http://www.conyersblog.us/Drumbeat Continues on DSM
A couple of more stories to bring to your attention. The Knight Ridder news service has done exemplarary work on this issue, running several early and useful articles. Today, they ran another good article, detailing how the American public is souring on the war. They included a particularly good passage ridiculing the White House press office dismissing my investigation, since I voted against military action in the first place: "Did you catch the irony? Conyers has no credibility to challenge the president's actions toward Iraq, the White House argues, because Conyers has opposed the war from the beginning. Yet just a few months ago, the Bush people ridiculed Sen. John Kerry because Kerry allegedly supported the war before being against it - remember all the giddy supporters chanting ``Flip-flop! Flip-flop!''
I also would point out a great opinion piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled "Bush's pre-emptive war pre-empted Congress." Everyone of you who submits pieces like this to their local media, is doing a valuable service in keeping this critical issue in the public eye.
I am working on follow up to the hearing, and hope to have more to share with you next week.
The Knight-Ridder article:
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/11965588.htmPosted on Thu, Jun. 23, 2005
Americans inching closer to a reckoning
BY ROBERT STEINBACK
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT) - Do you want to know?
That's the only popular division that matters in the United States today: Those who want to determine once and for all if President Bush knowingly ``fixed the facts'' regarding Iraq, thereby misleading Congress and the American people into supporting an unnecessary war, and those who will cover their ears and hum loudly in order to maintain their belief that Bush and his advisors remain above reproach. You're in one camp or the other. Either you want to know if you've been lied to, or you don't.
The American public is inching tentatively toward a reckoning unlike any this nation has ever experienced. The oh-so-clever Bush administration strategists and their quasi-media acolytes, who have kept the reckoning at bay with a deft combination of we're-at-war patriotic fervor and fear-the-evil-liberals rhetoric, are running out of parlor tricks.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan last week held an unofficial public briefing - despite being forced into a tiny Capitol Hill basement by GOP leaders - to talk about the so-called Downing Street Memo. The July 2002 memo, published in the Times of London on May 1, recounted the views of top advisers to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the Bush administration had already made up its mind to invade Iraq despite an absence of justification, and that it appeared facts were being manipulated to support the policy.
Since its publication, other information has surfaced revealing that the Americans and the British tried unsuccessfully to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving them a justification for war - first by launching an unauthorized bombing campaign in 2002, then by pushing the United Nations to demand weapons inspectors return to Iraq - a gambit Hussein trumped by agreeing to do so. After the briefing, Conyers carried a letter to the White House, signed by more than 120 House members, asking for answers to questions provoked by the Downing Street Memo. Not only was Conyers rebuffed, he was slighted. White House press secretary Scott McClellan, in a press briefing that day, dismissed Conyers as ``an individual who voted against the war in the first place and is simply trying to rehash old debates that have already been addressed.''
more......
---
ABOUT THE WRITER
Robert Steinback is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: One Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132, or via e-mail at rsteinback@herald.com.
The Seattle PI op-ed:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/229775_loeb24.htmlSEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/229775_loeb24.htmlBush's pre-emptive war pre-empted Congress
Friday, June 24, 2005
PAUL LOEB
GUEST COLUMNIST
It's bad enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that their "coalition of the willing" meant the United States, Britain and the equivalent of a child's imaginary friends. It's even worse that, as the British Downing Street memo confirms, administration officials had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have to manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote.
With Rep. John Conyers holding hearings, the media are finally starting to cover the Downing Street memo. This transcript of a July 23, 2002, British prime minister's meeting, whose legitimacy the British government confirms, details their response to the Bush administration's intention to go to war against Iraq, no matter how Saddam Hussein responded, and even while claiming they were still seeking peaceful solutions.
"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," states the document. "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." As the document states, "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
The document is damning, particularly coupled with the testimony of former Bush ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that Bush was talking about invading Iraq as early as 1999. But it's even more disturbing as we start learning that this administration began actively fighting the Iraq war well in advance of the March 2003 official attack -- before both the October 2002 congressional authorization and the November United Nations resolution requiring that Saddam open the country up to inspectors.
more........
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Loeb of Seattle is the author of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear" (Basic Books), www.theimpossible.org.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
