Le Sequoit

Drip, Drip, Drip

It is becoming clear now that the ouster of George Bush is a real possibility. This is no story of white lies and sexual confessions ala Clinton, or of the political shenanigans of the Plumbers squad of the Nixon White House. This is the sad tale of the systematic misrepresentation of intelligence undertaken in the intention of selling an ill-advised, immoral, and ill-planned war on Iraq to the world, America and to our Congress.

We've already witnessed the massacre of the truth these dolts proliferated in the Niger yellow cake uranium/Plame/Wilson fiasco. Now the New York Times runs a story of a documented report from February, 2002, the gist being that the "revelation" of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, long since debunked, was immediately considered most likely untrue.

What revelation was this? That Iraq was training Al Qaeda terrorists in the use of explosives and chemical/biological warfare. This nay-saying report was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and would certainly have crossed the desk of one Donald Rumsfield and one Dick Cheney, yet this report was not offered up during phase one of the Senate investigation of intelligence quality, an interesting fact of itself. Now lets look at the speeches of our armchair warriors that offered this highly doubted intelligence as evidence of the necessity of war. This is from Colin Powell's infamous speech to the UN one year later, making the Administration's case for military action:

This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan.

His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.

The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

What did the DIA report, done one year prior, have to say about this "senior al Qaeda terrorist"?

It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.

The Times article goes on to report that around the time of Powell's speech a declassified statement from the CIA called al-Libi's story credible, while at the same time a classified assessment stated "the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place."

But Powell wasn't the first to refer to this "credible source". Turn the page back to Bush's October 7th, 2002 Cincinnati speech done just three days before Congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution. This speech should live in infamy―should be looped forever in the W Presidential Library as an example of the extremity of corruption that is possible in the political arena. The level of distortion throughout this speech―the White House, with typical bone-headedness, still heads it up on their site as "Iraq, Denial and Deception"―is only surpassed in repugnancy by the President's sledge hammering appeals to the public's fear of WMD's throughout.

Back to the subject of the day, though. Here are Bush's words given a full eight months after the recently declassified report had been distributed:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. (emphasis mine)

But we now know you knew you didn't know any such thing.

Increasingly the focus becomes not that information was wrong, but that the Administration knew it was wrong and used it to scare the begeezus out of us anyway.

This is beyond impeachable, this is seditious in it's recklessness. It's time to head the vans over to the White House and start loading documents. It's time to impeach the President and the Vice President, and for finding out who in the hell the senate pro-tem is because the Speaker is likely to be disqualified as well.

Judgment day is coming, it's clear that the flow of revelations is widening. Will we progressives be happy to see such a day? Hell, no. But it won't be the saddest day in America lately.

No, that would be the day so many of you voted for what was clearly to us a pack of self-serving liars.

posted by sequoit @ 3:01 PM