Murtha takes the White House talking points and crams them right back down their throats!

MURTHA: I went there -- now this was July that Hamre made his report and it was a very prescient report. I mean, it was a very accurate report about the predictions of what was going to happen. And we have a copy of it here for you.

In August 16th, I went to Iraq, from August 16th to the 20th. When I came back, I said to Secretary Rumsfeld: We require immediate attention of body armor. They said they were prepared. They said they had what they needed.

Forty thousand troops didn't have body armor. They needed armored Humvees. They needed jammers and Kevlar blankets they asked for. This was all levels of people in Iraq at the time.
And then I wrote to the president on September 4th and I said, "I believe you have miscalculated the magnitude of the effort we are facing. We should energize, Iraqitize and internationalize this effort."

And we have copies of that letter in there.

Today they said we're making progress.

I can only measure progress by what I see and the things that I can actually measure, not by what they say are brigades and so forth and so on.

Now, water production: We put $2.1 billion into water production. They're short of water all over the country. And they have only spent $581 billion -- or $581 million.

Now, that's why Hamre's report was so important. You had to get this insurgency under control immediately. You had to win the hearts and minds of the people. That's the key in a guerrilla-type war.

This is electricity overview. This is the demand. The yellow line is the demand. The red line is the prewar level. And you can see that occasionally you got up to prewar level. That's the way I measure progress.

Now, there's one other area where I measure progress, and that's incidents. Incidents have increased fivefold in the period of time that -- well, a year ago. A year ago there were five times less than today.

And you know what? We're paying someone to go into the Army. When I was in, they paid $72 a day. I volunteered in the middle of the Korean War. They are now paying $150,000 for somebody that's in special forces, in one of the specialties, in order to get them to re- enlist.
They missed their goal. And one of the biggest reasons that I'm so concerned about this -- and I talk to the military all the time -- is the future of the military. They missed their goal in recruiting by 6,600 this last time.

But you have to look at that, because there's a retention, there's a stop-loss, plus the problem that we had with the people not in the right specialties. And they enlisted people in the higher levels who were probably going to enlist anyway that they wouldn't normally have re-enlisted.

They have lowered the standards. They're accepting 20 percent last year in category four. Now, this is a highly technical service we're dealing with, And yet they lowered the standards to category four, which they said when we had the volunteer army, that would eliminate all the category four.

Now, let me tell you the major problem we have. You heard the president talk today about terrorism. Every other word was "terrorism."

Let me separate terrorism from insurgency. When I was in Iraq in 1991, president -- or King Fahd said to me -- this was an early morning meeting, like two or three o'clock in the morning, when he normally met with people during the air war.

And he said: Get your troops out of Saudi Arabia the minute this war's over. You're on sacred ground. You're destabilizing the whole region. I reported that back to the State Department and, as you know, we didn't get our troops out of there. We left our troops there.

Do you smell that? That, my friends, is a breath of fresh air. That is what the truth smells like. I want much more of that aroma filling my nostrils. I am tired of the putrid smells that the Bush lies give off. Murtha is still out there on his own. But with our support we can get more of these truth tellers to come forward. What do you say?