Bill Delahunt: “If we want to talk about weapons of mass destruction program-related activities, let us go back to that point in time…”

“If we want to talk about weapons of mass destruction program-related activities, let us go back to that point in time when the current Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was the National Security Adviser and when the current Vice President, Mr. Cheney, was the Secretary of Defense. What I find particularly fascinating is, as Dr. Condoleezza Rice just said, if I can find the quote, she said just recently, he used weapons of mass destruction, just as the gentleman indicates. The truth was that we were transferring to him the computers and the ingredients necessary to advance his nuclear weapons program. That happened. We, the United States Government, during the 1980s under Reagan and President George Herbert Walker Bush, were removing him from the terrorist list, installing an embassy in Baghdad, providing intelligence to Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran. And when it came to that horrific incident in Chalabi where he used chemical weapons against the Kurds who had aligned themselves with the Iranians, there was a condemnation, let us call it lip service. And yet, when this institution, this House and the United States Senate in 1989 and 1990 attempted to impose sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime, you know what the position of the administration was then, led by the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser? They killed the bill. They killed the bill. Now, if hypocrisy was a virtue--”