Political/Political Humor
Saturday, June 21, 2003[5:26:53 PM]
Look at the WMD scandal this way....
We delegate the primary role in defending our country to the President.
If the President says there is an imminent danger, we should be able to trust that, and we should take him at his word. Based on Bush's declarations to Congress, we shouldn't hold it against anyone there who voted for the Iraq war.
On the other hand, if it turns out the President lied about the imminent danger -- if either the danger was small or in the more distant future -- and we go to war and kill tens of thousands of people who posed no threat to the American people, as well as lose hundreds of our loved-ones killed, with many more wounded and/or traumatized emotionally, then the President is guilty of a High Crime.
If the President claims he didn't lie, but rather that he was uninformed, I say that is also a High Crime by negligence: his role is to get the facts straight before taking us to war. If he didn't, Bush has perpetrated a High Crime through his own negligence.
Of course, we have heard Bush and Rice claim incompetence before -- both claimed they had no prior information about terrorist plans to hijack airliners and crash them into buildings. Bush and Rice's statements were both proven to be lies: they knew.
There should be an immediate investigation, with everyone involved giving statements under oath, the appropriate documents and recordings subpoenad, and full accountability for anyone involved in misleading us into war or covering up the High Crimes.
[12:55:10 PM]
Should Democrats use the so-called WMD scandal as an example of why Bush must go? Yes.
But let's define the scandal clearly. The issue isn't whether there is an ounce of anthrax here, or some old nerve gas precursors there.
Bush's message was that Iraq posed a clear and present danger -- an imminent threat -- to Americans and our allies.
Iraq was not a threat, and the conquest of Iraq was chosen because Iraq was weak, not because it was strong. Having decided to conquer Iraq, the Bush propagandists then sought to gain public and world support by -- lying: claiming Saddam had an active nuke program, as well as huge amounts of bio/chemical weapons that he was ready to turn over to Al Qaeda.
Even if the "WMD trailers" story hadn't been a complete lie, it would still not have justified the invasion, because Iraq was not a threat, even with a small biological and chemical weapons program.
The other part of the scandal that should force Rumsfeld to resign is that Rumsfeld's war plan didn't provide enough soldiers to secure the various sites in Iraq with potentially deadly materials -- radioactive ore, lab specimins of diseases, etc. Rumsfeld allowed all kinds of dangerous material to be looted. There is a great risk that such looted materials were sold to terrorists. Let's be clear: the conquest itself created the exact problem that Bush/Rove falsely claimed Saddam represented.
Interestingly, "intelligence" analysts leaked the evidence that Bush/Blair mis-used the intelligence reports. We know the exact groups of people in England and the US whose jobs were to cover up accurate intelligence and spread false intelligence. We know they did a very bad job of it. All of this is clear and on the record.
How do Bush and Blair get away with the pretense that they weren't lying? Are we supposed to give them a pass if they claim they were "out of the loop"?
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:37:45 PM.