A firm basis for impeachment
"A president who employed lies to lead us into war" - Robert Scheer:
On national security, the buck doesn't stop with Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA's concerns were backed by the State Department's conclusion that "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious."On Friday, Condo 'not me!' Rice admitted that she had known the intelligence unit "was the one that had objected to that sentence" and that Colin Powell had refused to use the Niger document in his UN presentation because of "long-standing concerns about its credibility."
But Rice also knew the case for bypassing U.N. inspections and invading Iraq required demonstrating an imminent threat. The terrifying charge that Iraq was hellbent on developing nuclear weapons would do the trick nicely. However, with the discrediting of the Niger buy and the equally dubious citation of a purchase of aluminum tubes (which turned out to be inappropriate for the production of enriched uranium), one can imagine the disappointment at the White House. There was no evidence for painting Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.
We now know, and perhaps the White House knew then, that the inspectors eventually would come up empty-handed because no weapons of mass destruction program existed — not even a stray vial of chemical and biological weapons has been discovered. However, that would have obviated the administration's key rationale for an invasion, so lies substituted for facts that didn't exist.
Reminder: only sperm cells died under Bill Clinton's watch.
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