Reply #16: No, this was from his second appearance this week [View All]

[indie_voter]

http://securingamerica.com/node/1047

O'Reilly: Murderers, if, if they're deemed guilty in a, in a military court of justice have to be punished. But to draw a wider implication, General, when 95%, and I think you'd agree with that figure, of American forces overseas under tremendous stress are performing heroically every day, to draw a wider implication at this juncture brutally unfair, both to our forces and to our country. What say you?

General Wesley Clark: I say that, first of all, you'll have to show me and prove to me that there were ever any American soldiers in Belgium and Normandy or in Iwo Jima who murdered civilians. Secondly, I think you're too low when you say 95% of the forces are performing effectively. I'd say 99.5% of the forces are performing effectively, maybe higher. But when you have incidents like this, and you have chains of command under enormous stress, that is an indicator that things aren't going right. You've got to be sensitive to those indicators. You've got to fix the problem, otherwise it's going to get worse.

Then he says this:

Bill O'Reilly: But I, in, in Mal-, in, in Malmedy, as you know, US forces captured SS forces who had their hands in the air, and they were unarmed, and they shot them down. You know that. That's on the record, been documented. In Iwo Jima, the same thing occurred. Japanese attempted to surrender, and they were burned in their caves.

General Wesley Clark: Bill, that's a lot different than this.

What is he responding to in the "that's a lot different than this"?

Bill threw in Malmedy, Iwo Jima and Japan all in the mix. What I thought Clark was trying to say is this involved civilians not POWS. He can't stop everything and lecture Bill on WW2. He has to keep his eye on the ball which was explaining the horror of today!


If he let Bill distract him then he would have lost the opportunity to discuss what is going wrong in Iraq and defending Murtha. He would have gotten in to a debate over WW2 and that wasn't his mission.