Sidney Blumenthal reports in his latest Salon article that CIA Chief George Tenet told George W. Bush in a briefing in September of 2002 that the agency had solid information Iraq and Saddam Hussein harbored no weapons of mass destruction. This briefing was described to Blumenthal by two former high-ranking officials at the CIA. Blumenthal further notes that not only did Bush ignore this information, he also forbid this information from being disseminated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or to the members of Congress who thereafter voted to authorize his use of force in Iraq.
So the short story is this: Bush knew there were no weapons in Iraq, but he wanted his war so bad he lied to Powell, Congress and the American people to get it. He played the "politics of fear" card so loud for so long (and, we now know for certain, so disingenuously) that in the end he got what he wanted: to be known as a "war time" president.
Where does this leave us? It seems obvious now he is guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors" and should be impeached Constitutionally, yet we know we don't have the votes in the Senate to convict and remove.
A lot of people on the left are kind of mad at the Democratic Congress right now for not showing the courage to end the war or impeach Bush. However, I lay this right at the feet of the Republicans. Where are the Republican statesmen who put principle over party? The Republicans who voted to impeach Clinton for getting a hummer but give Bush a free ride for lying us into a horrible and unwinable war that has cost thousands of American lives and maybe a million Iraqi ones?
What a sorry state of affairs this is.
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