President George W. Bush said he would order the assassination of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein if US forces had ”a clear shot,” a suburban Chicago newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Bush reportedly made the remark to Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican Senator for Illinois, during a private conversation aboard Air Force One last month, according to the Daily Herald. Quizzed by the Herald’s editorial board about how the United States might capture and remove Hussein from power without killing
thousand of innocent Iraqi citizens, Fitzgerald volunteered these comments: ”I have personally talked to the president about this and if we had intelligence on where he was now, and we had a clear shot to assassinate him, we would probably do that,” Fitzgerald told the board on Monday.
”President Bush would probably sign an executive order repealing the executive order put in place by President Ford that forbid the assassination of foreign leaders.”
Herald reporters later asked Fitzgerald to clarify whether Bush said he would change US policy, Fitzgerald said, ”Yes, yes.”
Possibly sensing that he had spoken out of turn, the one-term US senator added: ”I don’t want to betray any confidences of the president. ”I assumed he (Bush) had said that somewhere else. But maybe if he didn’t say that anywhere else, I shouldn’t have said that just now.”
A Fitzgerald aide, reached on Tuesday, said the senator had no comment on the report. – Sapa-AFP