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Main | 'The State Of The Union speech Bush wanted to give' »
July 12, 2003
What did the administration know and when did they know it?
Tenet has taken ultimate responsibility for the 16 words: "'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In a statement released Friday, the CIA director gives a version of events in which the CIA never conclusively proved that the attempt had been made, but did not excise the words from the State of the Union address.
It seems a harmless oversight, but when the consequence of such an oversight is the invasion and occupation of a state at the cost of hundreds of American lives, thousands of Iraqi lives, and tens of billions of dollars, this oversight is far from harmless.
Tenet's words near the end of his statement are particularly telling:
In a followup article on the Tenet statement, CBS News Correspondent David Martin says, "Whoever deserves the blame, it appears the White House, in its desire to make the strongest case possible against Iraq, tried too hard to get the statement into the speech, and the CIA did not try hard enough to keep it out."
The article continues to say:
"Somebody in the administration, not in the agency, not at the CIA, wanted to put this in the speech and got the CIA to sign off on it, even though everybody knew within the U.S. government that there were real doubts about the validity of the report. And that's what constitutes the misleading quality of it."
An administration that uses misinformation, word games, and rhetoric to push a war agenda is supremely dangerous.
It is time to create an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration's possible distortion of evidence of Iraq's WMD programs. Thirty years ago, another popular administration overstepped its bounds and committed politically motivated crimes. At that time, a bi-partisan Senate established the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate the events surrounding the break-in. Serious as these crimes and the subsequent cover-up proved to be, a preemptive war premised on deception and distorted facts would be a scandal that surpasses Watergate by any measure.
It is time for the American people to know the truth.
Posted by glyphic at July 12, 2003 05:22 PM