posted 01-12-2004 09:42 AM
Ex-Treasury Chief: Saw No Evidence of Iraq WMDs..
Sun Jan 11, 2:22 PM ET
By Adam EntousCRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said he never saw any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- President Bush's main justification for going to war -- and was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
In excerpts from a new book chronicling his rocky two-year tenure and an interview with Time magazine, O'Neill said Bush balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.
O'Neill, fired in a shake-up of Bush's economic team in December 2002, also said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits -- expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone -- posed a threat to the U.S. economy.
Cheney cut him off, according to the interview posted on the Time Web site on Sunday. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. O'Neill said he was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due."
A month later, Cheney -- instrumental in bringing O'Neill into the administration -- told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
The vice president's office had no immediate comment.
Democrats seized on the account.
"What Paul O'Neill says ... is what a lot of other people are beginning to conclude -- that there was an overstatement by the Bush administration of the weapons of mass destruction part of the argument for going to war against Saddam Hussein," Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, told "Fox News Sunday."
'BLIND MAN'
O'Neill likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts from an interview to air Sunday evening on CBS's "60 Minutes."
Democratic presidential hopeful Richard Gephardt, a U.S. congressman from Missouri, said he had a similar impression of Bush, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" program: "He is a nice man. And he's a smart man. But he doesn't have experience. He doesn't have knowledge. And he has no curiosity."
Commerce Secretary Don Evans defended Bush.
"I know how he leads, I know how he manages.... He drives the meetings, tough questions, he likes dissent, he likes to see debate," Evans told CNN's "Late Edition."
Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida accused O'Neill of taking "a Shakespearean approach to advance his career and his book sales. Not since Julius Caesar have I seen such a blatant stab in the back. Et tu, Mr. O'Neill?"
In the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty," O'Neill charged that Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it.
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," O'Neill, who sat on the National Security Council, told Time.
"There were allegations and assertions by people... To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else," he added.
The magazine said O'Neill sought support for his position on deficits and corporate reform from long-time friends -- Cheney and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who he says agreed with many of his proposals and helped craft a tough plan to hold executives accountable.
"I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all of this, over and over, and nothing ever changed," he said. "This is the way Dick likes it."
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Mech on 02-11-2004]
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