Bush Feels the Heat After Saudi Bombings

Oliver Burkeman in Washington

Thursday May 15, 2003, The Guardian

The impact of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia began to reverberate through US politics yesterday as the Bush administration defended itself against charges that it had taken its eye off the ball over al-Qaida because of its obsession with Iraq.

With George Bush's critics alleging that serious counterterrorism efforts had become "lost in the shuffle", analysts warned that by fostering the widespread perception that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were closely linked, the White House may have created unrealistic expectations that in destroying the Iraqi regime, it was also crushing the terrorist threat.

But the president's press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, dismissed as "nonsense" claims by two Democratic senators that the administration was neglecting the hunt for the terrorists behind the September 11 atrocities.

Continued.

Mr Fleischer said that the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, headed a long list of people linked to al-Qaida who had been taken into custody in recent months.

Mr Fleischer was responding to a coruscating attack from Senator Bob Graham, who had argued earlier that the Saudi bombings "could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of al-Qaida".

Link to Guardian

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printed from Bush Feels the Heat After Saudi Bombings on 2004-05-30 23:54:12