posted on July 14, 2003 12:37:39 PM new
This is beyond a partisan issue.
If Bush lied about the reasons for war, it would be the gravest
crisis in the nation's history. It would exceed Watergate because
of the cost in terms of money and lives. It would be the worst failure
of the Presidency since the founding of the republic.
A gross abuse of the office and its powers.
If you cannot believe the President on going to war, what can
he say that anyone can believe? Which is a lot more important
than if the Dems score a few points on the campaign trail.
Now as the costs of it explode beyond anything he said, beyond
anything he imagined, his aides are reduced to the most shameful
kind of fingerpointing.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said Monday the United States went to war Iraq "under false pretenses."
In a scathing speech, Kennedy faulted both the administration's justification for war and its handling of Iraq's reconstruction after Saddam's fall from power.
"They have undermined America's prestige and credibility in the world," Kennedy said in a speech delivered at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed. "The misleading statement about African uranium is not an isolated issue," he said.
Levin said Bush's statement was "one of several questionable statements and exaggerations" in the buildup to war.
"It is therefore essential that we have a thorough, open and bipartisan inquiry into the objectivity, credibility and use of U.S. intelligence before the Iraq war," Levin said in a Senate floor speech.
"The more important question is who is it in the White House who was hellbent on misleading the American people and why are they still there?," Durbin said Thursday.
"Being a member of the Intelligence Committee I can't disclose that but I trust that it will come out," he said. "But it should come out from the president. The president should be outraged that he was misled and that he then misled the American people."
Durbin and other Democrats in the Senate had said earlier the question is not why Tenet failed to remove the Africa information from the speech, but who insisted on leaving it in. "All roads still lead back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," Durbin said.
So, Bush trots out another fall guy to cover his ass while he strolls out into the Rose Garden to claim the victory of killing two sons of Saddam. Good grief!
Now, Condoleezza Rice's assistant, Stephen Hadley is the newest fall guy to join Tenet for a lie that should be the responsibility of the President.
"So now we have Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice's number two, stepping forward to take the blame for not keeping the uranium line out of the State of the Union speech. This buck may eventually stop at the president's desk, but it's amazing how many stops it makes along the way, isn't it?"
An Acela Express it ain't!
Presumably this renders 'inoperative' the earlier White House claim that the CIA didn't warn them about their doubts on the uranium sale.
It would seem that Hadley's 'mea maxima culpa' was triggered by leaks out of the CIA that they had even more evidence to prove that they sent the word to the White House plenty of times. It may also not have been entirely coincidental that the news came out on a day when the administration was celebrating a very real victory in having tracked down Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay.
If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it is competence at delivering
a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news. That reputation has been badly damaged by the administration's clumsy efforts to explain how a statement based on disputed intelligence ended up in the president's State of the Union address.
How did the White House stumble so badly? There are a host of explanations, from White House officials,
their allies outside the government and their opponents in the broader debate about whether the administration
sought to manipulate evidence while building its case to go to war against Iraq.
A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.
The former CIA agents were asked to examine prewar intelligence last year by Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. The former agents will present a final report on their findings to the Pentagon, the CIA and possibly Congress later this year. More than a dozen calls to the White House, the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon for comment were not returned.
The ad hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary review of the intelligence. ---
