US and the World

Cheney: Spinning in fantasyland

ABCNEWS.com : Cheney: Weapons Report Justifies Iraq War

Black is white - Dick Cheney said so.

The report that clearly shows Saddam Hussein was no threat to us is simply turned inside out to say that it shows it was a threat. This is exactly the fashion in which they take Kerry's statements and turn them inside out. These people don't deserve defeat - they deserve impeachment. They are the most irresponsible, self-serving crowd to ever lead this country.

Look, these guys have three simple principles:

1. Attack, attack, attack.
2. Lie, lie, lie.
3. The American public is easily fooled and has an incredibly short memory.

There is no sense of shame for getting more than 1,000 American soldiers killed for nothing. There is no sense of responsibility for wasting billions of dollars and building up the largest debt in history. There is no accepting the burden of leadership in which we attacked a much weaker enemy with incredibly superior firepower killing at least 10,000 innocent civilians, dishonoring our country, strengthening recruitment of terrorists, and losing the respect of the world.

Contrast Cheney's incredible state of denial with this account in today's Washington Post - written by people who unlike the president and vice president, can read.

U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
Report on Iraq Contradicts Bush Administration Claims

By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01

The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.

Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, said Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons had "progressively decayed" since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."

The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.

Duelfer's report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government's most definitive accounting of Hussein's weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer's assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.

"We were almost all wrong" on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.