Kucinich criticizes Bush administration for letting Hadley take the blame
Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle
POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: Kucinich criticizes Bush administration for letting Hadley take the blame
MALIA RULON, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, July 23, 2003
(07-23) 13:16 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich assailed the Bush administration Wednesday for allowing a deputy national security adviser to get the president and his top officials "off the biggest hook in town."
Stephen Hadley, the top aide to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, apologized Tuesday for allowing a tainted intelligence report on Iraq's nuclear ambitions into Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address.
Hadley said he had received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from agency director George Tenet raising objections to an allegation that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program.
"So the American people are being asked to believe that the bogus cause of war against Iraq, eliminating a nuclear threat, was advanced because a lower level functionary simply overlooked a memo from a higher level functionary?" asked Kucinich, who voted against the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force and has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Iraq war.
Speaking on the House floor, the Ohio congressman challenged the president to take responsibility for his actions.
Hadley "tried to take the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the national security adviser off the biggest hook in town by accepting blame for the president falsely claiming in the State of the Union that Iraq was trying to go nuclear," Kucinich charged.
That these top officials "all were blissfully unaware of the fact that false nuclear claims they were circulating about Iraq were simply the result of a memo misfiled by a national security clerk named Hadley" is incredulous, Kucinich said.
"Hadley? Hardly! Hadley? Hardly! Hadley? Hardly!" he said.
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