[Peace-discuss] Baghdad is Bush's Blue Dress

[patton paul]

Apparently, fooling around with an intern is a grave crime, but
killing tens of thousands of people based on false pretenses, subverting
the constitution and violating the UN charter is OK.
-Paul P.

Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress
by Robert Scheer


Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S.
weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of
mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S.
invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in
arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the
Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a
broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of
Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.

In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake,
both in preserving constitutional safeguards and national security. This
egregious deception in leading us to war on phony intelligence overshadows
those scandals based on greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding
administration, or those aimed at political opponents, such as Watergate.
And the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying
reality even as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to speak the
truth.

A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address to paint Iraq's
allegedly vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction as a grave threat to
the U.S. and the world, Bush spent this month's State of the Union
defending the war because "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of
mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Bush said officials
were still "seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs but noted
that weapons searchers had already identified "dozens of weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities."

Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA Today and the Los
Angeles Times echoed this fudging  last year's "weapons" are now called
"programs"  declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had WMDs
and, "I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was
some fundamental flaw in our intelligence."

Yet three days after the State of the Union address, Kay quit and then
began telling the world what the administration had denied since taking
over the White House: That Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of the
military force it had been at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that
he believed it had no significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
programs or stockpiles in place, and that the United Nations inspections
and allied bombing in the '90s had been more effective at eroding the
remnants of these programs than critics had thought.

"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly
produced weapons of mass destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We
don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would
expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually
reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990s. Somewhere in the mid-1990s the
large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated. The Iraqis
say they believed that [the U.N. inspection program] was more effective
[than U.S. analysts believed], and they didn't want to get caught."

The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed Kay to set the
record straight. The administration's systematic abuse of the facts,
including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two
years. That's why 23 former U.S. intelligence experts  including several
who quit in disgust  have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's
shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an
administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building,
then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is
that not an impeachable offense?

After all, the president misled Congress into approving his preemptive war
on the grounds that our very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we hesitated, allowing
the U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud
over New York, to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our dark
reward.

Now that Kay  who, it should be remembered, once defended the war and
dismissed the work of the U.N. inspectors  has had $900 million and at
least 1,200 weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA and
elsewhere had been telling us all along, are there to be no real
repercussions for such devastating official deceit?

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times