APRIL FOOLS?: Belgian minister embarrassed over Bush "chimpanzee photos" in
police training manual
 Belgium's interior minister, Patrick Dewael (photo on the right), was reported embarrassed yesterday after a
Flemish-language national daily published a report that photos comparing US President George W. Bush to a chimpanzee had been used in a
Belgian police training manual.
"I hadn't seen these photos and I think they are in bad taste," Dewael told the Flemish-language daily Het
Laatste Nieuws (see picture below), which first reported the story.
The pictures in question -- reprinted by the newspaper -- showed a series of the US leader's facial expressions next
to shots of a chimpanzee making apparently similar faces (as shown at the newspaper's bottom right corner).
They were intended to help trainee police officers in the western city of Bruges to recognize the importance of body
language in dealing with the public. Bush is shown in poses ranging from pensive to finger-waving debating mode.
The pictures are all the more embarrassing for Dewael since he had signed a letter calling on Belgian municipal
authorities and other police chiefs to use the manual.
But he was at pains to insist he did not know about the pictures.
"This collage was not an initiative of the interior ministry," he
said, adding that he intended to ask Bruges authorities to withdraw the controversial pages from the manual.
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