.S. corporate interests attempted a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

… are unaware most corrupt and wasteful government projects are run primarily by corporate contractors.

… are unaware ‘less government’ means paying corporate contractors three times what we pay government workers to do the same work.

… are unaware American corporations behave very differently in other countries.

… are unaware Enron and others were NOT investigated until they collapsed under the weight of their own greed.

… are unaware Bush’s massive tax cuts were invested overseas to build sweat shops, factories and other facilities, where our jobs have been outsourced.

… are unaware outsourcing American jobs weakens labor unions and keeps wages low and corporate profits high .

… are unaware weak enforcement of immigration laws lowers wages in the U.S. and increases corporate profits.

… are unaware ‘Free Trade’ means ‘Slave Wages’ to poor people in Honduras, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Burma, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nepal, El Salvador, Guatemala, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and others.

… believe America is hated all over the world because of our freedom.

… believe the massive U.S. national debt (now $7,786,000,000,000) created by Republican presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush does not seriously threaten the future of our children and grandchildren.

… are unaware massive national debt ensures the expansion of poverty, which keeps wages low, which increases corporate profits.

… are unaware widespread poverty keeps wages low and corporate profits high.

… are unaware weak gun control laws perpetuate violence in poor neighborhoods which expands poverty, reduces wages and increases corporate profits.

… are unaware abortions go down only when we reduce poverty, expand healthcare and improve education.

… are unaware that making abortion illegal expands poverty which reduces wages and increases corporate profits.

… believe the Michael Jackson trial deserved more news coverage than the genocide of 400,000 people in Darfur , Sudan.

… believe Social Security is the biggest priority in America.

… are unaware privatizing Social Security would be a massive give away to experienced Wall Street investors that would also destabilize Social Security.

… are unaware that NOT funding ‘No Child Left Behind’ is dismantling funding for schools in poor neighborhoods, which expands poverty, lowers wages and increases corporate profits.

… are unaware the Healthy Forests Initiative has led to massive clear cutting of prime lumber and almost none of the forest fire prevention that it was sold on.

… are unaware the Clear Skies Initiative has increased pollution.

… are unaware Tort Reform will absolve corporations of massive negligent liabilities for things like asbestos exposure, pollution, mercury poisoning, hazardous waste, mad cow disease and all sorts of dangerous products and practices.

… are unaware mercury pollution (mostly from coal fired power plants and medical vaccines) has caused an epidemic of Autism, ADD and ADHD in the U.S.

… are unaware the Bush administration is dismantling three decades of US environmental protection.

… believe global warming is a rumor or conspiracy.

… are unaware ‘Global Warming’ is causing colder weather because the melting ice caps are cooling the gulf stream.

… believe the UN scandals could have taken place without the largest, most influential member and host nation being involved.

… believe making a war monger ambassador to the UN will help prevent more wars.

… are unaware that expanding equal rights to any segment of the population (including gay people) also expands economic opportunity and puts pressure on wages, which would reduce corporate profits.

If you believe Fox News is fair and balanced, you have been brainwashed by corporate owned media.

David Isenberg of the Asia Times on the massive Pentagon-led ‘information management’ campaign being waged in Iraq by the PR(opaganda) firm The Lincoln Group.

The news of a US military operation that pays Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by “information operations” troops about how wonderfully things are going in the war should not come as a shock.

Even before the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon planned to create its own in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. The program was supposedly killed after critics pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the domestic media.

Nevertheless, the occupation of Iraq has put the Pentagon in the “strategic influence” business in a big way, with its own TV news operation (the Pentagon Channel), a then-coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, but still powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a US vendor) and millions of dollars to hire public relations firms and consultants to spin the coalition’s propaganda to the Iraqi people.

In fact, paying off the Iraqi media to run good news mirrors what the Bush administration has been doing at home.

For example, in the past year it was revealed that the Bush administration paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars to a prominent conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote a new education law that had been strongly supported by President George W Bush. The Education Department paid a public relations firm for a video that promoted the law and appeared as a news story, without making clear the reporter was hired as part of the deal.

