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Posted on 07/19/2004 2:32:28 PM PDT by EllaMinnow
US Democrats stepped up attacks on George W. Bush's anti-terror policies when an official of White House candidate John Kerry (news - web sites)'s campaign said the president "flat-out lied" over the Iraq war.
Former senator Max Cleland made his remarks in a conference call to reporters with Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe as part of a party offensive ahead of this week's release of a major report sure to fuel criticism of Bush's war on terror.
Cleland, a national co-chairman of Kerry's campaign, described the Bush administration's arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, as a "pack of lies."
The former lawmaker from the southern state of Georgia defended the vote that he, Kerry and others cast in the Senate to authorize military intervention in Iraq, saying the Congress was "flat-out lied to."
Asked whether they were lied to by the intelligence services or the White House, he said emphatically: "By the president, by the vice president and by the secretary of defense."
"Now why did Bush go to war in Iraq? Because he concluded that his daddy was a failed president and one of the ways he failed was that he did not take out Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)," Cleland said, referring to the 1991 Gulf war.
He added that Kerry, from Massachusetts, agreed with the assessment of Bush's credibility.
"About a year ago John Kerry said,'The president lied, he lied to me personally,'" said Cleland, a badly wounded Vietnam war veteran.
Cleland, who has led the cadre of Kerry's Vietnam comrades supporting the candidate, went further than the draft Democratic platform to be adopted next week by the party's convention for its drive to unseat Bush in November.
The draft says, "People of good will disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq, but this much is clear: This Administration badly exaggerated its case."
But McAuliffe did not back away from Cleland's allegation of outright lying. He said only that the platform committee "did an excellent job of representing where this party stands as it relates to issues on national security."
"The platform does not get into specifics on all the different issues. ... It is a document that all Democrats can run on."
Spokesmen for the Kerry campaign did not immediately return phone calls asking whether Cleland's remarks reflected the candidate's position.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan shrugged off the Democrats' remarks, saying, "all they can offer is more political attacks" while the rest of the world had agreed on the Iraqi threat based on available intelligence.
"I would remind you that the president's opponent looked at that same intelligence and made the same decision to support the use the force to remove that regime from power," McClellan said. "I know he's all over the map since that time."
The Democrats' conference call was one of a series of broadsides at Bush, orchestrated by the Kerry campaign ahead of the release Thursday of the final report of a national panel investigating the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The document, following 17 staff reports already made public, was expected to be highly critical of the Bush administration for intelligence failures and other lapses surrounding the attacks.
Cleland, who served briefly on the national panel, said the move to invade Iraq without widespread world support was "one of the great strategic errors" of US military history and actually left the country more vulnerable to terrorism.
"This country is less safe and less secure because of George Bush's decision to go to war alone and alienate the Arab and Islamic world and generate more recruits for al-Qaeda," he said.
Just reading from the sheet musics provided him by the DNC. They are all saying the same stuff.
This is as bad as you could get for the Kerry campaign....
I hope someone has an audio tape of that hateful freak. Will he lash out the same way at the convention? That would look good on national tv.
dangerous tactic
Max, you don't have a leg to stand on here.
Straight out of the DNC playbook. We've got mountains of evidence that W didn't lie but they keep spouting the same BS...
How can he stand to be photographed with a man who voted to invade Iraq without that widespread world support?
Fyi...
Wasn't Cleland a co-sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998?
This statement has the scent of desperation on it.
Max Cleland, a badly wounded Vietnam war veteran, thinks he can say anything he wants because he is a "war hero".
Har! Let's give Maxie a hand......or two. I'm beginning to think every speech he gives is a stump speech, so to speak.
Campaign Carl Cameron said this is a preview of what we're likely to hear at their convention.
The venom is beginning to pour out of the snakes.
I'm betting there is a tape. But I'm also betting that it's locked in the DNC vault with the Whoopi video.
All I can say is "wow."
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