Editor’s note: Each week, WorldNetDaily White House correspondent Les Kinsolving asks the tough questions no one else will ask. And each week, WorldNetDaily brings you the transcripts of those dialogues with the president and his spokesman. If you’d like to suggest a question for the White House, submit it to WorldNetDaily’s exclusive interactive forum MR. PRESIDENT!
At today’s White House news briefing, WND asked presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer about plans to give the Palestinian Authority U.S. taxpayer assistance.
WND: Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, said yesterday, “It is appalling that a president who has vowed to put an end to terrorist regimes around the world now plans to give U.S. taxpayers’ dollars directly to a corrupt terrorist regime, the Palestinian Authority, despite more than a billion dollars to the PA from 1994 to 2002, during which time Palestinian terrorists continued murdering Israeli and American civilians.” And my question is, why does the president want to increase PA funding when they have, for the past two months, done absolutely nothing – nothing – to stop terrorists?
FLEISCHER: Lester, this is something we discussed at length yesterday, and nothing has changed from the answer yesterday.
WND: Well, this is a new thing. He’s asked why this huge increase –
FLEISCHER: For the exact reason I gave yesterday – that the circumstances of who we are dealing with the in Palestinian Authority have changed from night to day. And that was evidenced in the warmth that you saw in the news conference between Prime Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Abbas yesterday. The Israelis are working directly with the Palestinian Authority for the right reasons. And under Prime Minister Abbas’ leadership, there is a new moment of hope, and the United States is going to work very hard with the president, in his conversations with Arab leaders around the region. He called today to President Mubarak and King Abdullah, as you know, to make this even more of a moment of hope.
WND: On March the 24th, 1998, the BBC reported that near Kampala, when President Clinton said the U.S. was wrong to benefit from slavery, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni replied, “If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs for capturing their own people and selling them. We still have these traitors today.” And my question: Does President Bush have enough respect for President Museveni that he will speak about those traitors today who hold tens of thousands of black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania, or will he, like the Clintons, avoid saying anything about this horror?
FLEISCHER: Lester, when the president arrives, he will be giving a speech at Goree Island, where many slaves were sold and shipped off. And his speech will speak for itself. I’m not going to preview every aspect of it, but I think it’s a speech that’s worth paying attention to.
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