Similarly, some-time reporter and $200-an-hour gay escort, James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, violated a ban on “fake” news stories by reprinting White House news releases verbatim.

The gist of the latest story is that beginning this year as part of an information offensive in Iraq, the US military began secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the US mission in Iraq.

Read the rest of the article on this campaign to gain market share in the hearts and minds department here

You’re tax dollars at work. Not only are the Bush administration policies some of the most horrendously bad in American history, but you get to have your money take to be put towards PR(opaganda) campaigns to advertise to you about how wonderful they are.

The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday.

Read The Article

Stealth sponsorship of talking heads and op-ed columnists is surprisingly common, says Business Week.

In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling “payday loans.” Readers weren’t told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans.

In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper opinion pieces who received undisclosed payments from business interests they wrote about. Both lost their nationally syndicated columns as a result. Fumento acknowledged just last week that in 1999 he benefited from payments totaling $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. (), a subject of praise in Fumento’s opinion columns and a book. Scripps Howard News Service canceled his column. Bandow resigned last month from Copley News Service after he admitted writing as many as two dozen op-eds for which he was paid $1,000 to $2,000 each by embattled Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Read The Full Article Here

David Sirota elaborates on this phenomenon with this article on The Huffington Post

So, for instance, if you read the newspapers or listen to a congressional hearing, you might think that organizations like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute are just naturally occurring organizations sprouting up from the a supposed overall extreme conservative economic slant of the American public. These institutions - which D.C. is teeming with - are cited as official-esque sources, described only in ideological terms as “conservative.” They are almost never labeled according to which industries fund them, just as the politicians who spew corporate PR are almost never identified in the media as having taken huge sums of cash from the industry being shilled for. It is as if naming the funders would be to offer the public too much truth about who owns their political debate - a major Establishment taboo.

Read The Full Article Here

Highly recommended expose by writer Dave Zirin, author of “What’s My Name, Fool?” about the history of politics in sport.

“I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter.

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original–virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary.

So why does Mary Tillman hate America?

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling “a side of Pat Tillman not widely known–a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books…to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.” Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town…. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman’s transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn’t play their game. To the Pentagon’s chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

Tillman was a *real* American hero because he was about serving an America that was real, not some deluded bull***t neo-con fantasy version of one. One in which founding American principles and constitutional law were the what we strived for, and not for theocracy and empire where might makes right.

The full article can be read here…
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin

The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
November 6th, 2005

    It would be a compelling story,” Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, “if only it were true.”

    ”Compelling” is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of “murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow” called “The Apprentice.” If you read the indictment, you’ll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury - with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues’ testimony - is compelling even without the sex and the snow.

    The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam’s mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler’s huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn’t resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.

    If there’s a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn’t see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

    It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman’s death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had “probably” died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army’s initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. “The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath,” Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. “They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.”

    This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman’s divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son’s death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) “The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman’s father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son’s uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels.”

    His accusations are far from wild. The Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top American officer in Iraq, and others in his command had learned by April 29, 2004, that friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That was the day before the Army released its fictitious press release of Tillman’s hillside firefight and four days before a nationally televised memorial service back home enshrined the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman’s parents, his widow, his brother (who served in the same platoon) and politicians like John McCain (who spoke at Tillman’s memorial) were not told the truth for another month.

    Why? It’s here where we find a repeat of the same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal - this administration will always push back with change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson, smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to expose its prewar hype of Saddam’s supposed nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been out to delay or rewrite a story that could be trouble when public opinion on the war itself was just starting to plummet.

    It was an election year besides. Tillman’s death came after a month of solid bad news for America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign alike: the publication of Richard Clarke’s book about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the remains of American contractors in Falluja, the eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just after Tillman’s death, “60 Minutes II” first broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read the names of the war’s fallen on “Nightline,” and the Pentagon’s No. 2, the Iraqi war architect Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the number of American casualties to date (722) in an embarrassing televised appearance before Congress.

    Against this backdrop, it would not do to have it known that the most famous volunteer of the war might have been a victim of gross negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself was so idealistic that he refused publicity of any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by the war’s cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and was needed to continue in that role after his death. (Even though he was adamantly against the Iraq war, according to friends and relatives interviewed by The Chronicle.)

