Bush fakes video conference with the troops and NBC gets video of the rehearsal. Ohhhh Busted!

A brief rehearsal ensued.
“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”
“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.
“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.
“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.
And so it went.
“If the question comes up about partnering — how often do we train with the Iraqi military — who does he go to?” Barber asked.
“That’s going to go to Captain Pratt,” one of the soldiers said.


Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a “carefully scripted publicity stunt.” Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.
“If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can’t do it in a nationally televised teleconference,” Rieckhoff said. “He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that’s not a bunch of captains.”

Okay now I am not naive, I know that there is lots of scripting that occurs whenever any president is before the cameras, but this administration has taken it to an all new level. I feel that there is never a time that the president is answering the concerns of Americans without having the benefit of seeing the questions ahead of time, or having cherry picked supporters to ask the questions, or has been loaded with talking points from which he never strays.

What I would like to know is how were these soldiers chosen? Were there any soldiers that were turned away because they might respond in an non-supportative manner? Were the soldiers in the video Q and A given the script ahead of time? I think that we deserve the answers to those questions.