Defense Department Town Hall Meeting (Transcript) check out the spin!

[The Straight Story]

Historian/author David McCullough recently reflected on what might have become of our country had the country faced the media realities that Dick Myers was talking about back in 1776. And he -- he noted the setbacks that the Continental Army faced, and he said, "If the American Revolutionary War had been covered by the media and the country had seen how horrible conditions were and what a very serious soup we were in, I think that would have been it." But it is a different world we're living in, and it's important that we understand it and that we adapt to it. But Americans succeeded back then because they marshalled the will and the resolve to see that difficult effort through -- and it was difficult. And the skeptics who were certain it wouldn't work were proven wrong.

Full, long, transcript here:

http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/2005/tr20050629-secdef3201.html

[The Straight Story]

1. Another snippet:

Q Mr. Secretary, my name is Master Sergeant Shaeffer (sp). I work in the Army Operations Center, down on the CAT floor. One of the things we do every day is track all the incidents that happen in the theater of war and clean the names of all of our casualties and, you know, track their funerals and handle them with the utmost and deep respect.



One of the things that we always find very discouraging down there is that the press likes to report all the numbers of our casualties, whether they're combat or heart attacks or the rare occasional suicide, or vehicle accidents or whatever, in their total numbers. And now they're even starting to include Iraqi casualties in their numbers also.



How do we (combat ?) that kind of a press and really get out the story that when an Iraqi police department gets blown up with an IED and kills 50 new recruits, that the very next day there's 150 new recruits in line to replace them?

[lapfog_1]

2. One of the big reasons why there are lots of Iraqi new recruits

is that they have NO JOBS. All of the war reconstruction jobs went to
Contractors that hire outside labor (like poor bastards from the US
that have NO JOBS). So the Iraqis are out of work and destitute...
and if the police are hiring, they will get "volunteers", even if there
is a good chance of getting killed. I wonder why he didn't add that
little factoid to his remarks?