WASHINGTON, May 21: US Senator Robert Byrd on Wednesday issued a scathing denuniciation of White House over the Iraq invasion.

“Our costly and destructive bunker-busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what was the urgent reason to go in,” Byrd said.

“This house of cards built of deceit will fall,” said Byrd, the most senior member of the US Senate, in comments delivered from the Senate floor.

The Bush administration, Byrd charged, “assiduously worked to alarm the public and to blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, until they virtually become one.”

“What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the United States, and many of us here said so before the war,” Byrd said.—AFP