Letterman v. O'Reilly II: [VIDEO]

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 9:33 AM on November 1, 2006.

Thanks to reader Ken Pruett for notifying me that in my original post of the smackdown between Dave Letterman and Bill O'Reilly, I left out a major portion of the interview (transcript via A la Gauche).

In the clip to the right, Letterman smells O'Reilly's BS, telling him: "You're putting words in my mouth. Just the way you put artificial facts in your head."

And, in fact, O'Reilly's claim, in bold below, is unsupported by anyone who isn't a Bush apologist, including the CIA, the FBI, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the National Security Council.

***

Letterman: But why didn't we stay in Afghanistan? Why didn't we stay in Afghanistan. It seems to me that Afghanistan was more directly the source. I mean there has been no tie proven between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the Taliban, anything. Why didn't we stay there?

O'Reilly: You know what Ansar-al-Islam, do you know what that is? You don't. And I'm not saying this in a condescending way, I'm really not. Okay? I'm not going to call you a bonehead or a pinhead?

[laughter]

O'Reilly: Ansar-al-Islam was the al Qaeda affiliate in Northern Iraq who tried to poison the British water supply with Ricin. They operated with Saddam Hussein's okay. Again, complicated, but it isn't so black and white, Dave. It isn't, "We're a bad country, Bush is an evil liar."

O'Reilly: That's not true.

Letterman: I didn't say we were a bad country,

Letterman: I didn't say he was an evil liar. You're putting words in my mouth. Just the way you put artificial facts in your head.

Tagged as: iraq, o'reilly, saddam, al qaeda, letterman

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.