mardi 5 août 2008

We'd be within our rights to demand an apology

Remember when you would try to tell your friends that the case for war in Iraq was fabricated, that there were no mass stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks? Remember how that guy in the office called you a traitor? Remember the guy in the Hummer who tailgated you on the Turnpike because you had a "No Blood for Oil" bumper sticker on your car?

All those people owe you an apology, because you were right. And I wonder what hoops those people are jumping through now to justify what they believed then, especially in the face of this:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

[snip]

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

[snip]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.


Except there's going to be no impeachment. At this point there isn't time. The Bush Administration has effectively played out the clock, except for one little glitch: impeachment and conviction only serves to remove the president from office; it is not a criminal prosecution. I would rather see this president and his henchmen on trial for war crimes after he leaves office.

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