Kerry aide: Bush 'flat out lied' on Iraq

[gldstwmn]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...1506&ncid=2043

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Democrats stepped up attacks on George W. Bush's anti-terror policies when an official of White House candidate John Kerry'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," Cleland said, referring to the 1991 Gulf war.

He added that Kerry, from Massachusetts, agreed with the assessment. "About a year ago John Kerry said,'The president lied, he lied to me personally,'" said Cleland, a badly wounded Vietnam war veteran.

Cleland's language went further than the draft Democratic platform expected to be adopted by the party's convention next week in Boston as a blueprint 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.

The 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 prepared by 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, a member of the 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.