BILLIONAIRE AND INTERNATIONAL FINANCIER George Soros, who is bankrolling the campaign against Bush, yesterday compared the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal to the attacks of September 11. “I think that those pictures [of prison abuse] hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself–not quite with the same force, because in the terrorist attack, we were the victims. In the pictures, we were the perpetrators and others were the victims,” he said. “But there is, I’m afraid, a direct connection between those two events, because the way President Bush conducted the war on terror converted us from victims into perpetrators.”

Soros also accused Bush administration officials of being “American supremacists,” and claimed the United States went to war “on false pretenses.” He stated that there was “no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda,” and that America did not go to war “for the sake of the Iraqi people.” Senator Hillary Clinton introduced Soros in front of a packed ballroom and commended him for his fearlessness and generosity. In her 20-minute speech she, to whoops of delight from the audience, likened the president to the robber barons of the late-19th century and warned the audience about the conservative media machine: “Now, you’re going to hear, if you haven’t already, many, many attacks on George Soros. . . . And, you know, we have two kinds of media left, it seems to me. We’ve got the so-called mainstream media . . . and then we’ve got the advocacy media that is turning war into propaganda.”