http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/06/1354218AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed you when you were talking about the impeachable crimes of George Bush, if in fact he lied. Are you convinced he did now?
JOHN DEAN: I am convinced he did lie, and in fact I put an appendix in the book to really show others how they can establish that for themselves. What I did is I looked at one of his major speeches. And took the statements that he had made relying on rather publicly available material. It's not highly classified. There are reports that anyone who takes the trouble to look online can find. And you can see where he literally takes a statement and drops all of the qualifications, all of the modifiers and makes it a declarative statement. He does it time after time after time. This is a misrepresentation of the facts. When he went to Congress in October of 2002 to get a resolution to go to war in Iraq, he wanted something that the Congress had never given before, which was a delegation of a power that he wouldn't have to go back to Congress to get war powers when he actually went to war. The Congress had never granted such a power. So, the Congress said, all right. We'll take the two -- we'll do this with conditions. The two conditions are -- really the premise that he had been arguing for war. So, when they granted the resolution, they said, we want a formal Presidential declaration from you that, one, there is no diplomatic way to resolve the problems of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the first condition. The second condition was that going to war in Iraq would be consistent with the war on terrorism, which was his second point, that there was an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Hussein, was the implicit rationale. Bush, in a secret deal with the House of Representatives, agreed to that. The resolution was written, passed and signed by the President. No one really paid any attention to this resolution, and the President in March of 2003 goes to war. 48 hours after, under the resolution, he had to report that he had done that, and he had to submit his formal declaration. His declaration is one of the most -- I can't really find the right word for it, Amy. It's just -- I use all of the modifiers I can think of in the book. It's a fraud. It is a deliberate, misleading resolution the President himself asked for. It's a violation of trust to the Congress who granted him very unusual powers. It's a violation of the trust of the American people. His declaration is phony. His determination, excuse me, is phony. It's actually bizarre. So I lay that out in the book to explain to people what he has done and how he did it, and how questionable it really is...
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