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Politics : Bush Bashers & Wingnuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Red Heeler who wrote (401)	1/10/2004 2:23:12 PM
From: laura_bush	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1347

Despite report, Cheney says war was justified By M.E. SPRENGELMEYER SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq as "perfectly justified," despite a scathing new report that cast doubt on many of the administration's pre-war claims. In an interview in advance of a fund-raising trip to Denver on Monday, Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News that he stands behind a national intelligence estimate used to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that documents found in Baghdad since then support suspicions that the former Iraqi regime had terrorist ties. "I think we were perfectly justified in doing what we did," Cheney said. "I think the American people support it overwhelmingly. And I don't have any qualms at all about the decisions that were made." Cheney's comments came a day after the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report claiming that the Bush administration misrepresented the threat of Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and the suspected terrorism connection. In response to the report Thursday, Secretary of State Colin Powell defended his pre-war presentation to the United Nations, but conceded he had not seen "smoking-gun, concrete evidence" of a link between the former Iraqi regime and terrorist organizations. In yesterday's interview, Cheney said there was new evidence in documents found in Baghdad concerning Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Yasin was questioned by the FBI following that earlier attack on the twin towers, but he was released and fled to Iraq. The Iraqi government long maintained that it had imprisoned him in 1994, and CBS conducted a jailhouse interview in 2002. But Cheney said new documents suggest a more sinister link. "We now know based on documents that we've captured since we took Baghdad that they put him on the payroll, gave him a monthly stipend and provided him with a house, sanctuary, in effect, in Iraq in the aftermath of ... the '93 attack on the World Trade Center," Cheney said. Cheney still has plenty of skeptics among those who study global terrorism. "While there may be indications that Abdul Rahman Yasin may have worked for the fallen Iraqi regime, evidence significantly linking al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein still remains unconvincing," said Rita Katz, director of The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, a Washington research group. Despite persistent criticism about pre-war claims and the coalition's failure to find major stashes of chemical or biological weapons, Cheney said the intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction left the Bush administration little choice. "Based on that, there wasn't any way the administration could ignore those findings of the intelligence community in terms of thinking about the threat that Saddam Hussein represented," he said. THE CARNEGIE REPORT The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported Thursday that Iraq's weapons programs constituted a long-term threat that should not have been ignored. But it also said the programs did not "pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security." Among its conclusions: The extent of the threat of nuclear and chemical weapons was largely unknown at the time. The uncertainties were even greater regarding biological weapons. "The dramatic shifts between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 national intelligence estimate ... and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community appears to have been unduly influenced by policy-maker's views sometime in 2002." "There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and al-Qaida." The full report can found at www.ceip.org seattlepi.nwsource.com