Bush by Jean Edward Smith

Author:Jean Edward Smith [Smith, Jean Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-07-04T21:00:00+00:00

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I. Powell’s views were more than vindicated in October 2004, when Charles Duelfer, who had succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Study Group, submitted a final report on the hunt for Iraq’s WMDs. Like Kay, Duelfer concluded that Saddam Hussein had no such weapons and was making no effort to develop them. His WMD stockpiles and production capacity had been effectively destroyed in the first Gulf War and by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s. There was no evidence that Saddam had made “concerted efforts to restart” a nuclear weapons program, and although the Iraqi dictator dreamed of reconstituting his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, there was no indication that he had taken steps to do so. Paraphrasing Kay, Duelfer concluded, “We were almost all wrong.” Report of the Iraq Study Group, October 6, 2004. Also see Dana Priest and Walter Pincus, “US. ‘Almost All Wrong’,” Washington Post, October 7, 2004.

II. When I discussed his resignation with Rumsfeld on April 15, 2014, he was still of the opinion that he had made a mistake in not leaving. “There was no one else in the chain of command who was responsible. I had replaced some of the senior people, others were new to their job and were not there when the offenses were committed. Someone had to take the fall, and I was the obvious candidate. It would have cleaned the slate and that would have been useful.”

III. Taguba quotes a number of MPs reporting the guidance given to them by Military Intelligence and the CIA. “Loosen this guy up for us.” “Make sure he has a bad night.” “Good job, they are breaking down real fast. They answer every question.” “The Taguba Report,” in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 418.

IV. The Democrats wanted the bill to allow the Medicare administrators to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies, as the Veterans Administration does. A report released by Democratic staff on the House Government Reform Committee showed that under the new plan, prices for ten commonly prescribed drugs were 80 percent higher than those negotiated by the Veterans Department, 60 percent above that paid by Canadian consumers, and still 3 percent higher than volume pharmacies such as Costco and Drugstore.com. The report concluded that “The prices offered by the Medicare drug plans are higher than all four benchmarks, in some cases significantly so. This increases costs to seniors and federal taxpayers and makes it doubtful that the complicated design of Medicare Part D provides any tangible benefit to anyone but drug manufacturers and insurers.” Because of this objection, only 19 House Democrats voted for the bill.

V. “The best way for the Germans to comprehend the advantages of a free press is to have one,” Clay told E. J. Kahn of The New Yorker. When writing Clay’s biography, I asked the general about it. “That’s right,” he said. “My information bureau sent out an order curtailing the issue of

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