Prepare for Another Whitewash
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In the wake of an investigation that largely cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair of
falsifying intelligence that was
used to justify the invasion of Iraq,
President Bush now calls for a similar inquiry into the "sources" that lead to our
involvement.
As the New York Times blighthly notes, this undertaking is awash with difficulties. Some
would say flawed form the outset. Notably Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the
senate committee
tasked to investigate this type of failure Last November, Chairman Pat Roberts
(R-Kan.) took the unusual step of canceling all business of the Select Committee
on Intelligence: demanding an apology for a democratic memo outlining a plan to
include the executive branch and the white house in the investigation. Roberts claims
the memo was intentionally leaked to the public: Rockefeller claims it was pilfered.
In any case, public knowledge of this memo was the excuse the Republicans used
to shut down what might have been a valid investigation of the false basis of the Iraq
war. The problem was apparently not the intelligence itself, but its use and
interpretation by the executive branch, as Rockefeller indicated last
year:
"...The presentation of fraudulent information regarding Iraq's nuclear program in the
president's State of the Union address -- and assertions by intelligence analysts that
their judgments were discounted when they did not support the administration's
pro-war policies.
Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into
these matters, my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential
misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the
usually secure Senate intelligence committee and distributed to the media."
But the entire controversy crumbles to dust when we consider these words:
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on weapons of mass destruction
because it was the one issue everyone could agree on."
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned over this issue, rather than be
associated with a fraud, or as he explains:
The time has come for the British government to concede that we did not go to war
because Saddam was a threat to our national interests. We went to war for reasons
of US foreign policy and Republican domestic politics.
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