We've moved on in this country, from examining how this war was started, to, how the hell do we get out of it? And I understand that. I even see the point of people who say, look however we got here, we're in deep shit, and we have to all work together to get out of it. They're not wrong.
But...look at this piece in the WAPO today. I've pasted two paragraphs, but it's filled with facts about the run-up, and they are not prett, and anyone who says "bush didn't lie he was mistaken" is being willfully ignorant. Because he lied. Ok? We're not going to find a tape of bush and cheney giggling in the oval office saying "yeah I know it's all bullshit, but we want to go to war anyway, so let's just lie and say it's true". And there are people in this country, who demand that you produce just that in order to conclude that bush lied. And they are hurting this country. Because if an adminstration gets away with taking this country to war, at the cost of the lives of tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of human beings, then what stops another adminstration down the road from doing the same?
But what if he were impeached? That then, changes history. Just as history would have been changed if Nixon was impeached and tried for his crimes. Should LBJ have been tried for the Gulf of Tonkin? History books now tell us that LBJ probably thought, in the first hours of the reports, that the incident did take place. However, he most defintely knew within days, that it had not. And LBJ was in many ways, a great man, and so it's hard to say this, but yes, he should have been impeached, because if LBJ had been impeached for lying once he knew that the incident was a false report, and escalating Vietnam for it, we would not have had a Watergate, and we would not have had an Iran-Contra, and we would not have had an Iraq. There are consequences in this life, and if you decide that Presidents need not suffer real consequences (other than in the history books and their approval ratings), then that decision in itself, has consequences. We live with them now, and we will live with them in the decades to come because we refused to call a lie a lie, a liar a liar, and impeach for it.
At this point, State Department analysts had determined the documents were phony, and had produced by far the most accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons program of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. But the department's small intelligence unit operated in a bubble. Few administration officials -- not even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- paid much attention to its analytical product, much of which clashed with the White House's assumptions
Five months later, on March 7, 2003, as preparations for the Iraq invasion were in their final stages, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the U.N. Security Council that the report that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger was based on forged documents. The agency had received the document from the United States a few weeks earlier.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201777.html?hpid=topnews
But...look at this piece in the WAPO today. I've pasted two paragraphs, but it's filled with facts about the run-up, and they are not prett, and anyone who says "bush didn't lie he was mistaken" is being willfully ignorant. Because he lied. Ok? We're not going to find a tape of bush and cheney giggling in the oval office saying "yeah I know it's all bullshit, but we want to go to war anyway, so let's just lie and say it's true". And there are people in this country, who demand that you produce just that in order to conclude that bush lied. And they are hurting this country. Because if an adminstration gets away with taking this country to war, at the cost of the lives of tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of human beings, then what stops another adminstration down the road from doing the same?
But what if he were impeached? That then, changes history. Just as history would have been changed if Nixon was impeached and tried for his crimes. Should LBJ have been tried for the Gulf of Tonkin? History books now tell us that LBJ probably thought, in the first hours of the reports, that the incident did take place. However, he most defintely knew within days, that it had not. And LBJ was in many ways, a great man, and so it's hard to say this, but yes, he should have been impeached, because if LBJ had been impeached for lying once he knew that the incident was a false report, and escalating Vietnam for it, we would not have had a Watergate, and we would not have had an Iran-Contra, and we would not have had an Iraq. There are consequences in this life, and if you decide that Presidents need not suffer real consequences (other than in the history books and their approval ratings), then that decision in itself, has consequences. We live with them now, and we will live with them in the decades to come because we refused to call a lie a lie, a liar a liar, and impeach for it.
At this point, State Department analysts had determined the documents were phony, and had produced by far the most accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons program of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. But the department's small intelligence unit operated in a bubble. Few administration officials -- not even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- paid much attention to its analytical product, much of which clashed with the White House's assumptions
Five months later, on March 7, 2003, as preparations for the Iraq invasion were in their final stages, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the U.N. Security Council that the report that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger was based on forged documents. The agency had received the document from the United States a few weeks earlier.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201777.html?hpid=topnews
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