Friday, July 18, 2003

Dean: There are a lot more White House mistakes


Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Thursday predicted more revelations of false information from the White House before the war in Iraq as a Senate committee continued to examine pre-war intelligence.

"This isn't all of it. There's a lot more," Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said during a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids. "There are other mistakes. There are other exaggerations."

Dean also called on an unnamed White House official to resign for allegedly ignoring CIA instructions to strike suspect information about Iraq's nuclear weapons program from President Bush's State of the Union address in January.

Dean and rival Joe Lieberman have said CIA Director George Tenet should resign after admitting responsibility for the agency's failure to keep out of the speech a line alleging Iraq had tried to obtain nuclear material from an African nation. The White House this month admitted the claim was incorrect, but Bush has not asked Tenet to resign.

Lieberman, who also campaigned in Iowa Thursday, accused Bush of passing the buck.

"This White House doesn't accept responsibility. They don't hold people accountable when things go wrong," he said. "In the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy accepted the blame."

Dean said he doubted U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statements in March that officials knew where weapons of mass destruction were located.

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