Bill Delahunt: “Well, Mr. Speaker, the noted conservative columnist, a prominent Republican, William Buckley, recently made the…”

“Well, Mr. Speaker, the noted conservative columnist, a prominent Republican, William Buckley, recently made the statement that this administration has a dismaying capacity to believe its own PR. Well, you know, this is not about public relations. This is about war and peace and the loss of American military lives and untold hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayers' money. That is what this is about. To simply say that things are rosy, and they are guessing, I think does a disservice to our intelligence agencies. Again, to point to the article that was as recent as September 16, it was on the front page of the New York Times. It was entitled, ``U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future'': ``A classified national intelligence estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday. There's a significant amount of pessimism, said one government official who has read the document.'' This is just unacceptable, to have the President of the United States say, in response to a question, that they are just guessing.”