| Congress did not have access to the same intellegence information that Bush had during the selling of the Iraq invasion in 2002-2003. |
| "Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war," wrote former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a devastating statement in The Washington Post on Sunday. 'Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace — that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud."
Graham, then the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate was a sham. "It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed (WMD), avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version," writes Graham. Source: "Cheney's trouble with the truth" by Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate - 11.28.05 The Senate couldn’t know back then that the president and his national-security cabinet had been planning war against Iraq since early 2001. The Senate was not privy to all the same intelligence as the president, nor could its members have known how that information had been distorted and exaggerated by the influence of the vice president and other high White House officials. The Senate didn’t know, as the British intelligence chief learned, that the facts were being “fixed ” to build a case for war. Without the firm imprimatur of Dick Cheney, no Senator could have claimed to know “without doubt” that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program. Without the confident endorsement of Donald Rumsfeld, no Senator could have claimed to know “exactly” where the “weapons of mass destruction” were located. Without the jut-jawed insistence of Condi Rice, no Senator could have touted the uranium from Africa and the aluminum tubes that were supposed to make a nuke for Saddam. It is pitiful indeed to hear the President now pretend that the responsibility for this deadly fiasco somehow falls equally on both parties and both branches of government. As far as the public is concerned, that debate is over—and his administration is guilty. Source: "Blame-throwing Bush tries to burn Democrats" by Joe Conason - The New York Observer - 11/18/05 And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the president of the United States is just a lie on its face -- it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally. It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate that did see the unsanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee -- shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican president. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated. The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance -- said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction -- was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers." Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon's intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate's vote to authorize the war, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gases." The false al-Qaida-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush's argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands, but that they would not be found at all. Source: "The big lie technique: Bush channels Nixon, calls his critics traitors" by Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate - 11.16.05 |
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