    ”They blew up their poster boy,” Patrick Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that “all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script” the fake narrative (or, as he puts it, “outright lies”) that followed. Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo role in this screenplay: she told The Post that he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly before Election Day. (She said no.)

    In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Mary Tillman added: “They could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was a fratricide but they didn’t. They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that.”

    Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has often failed to give the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in manpower and planning at the invasion’s outset to effective armor for battle to adequately financed health care for those who make it home. But when it comes to using troops in the duplicitous manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky’s the limit.

    Pat Tillman’s case is itself a replay of the fake “Rambo” escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi Freedom showed the first tentative signs of trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms. Lynch told Time magazine this year, “I was used as a symbol.” But the troops aren’t just used as symbols for the commander in chief’s political purposes. They are also drafted to serve as photo-op props and extras, whether in an extravaganza like “Mission Accomplished” or a throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent teleconference in which the president held a “conversation” with soldiers who sounded as spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.’s in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

    As Mr. Bush’s approval rating crashes into the 30’s, he and the vice president are so desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the day of the Libby indictment, they took separate day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course platitudes before military audiences. If this was a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense will save him from jail, but too many other Americans are now refreshing their memories of what went down in the plotting and execution of the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths and buried secrets that even the most compelling administration scenarios can no longer disguise.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Treating policy as product to be marketed to the electorate is no great stretch for a president who fashions himself the CEO of White House Inc. But in its zeal to promote sales of the Bush brand, this administration has crossed the line that separates honest brokers from snake oil salesmen.

Bush and company sold Americans defective goods in clear violation of federal law. Yet Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hasn’t budged. Instead, the man charged with enforcing our laws has tasked his army of lawyers to throw a legal shield around the White House, telling the administration to ignore investigations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which repeatedly has blasted Team Bush for using taxpayer money to fund “covert propaganda.”

In its latest report, issued on Sept. 30, the GAO’s federal auditors scolded the White House for squandering American tax dollars to hire fake news reporters and unleash a pre-packaged new blitz in advance of the 2004 elections. The GAO found the White House violated the law by hiring pundit Armstrong Williams to shower praise on Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, while interviewing administration officials on the air.

The GAO also uncovered a previously undisclosed case in which the Education Department commissioned an article carried by several newspapers that extolled the administration’s role in promoting science education. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article.

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic dissemination of government-authored propaganda or “official news” deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy. The law singles out materials that serve “a solely partisan purpose.” The GAO has now found on at least four separate occasions that administration agencies violated this and other federal restrictions when they disseminated news written by the government or its contractors without disclosing the conflict of interest.

Read the full article here…
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051011/a_snake_oil_president.php

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
The Associated Press
October 14th, 2005

Washingotn - 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.
“This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”

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?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.

And so it went.

“If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?” Barber asked.

“That’s going to go to Captain Pratt,” one of the soldiers said.

“And then if we’re going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they’re handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?” she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

“So long as I’m the president, we’re never going to back down, we’re never going to give in, we’ll never accept anything less than total victory,” Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

“You’ve got tremendous support here at home,” Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday’s event was coordinated with the Defense Department but that the troops were expressing their own thoughts. With satellite feeds, coordination often is needed to overcome technological challenges, such as delays, he said.

“I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect,” he said, adding that the president wanted to talk with troops on the ground who have firsthand knowledge about the situation.

The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.

The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.

“Thank you very much for everything,” he gushed. “I like you.”

On preparations for the vote, 1st Lt. Gregg Murphy of Tennessee said: “Sir, we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make this thing a success. … Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We’re really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they’re doing everything.”

On the training of Iraqi security forces, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo from Scotia, N.Y., said to Bush: “I can tell you over the past 10 months, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. … Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.”

Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Bush said, and then joked: “I probably look familiar to you, too.”

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a “carefully scripted publicity stunt.” Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

“If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can’t do it in a nationally televised teleconference,” Rieckhoff said. “He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that’s not a bunch of captains.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)