FOX News Channel "Fox News Live"-Transcript
Interview
FOX News Channel "Fox News Live"-Transcript
MR. SCOTT: Global adversaries speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on the same day; the Iranian president coming off a rocky weekend in New York City, set to take the U.N. podium in just a couple of hours. President Bush spoke this morning, telling the diplomats the U.N. was created to help people like those in Iraq stand up to terrorists.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: (From videotape.) Every civilized nation has a responsibility to stand with him. Every civilized nation also has the responsibility to stand up for the people suffering under dictatorship. In Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the universal declaration.
MR. SCOTT: Let's talk about it with Texas Senator John Cornyn, a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Senator, there's been some suggestion that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has somehow eclipsed President Bush today with all of his wacky pronouncements of yesterday.
Do you agree?
SEN. CORNYN: Well, I think he's certainly demonstrated why he is an unstable force and unfortunately leading a country that aspires to have nuclear weapons and someone who subscribes to a radical ideology that justifies the killing of innocent civilians in order to pursue its goals.
So I think what we've seen is not a person who is crazy in the sort of traditional sense, but someone who is subject to delusions and fantasies, which justify their own actions, which are dangerous to the rest of us.
MR. SCOTT: I guess one of the questions though is how does his act play back at home in Iran? I mean, you know, the controlled media there are going to present only the best parts of what he had to say, the best for his own purposes.
SEN. CORNYN: Well, that's right. No one pretends that Iran has a free media. My hope is that the rest of the world can somehow get back to the Iranian people what an embarrassment the Iranian president has been here, how his statements defy reality back home.
He seems to just be completely deluded or intentionally misleading the civilized world about what conditions are like back in Iran, which partake more of sort of a Stalin era in terms of a police state.
MR. SCOTT: We know now, I mean, the U.S. military came out just today with more proof that Iranian weapons are winding up in Iraq and are killing and wounding U.S. soldiers.
Senator, why aren't we doing more about that?
SEN. CORNYN: Well, we are doing a lot; it's just not enough, unfortunately. Iran is doing -
MR. SCOTT: Are we doing things that we don't hear about that the public doesn't hear about?
SEN. CORNYN: Well, you know, within Iraq, we certainly are. We've been rounding up Iranian agents in Iraq who are training Iraqis, both in Iraq and Iran itself. The Qods Force, which is a specialized force, part of the Iranian guard that is training insurgents now to kill Americans and others.
So, I mean, we should be under no illusions that this person is somehow a harmless clown. He's a dangerous enemy of the United States and the civilized world.
MR. SCOTT: And then the irony, you know, he says that he has no homosexuals in his country, maybe because most of them get killed if they're publicly identified, but he winds up getting a platform to speak at Columbia University, the school that won't let ROTC recruit there because they don't like the Army's, "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
What do you think of that irony?
SEN. CORNYN: Well, I think Columbia is guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. It's one thing if they say they're interested in hearing all sorts of voices and messages and they will allow everybody to come on campus in the spirit of academic freedom, but to say that they're going to listen to the rantings of this very dangerous president - a state-sponsor of international terrorism and yet deny Army recruiters to come on campus, to me, is the worst kind of hypocrisy.
MR. SCOTT: Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. Thank you.
SEN. CORNYN: Thanks, Jon.
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