Vice President Dick Cheney joined the White House attack on critics of the Iraq war on Wednesday night when he told a conservative group that senators who had suggested that the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence were making "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."
Cheney, who was the administration's toughest, most persistent advocate for the war in Iraq, depicted the senators as hypocrites swayed by anti-war sentiment and their own political ambitions.
"Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein," Cheney told the group, Frontiers of Freedom. "What we're hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war."
Simultaneously, the Republican National Committee posted on its Web site comments from Democrats who in the past had warned of the threat of Saddam. Among them was Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, quoted as saying on CNN in 2002 that "Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community, and I think that the president is approaching this in the right fashion."
In Kyongju, South Korea, where he will attend the Asian economic summit, Bush said yesterday that he backed Cheney's comments.
Bush said it was "patriotic as heck to disagree with the president." "It doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics. That's exactly what is taking place in America."
Bush's communications chief, Dan Bartlett, said that the White House intended to make a "sustained" response to the Democrats and would stop when the Democrats ceased making the claims. Bartlett said Bush now recognized that the intelligence about Iraq was flawed, but that he accurately portrayed it before the invasion of Iraq.
In his speech, Cheney echoed the argument of Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the past week that Democrats had access to the same prewar intelligence that the White House did, and that they came to the same conclusion that Saddam was a threat.
The administration, however, had access to far more extensive intelligence than Congress did. It also left unaddressed the question of how it had used that intelligence, which was full of caveats, subtleties and contradictions. Many Democrats now say they believe they had been misled by the administration in the way it presented the prewar intelligence.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS