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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (21553)	7/6/2003 11:58:29 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Even Newsmax, comprised of the notoriously rightwing psycho spinners, admits Bush has his head up...."In an embarrassing series of statements on Friday, Bush challenged reports contending that Iraqi WMDs were still MIA - only to be contradicted by U.S. experts on the ground. "They're wrong, we found 'em," he told reporters in Poland. "We found weapons of mass destruction. We'll find more weapons," the president added." Aw too bad, GEE DUMBYA...btw, Happy Birthday Bush WMD Debacle Prompted by Salman Pak Blunder President Bush shouldn't wait a second longer to introduce Iraqi defectors Sabah Khodada and Abu Zeinab to the American people, and fire whoever it was in his administration who advised him to ignore the defectors' eyewitness accounts tying the Baghdad terrorist training camp Salman Pak to the 9/11 attacks. Instead of relying on evidence that would have dispelled all doubts about making war on Iraq, the as-yet-unidentified presidential adviser counseled Bush to hinge his Iraq war rationale on the threat of weapons of mass destruction, evidence that - so far, at least - has yet to materialize. The blunder has given Democrats their most potent ammunition yet in their bid to unseat Bush in the 2004 presidential election. In an embarrassing series of statements on Friday, Bush challenged reports contending that Iraqi WMDs were still MIA - only to be contradicted by U.S. experts on the ground. "They're wrong, we found 'em," he told reporters in Poland. "We found weapons of mass destruction. We'll find more weapons," the president added. But in a discrepancy that's sure to become the focus of the Sunday talk shows, U.S. intelligence and military officials contradicted Bush's claims. "We were simply wrong" in expecting to find that Iraqi army and Republican Guard units had terror weapons, Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told the New York Daily News. "It's not for lack of trying," Conway explained. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but [the Iraqi WMDs are] simply not there." A lengthy report released by the CIA this week said that two suspected mobile biological weapons labs contained no traces of the actual toxins that would prove they were WMD facilities. Adding to Bush's political humiliation, the British press quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell as fearing even before the war that tenuous WMD evidence "could explode in [our] faces." Even before the news of the contradictory accounts surfaced, Democrats had seized on the fruitless WMD search as evidence that Bush had lied to lead America into war. In one particularly odious comparison, former Clinton adviser Paul Begala charged that Bush's Iraq "lies" were far worse than his old boss's perjury about Monica Lewinsky. "Which is worse: lying about a girlfriend or lying about a war?" Begala complained on Thursday. "There aren't 169 [U.S. troops] dead over Monica Lewinsky," the Democrat strategist added sarcastically. While European and American intelligence services remain convinced that Saddam Hussein had substantial quantities of WMDs before Bush targeted the country as the lead member of the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address, delays caused by United Nation's footdragging gave the Iraqi dictator plenty of time to hide or destroy his weapons cache. Now, after U.S. forces have spent six weeks scouring Iraq in a fruitless search for Saddam's terror weapons, the decision to focus on WMDs has turned into a political nightmare for the White House. Still, boneheaded administration strategists have refused to acknowledge evidence that might still spare the president the his worst political debacle to date - the accounts of two Iraqi defectors who say that, for years before the 9/11 attacks, they helped train al-Qaeda operatives to hijack U.S. aircraft using the tactics employed by Osama bin Laden's kamikazi crews. In an account that would have dispelled any doubts about whether the U.S. was justified in making war on Iraq regardless of whether Saddam possessed WMDs, former Salman Pak instructor Sabah Khodada told the London Observer that Muslim fundamentalist recruits from throughout the Arab world were taught to hijack planes using small knives. "The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp," Khodada revealed. "When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was 'this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak.'" Khodada's account is corroborated by a man identified by the Observer only by his code name, Abu Zeinab, a colonel in Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service who also helped train for 9/11-style operations. "One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands," he told the Observer. "Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five." The accounts of the two Salman Pak instructors are further corroborated by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer - a one-time vice chairman of UNSCOM - who said he personally witnessed some of the 9/11 training aboard the parked fuselage of a Boeing 707. Duelfer told the British paper that the Iraqis even acknowledged that hijacking dress rehearsals were taking place at Salman Pak - but they insisted it was counterterrorism training. "Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter,'" Duelfer explained. The accounts of Khodada, Zeinab and Duelfer are backed by two other eyewitnesses - a third defector and a second U.N. inspector - all of whom testified earlier this year in a lawsuit brought by 9/11 victim families against Iraq. In a May 7 decision that should have been seized upon by the Bush administration - but wasn't - Manhattan U.S. District Judge Harold Baer ruled that the Salman Pak evidence was persuasive enough to tie Baghdad to the 9/11 attacks. It's probably too late for the Bush administration to abandon its WMD argument for going to war in Iraq. And indeed, Saddam's banned weapons may eventually be found. In the meantime, the president needs to quickly focus attention on far more compelling evidence that every American would agree justified going to war - Iraq's role in the worst attack ever on U.S. soil. And just as quickly, Bush should fire the officials whose advice to ignore the Salman Pak connection could conceivably cost him his re-election next year. newsmax.com Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Bush Administration War on Terrorism