Six more US soldiers died in Iraq today. For what?
David Kay, who the _resident named to prove Hans Blix
wrong, has washed his hands and gone home. According
to Kay, there were/are no WMD in Iraq... Now the Bush
cabal is trying to blame the CIA for another
"intelligence breakdown," just as they have done in
regard to 9/11. But, just as there was no
"intelligence breakdown" about the 9/11 attacks, there
was no "intelligence breakdown" on Iraq. Indeed, the
CIA analysts have called it correctly all
along...That's why VICE _resident Cheney kept showing
up at Langley and pressing them to say 2+2=5. Well,
they wouldn't. So Cheney and Rumsfeld just set up a
little shop of there own in the Pentagon to just
fabricate what they needed(that's where whistleblower
Karen Kwiatowski earned her name scarwled on the John
O'Neill Wall of Heroes -- look her up in the LNS
searchable database)...Of course, the "US mainstream
news media" and its propapunditgandists refuse to
connect the dots between all of these stories. The
deaths of 500 US soldiers (and the many more to come)
have forced them to run the revelations one after
another, but so far they refuse to tell the story that
they all weave into...
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles: Now, can we talk of
impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S.
weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did
not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means
to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion
confirms the fact that the Bush administration is
complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S.
history.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0127-07.htm
Published on Tuesday, January 27, 2004 by the Los
Angeles Times
Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress
by Robert Scheer
Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission
by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that
Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass
destruction or the means to create them at the time of
the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush
administration is complicit in arguably the greatest
scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the
Republicans control both houses of Congress that we
hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the
type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's
infamous blue dress.
In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance
was so much at stake, both in preserving
constitutional safeguards and national security. This
egregious deception in leading us to war on phony
intelligence overshadows those scandals based on
greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding
administration, or those aimed at political opponents,
such as Watergate. And the White House continues to
dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even
as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to
speak the truth.
A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address
to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction as a grave threat to the U.S. and the
world, Bush spent this month's State of the Union
defending the war because "had we failed to act, the
dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would
continue to this day." Bush said officials were still
"seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs
but noted that weapons searchers had already
identified "dozens of weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities."
Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA
Today and the Los Angeles Times echoed this fudging —
last year's "weapons" are now called "programs" —
declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq
had WMDs and, "I am a long way at this stage from
concluding that somehow there was some fundamental
flaw in our intelligence."
Yet three days after the State of the Union address,
Kay quit and then began telling the world what the
administration had denied since taking over the White
House: That Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of
the military force it had been at the time of the 1991
Persian Gulf War, that he believed it had no
significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
programs or stockpiles in place, and that the United
Nations inspections and allied bombing in the '90s had
been more effective at eroding the remnants of these
programs than critics had thought.
"I'm personally convinced that there were not large
stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass
destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't
find the people, the documents or the physical plants
that you would expect to find if the production was
going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles
throughout the 1990s. Somewhere in the mid-1990s the
large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was
eliminated…. The Iraqis say they believed that [the
U.N. inspection program] was more effective [than U.S.
analysts believed], and they didn't want to get
caught."
The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't
needed Kay to set the record straight. The
administration's systematic abuse of the facts,
including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has
been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S.
intelligence experts — including several who quit in
disgust — have been willing to speak out in Robert
Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The
story they tell is one of an administration that went
to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then
constructed a false reality to sell it to the American
people. Is that not an impeachable offense?
After all, the president misled Congress into
approving his preemptive war on the grounds that our
very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we
hesitated, allowing the U.N. inspectors who were in
Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud over New York,
to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our
dark reward.
Now that Kay — who, it should be remembered, once
defended the war and dismissed the work of the U.N.
inspectors — has had $900 million and at least 1,200
weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA
and elsewhere had been telling us all along, are there
to be no real repercussions for such devastating
official deceit?
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
###