Loose cannons

Issue 

Average folks

"[John] Kerry's choice of [John] Edwards also sets up stark contrasts between the two tickets. Edwards' working-class roots and Southern-style populism will make it easier for Democrats to portray President Bush and Vice-President Cheney as rich guys with little feel for the lives of average folks. Even so, all four candidates on the two tickets are multimillionaires." — USA Today, July 6.

Still a believer I

"We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but we know we haven't found them." — British PM Tony Blair responding in the House of Commons on July 7 to the question: "Do you still believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?"

Still a believer II

"We believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction based on the intelligence, and nothing has happened since which has altered the fact that we have strong intelligence that built a very powerful circumstantial case." — Prime Menzies John Howard, July 7.

Weapons of mass delusion

"In a hard-hitting report released today, the US Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence said the CIA and other agencies used unfounded 'group think' assumptions to assess the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before last year's US invasion and reached conclusions that were often either 'overstated' or 'not supported by the underlying intelligence'." — Washington Post, July 9.

That's 'lies' in plain English

"A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of intelligence [about Iraq's WMD programs]" — From the 511-page report of the US Senate select committee on intelligence, released July 9.

From Green Left Weekly, July 14, 2004.
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