Friday, October 21, 2005

AlterNet: War on Iraq: A Long Overdue Frog-March

Bushco punished people who stood in the way of their push to war with Iraq. Now we are at the point of exposure of their treaonable conspiracy. Bush may yet hold things off by firing his prosecutor.

AlterNet: War on Iraq: A Long Overdue Frog-March: "The sixteen words

Powell had long since decided that the Iraq-Niger report did not pass the smell test. But he was apparently afraid to incur Cheney's wrath by telling the president. Powell's own intelligence analysts at the State Department had branded the story 'highly dubious,' so he had chosen to drop it from the long litany of spurious charges against Iraq that he recited at the U.N. on February 5, 2003, a performance that Powell now admits constitutes a 'blot' on his record. Asked to defend President George W. Bush's use of the Iraq-Africa story in his State of the Union address in January 2003, the best Powell could do was to describe the president's (in)famous '16 words' as 'not totally outrageous,' a comment that did not help all that much.

Those in Congress who felt they had been misled by the story, which the White House PR machine had shaped into a 'mushroom cloud,' were in high dugeon. For example, in the days before the attack on Iraq, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote the president to complain that Waxman and his colleagues had been deceived out of their constitutional prerogative to declare or otherwise authorize war."

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