The Long-burning Fuse

Members of the U.S. Congress were this afternoon hearing evidence about two secret Downing St. memos — as well as additional leaked documents — that were written before the invasion of Iraq which seem to imply that President Bush systematically and deliberately misled Congress and the American people into going to war. The Democratic congressmen and those who testified before the panel were relegated to a tiny room in the bottom of the Capitol, and the Republicans who run the House scheduled 11 major votes to coincide with the afternoon event.

“Conyers and a half-dozen other members of Congress were stopped at the White House gate later Thursday when they hand-delivered petitions signed by 560,000 Americans who want Bush to provide a detailed response to the Downing Street memo. When Conyers couldn’t get in, an anti-war demonstrator shouted, “Send Bush out!” Eventually, White House aides retrieved the petitions at the gate and took them into the West Wing.” - AP

Coverage of the Downing Street memo is finally beginning to seep into the media. What’s so far had scant coverage, though, is that in 2002, a month before the Congressional vote, and two months before the UN resolution 1441, we were already invading Iraqi air space, dropping bombs and destroying Iraq’s capacity to defend itself — when it posed no threat to the U.S., when it had nothing to do with 9/11/2001, and when it had no connection to al Qaeda.

The U.S. had not declared war. Bush had no authorization.

Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq had long been made before March of 2003, and the press failed to adequately cover the story. Remember the run-up to this war — the daily drumbeats of war playing across the airwaves for at least three months before Shock and Awe, that technicolor spectacle better suited to Hollywood than the real-life death and destruction of an unarmed people in a sovereign nation? This Administration and a complicit media has damaged the image of the United States abroad, and damaged the credibility of the media at home.

DSM : “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy“

There’s no ambiguity in what that means. ‘Fixed’ as in “fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it.” U.S. officials and Tony Blair deny the assertion about intelligence and facts being “fixed,” a comment that the Downing St. minutes attribute to the chief of British intelligence at the time. The documentation that has leaked in the wake of the first “memo” proves it’s veracity. This is documentary evidence, these aren’t transcripts of partisan debates or even newspaper articles, these are government documents — the kind that government officials rely on to make decisions of an official nature. Why else would they be marked “UK Eyes Only” if they weren’t official?

“‘Concerns about this administration hyping intelligence and Great Britain hyping intelligence cannot be dismissed lightly,’ [Senate Minority Leader Harry] Reid said, adding that it “is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence.”

Bush and his aides, including Bolton, justified the invasion by saying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States, but no such weapons have been found.” A March 8, 2002, secret “options” paper prepared by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s top national-security aides also stated that intelligence on Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was “poor.”

“The British documents assert more than once - in contradiction to statements and repeated innuendo by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon officials - that there was, in the words of the March 2002 options paper ‘no recent evidence of Iraq complicity with international terrorism.’”

Meanwhile, the White House has accused Senate Democrats of stalling Bolton’s confirmation, while failing to provide the information on Bolton that Democrats are demanding… information that the Democrats are demanding with good reason, considering everything. Bolton appears to have been involved in “fixing the intelligence” that misled this country into war. The White House’s stall tactics of failing to provide this information about Bolton must be considered in light of the information that’s been revealed by the Downing St. minutes and supporting documentation, as well as the tactics by Republicans in not allowing the Democrats a suitable room in which to hold today’s hearings, the Republican-scheduled votes to take place at the same time as the hearing, and the refusal of the White House today in admitting Rep. Conyers to the White House to deliver petitions from over half a million American citizens.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.