[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 15]
[House]
[Page 21053]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           IRAQI ARMS THREAT

  (Ms. DeLAURO asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, today's Washington Post reports that at the 
time this administration brought us to war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein 
posed not the gathering threat that President Bush and Vice President 
Cheney continue to claim he was, but rather, a diminishing one.
  The findings of the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq are but one 
more example of a President and a Vice President intent on misleading 
the American people into war and blind to the realities of Iraq today. 
This comes one day after the startling admission by the former head of 
the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Paul Bremer, that we did 
not have enough troops on the ground after the invasion to guard 
sensitive areas like weapons stockpiles. Today, those very weapons are 
being used against our troops by militants and by terrorists.
  At every step of the way, determining the threat level posed by 
Saddam, how much the war would cost, how many casualties America would 
bear, George Bush and Dick Cheney have been consistent, consistently 
wrong. As we saw last night and last Thursday in the debates, George 
Bush and Dick Cheney are incapable of fixing Iraq because they refuse 
to see the mess that they have created there.
  They refuse to see the mess that they have created in the U.S. 
economy.
  The American people? They see it every single day.

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