According to a newly released Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, Bush knew that pre-war claims about Iraq were untrue. Most people, particularly the ten million around the globe that protested before the invasion, knew the intelligence was sexed up and sold and most of our Congress bought it.
Among the reports conclusions:
* Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence.”
* The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.
* Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq’s weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.
* Cheney’s claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.
Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va, who voted in favor of the invasion is now concluding the country was duped by the Bush administration.
“The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said ‘we want to go to war,'”
Those of us who have lost sons and daughters, or had them wounded and disabled by the Iraq war, do not appreciate having our military so sorely misused. Yesterday, during our weekly vigil here in Coquille, a woman veteran came up to assert that veterans owe their allegiance to George W Bush because he was made president by God. She asserts the duty of anyone in the military is to obey their commander in chief… but the first oath is always to the constitution, to defend the constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. Once ordered to violate the constitution and then to follow that order violates that primary oath.
