From USA TODAY, 10/1/03:
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20031001/5548865s.htm
By Walter Shapiro
In the past week, three major Iraq-related developments should have,
in theory, caused lasting embarrassment to the Bush administration.
But because none of these flaps touched on illegality, they have been
treated as one-day stories.
* According to media reports, the interim report of the American
weapons-search team headed by David Kay is expected to acknowledge the
inability to locate Saddam Hussein's purported arsenals of chemical
and biological weapons. Because George W. Bush and his top advisers
have consistently justified the Iraqi war as needed to eliminate these
weapons of mass destruction, the failure of the four-month search
should call into question the validity of the administration's claim
that Saddam posed an imminent threat.
* Republican Porter Goss and Democrat Jane Harman, the leaders of the
House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter last week to CIA Director
George Tenet criticizing ''significant deficiencies'' in the
intelligence gathering before the invasion of Iraq. This bipartisan
critique, based on a four-month examination of 19 volumes of
classified intelligence information, further undermines the
administration's stated case for war.
* The New York Times reported Tuesday that Joe Allbaugh, Bush's 2000
campaign manager, and two top Republican lobbyists have formed a new
firm to advise companies on how to win contracts to rebuild Iraq. This
legal buck-raking -- along with the contracts awarded to Halliburton,
the company that ***** Cheney headed before he was picked as Bush's
running mate -- suggests an eagerness to turn Iraq into a profit
center.
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Those Bush "embarrassments" just keep comin', don't they.
Harry
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