Krauthammer: Assad ‘one of the great liars of all time’

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'Special Report' All-Star panel reacts to Assad interview

Analysis of talk with Syrian leader

Charles Krauthammer told viewers Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier” following Fox News’ exclusive interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad that Assad’s comments indicate “he is very smart, extremely sophisticated, and one of the great liars of all time.”

“(Assad) spoke for almost an hour and I don’t think there was a true word in anything he said including the words and and but,” said Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor. “I’ll give you two examples. One is he talked about the terrorists as being sort of at the start of the war, the reason he began the war, the reason he’s leveled all the cities. It began as a demonstration by schoolchildren in Daraa who he then tortured, and it remained a popular uprising for at least a year before any of the so-called ‘terrorists’ arrived.

“And secondly when you watch him and you get the sense of the sincerity, and the warmth and the softness of the voice of a guy who cares about how the terrible terrorists, meaning the Al Qaeda types, the jihadists, have come into his country and infiltrated it with a terrible ideology-- Assad is the guy who created and supported Al Qaeda in Iraq after America entered Iraq.

"He was the one who channeled all these elements who he now decries so sincerely in order to go into Anbar, into Iraq and kill Americans. So he is getting the blow-back of the people he invited and with whom he was completely comfortable, as long as the task was to kill Americans.”

Steve Hayes also commented on Assad’s ability to convincingly present untrue statements as facts in the interview.

“Bashar Assad did himself some good in this interview,” said Hayes, a columnist for the Weekly Standard and a Fox News contributor. “It’s not difficult to see why US officials have been touting him as a reformer. If you just listen to what he said; if you haven’t been following the ins and outs of what’s been happening on the ground in Syria over the past two years, if you’re just tuning in and you’re willing to take what he says at face value---he presented a pretty compelling case.

“The problem of course is that everything he said, virtually everything he said, was untrue…” Hayes said.