Jack Kingston: “It does seem that in Washington, D.C. you go from maybe major to lieutenant colonel to colonel to general to journalist.…”

“It does seem that in Washington, D.C. you go from maybe major to lieutenant colonel to colonel to general to journalist. And it seems that after you have turned in your uniform, you get more information and you are briefed in more top secret stuff than when you were active. Because it is amazing, the ex-generals who now can tell people what the plan is; where I would kind of think that if you do have a plan, which obviously you may need to deviate from, but you sure do not share it with everybody and his brother, as much as these embedded journalists like to think that they are in the Army. The reality is there are certain things they do not need to know. I wanted to say a little bit, one thing about this open society we have, this open war where the camera is right next to the rifle, it has got some good and it has some bad. But one thing that is seen over and over again is the United States' efforts to minimize collateral damage. And here you have Saddam Hussein who hides behind school children, who hides behind mosques, who takes his palaces into the civilian areas so that he can cower behind them. And even with that we minimize collateral damage. But you know, it is really bad when you have groups like the U.N. who have a role to play on the treatment of our prisoners of war, and all Kofi Annan has done today is say he is worried about the collateral damage because a missile hit a marketplace in Baghdad. We do not even know if it was an American missile or not.”