
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 25, 1993                   TAG: 9310250029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

IRAQI PLOT AGAINST BUSH QUESTIONED

The evidence of an Iraqi assassination plot against former President Bush, the basis for a U.S. missile attack in June on the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, was significantly weaker than the Clinton administration asserted, a new article says.

The article, written by Seymour Hersh and published in The New Yorker this week, says no evidence directly linked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, his intelligence service or his senior advisers to an assassination attempt on the former president.

President Clinton ordered the June 26 attack after receiving an FBI report that said Iraqi intelligence agents had smuggled a car bomb into Kuwait and planned to kill Bush during a visit in April.

Shortly after the attack, Clinton said he had been presented with "compelling evidence that there was in fact a plot to assassinate former President Bush" by Iraqi intelligence as "revenge by a tyrant" against the leader of the coalition that defeated Iraq in the gulf war in 1991.

"The American government's case against Iraq - as it has been outlined in public, anyway - is seriously flawed," Hersh writes. The evidence was "too weak to be conclusive" but, in the administration's view, "perhaps not weak enough to be dismissed," he says.

The White House had no comment on the article.

The administration based its case largely on a comparison of the device found in the car bomb with similar devices known to have been made in Iraq. But seven explosives experts who saw photographs of the device found in Kuwait and an Iraqi device said both were generic equipment without unique characteristics.

by CNB