Yesterday, I listened to KERA in Dallas air excerpts from a round table discussion of Bob Schieffer, Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, Tom Friedman and Bob Woodward. I can't find a transcript and
here is the only coverage I could find. The gentleman discussed the WMD's in Iraq. They made it clear that they felt they didn't have the technical savvy to challenge the Administration's "facts", saying something like:
I can remember having Condi Rice on [some Sunday talk show] and her saying "What about the missing 89,000 pounds of [some nasty sounding biological agent]. Just one pound of that stuff sounds scary
Then they made it clear that all resistance to the administration's WMD story collapsed after Powell's UN Presentation:
It wasn't the message, it was the messanger. Powell was the one who was skeptical about the WMD's and when he made his presentation to the UN, we all accepted it as true
Listening to them, it was clear that they respected and trusted Powell. Lately when I hear bad news out of Iraq, I am pissed at Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld. But this reminded me that Powell deserves to be in that list because he is the one who closed the sale with the media elite.