Dear US State Department,
Here’s a suggestion for shutting Karen Hughes up:
Please bring her back to the US before she says any more offensive and stupid things.
U.S. envoy Karen Hughes on Friday defended Washington’s decision to go to war against Iraq in front of a skeptical audience, saying Saddam Hussein had gassed to death “hundreds of thousands” of his own people. A State Department official later said she misspoke about the number.The title of this post has been blatantly ripped off from Princess Sparkle Pony.Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, made the comment before a group of Indonesian students who repeatedly attacked her about Washington’s original rationale for the war, Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were ever discovered.
“The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat,” Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.
“After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. “He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.”
Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam’s decades-long rule — only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.
Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. Gordon Johndroe, a State Department official traveling with Hughes, later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.