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Vice President Dismisses Iraq WMD Criticisms
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday dismissed criticism that the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Nov. 21). “We never had the burden of proof,” Cheney said. Rather, the burden was on former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to show there were no such weapons in his country, the vice president added. The White House made the Iraqi WMD threat central to its case for war, the Associated Press reported, but no evidence of such weapons or programs has turned up since the March 2003 invasion. “We operated on the best available intelligence, gathered over a period of years from within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police,” Cheney said. Those who say the White House misled the public before the invasion are partaking in “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety,” Cheney said. “What is not legitimate — and I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible — is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence,” the vice president said (Tom Raum, Associated Press I/Yahoo!News, Nov. 22). In the wake of Cheney’s speech, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) continued to blast the White House on Iraq, the Associated Press reported. Assertions that the Senate saw the same intelligence on Iraq as the administration “is just plain, flat, not true,” Kerry said. Kerry said the U.S. Air Force disputed administration claims that Iraq had unmanned vehicles that could deliver biological or chemical weapons. “The Air Force’s dissent was kept secret, even as the president publicly made the opposite case before the vote,” he said. “Congress wasn’t told that,” Kerry said. He repeated the line several times during a string of accusations against the White House, AP reported. Kerry said that assertions by U.S. President George W. Bush and Cheney that Iraq could launch a chemical attack within an hour were not cleared with the CIA, “which mistrusted the source so much they refused to include it in the National Intelligence Estimate.” Kerry said the White House said that Hussein was trying to obtain fuel for nuclear weapons, even though the CIA had stated three times that this was not true. The president also said that al-Qaeda terrorists had received training in Iraq on making bombs and using chemical weapons, while the Defense Intelligence Agency had determined the source of the information to be dishonest, Kerry claimed. “The fact is that they’re now trying to rewrite the rationale for the administration going into Iraq,” Kerry said. “Instead they really ought to be trying to fix the problems that they’ve created with their incompetence over the last few years.” In response, White House spokesman Mark Pfeifle said, “The close, candid relationship between Congress and intelligence agencies is necessary and healthy and enjoys the full support of the White House. Either Senator Kerry didn't bother to read the intelligence data or he is blatantly misrepresenting the facts” (Glen Johnson, Associated Press II/Dateline Alabama, Nov. 21).
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