Friday, November 11, 2005

Bush disregarded CIA warnings that there were no Al Qaeda-Iraq links

Now that the Democrats have forced the GOP's hand in the Senate to finish the so-called Part II of their investigation into whether the Bush administration lied to the Congress and the country to go to war in Iraq, more and more evidence of Bush's deceptions are coming out.

This is from today's CNN:
A January 2003 CIA report raised doubts about claims that al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons -- dramatic assertions that were repeated weeks later by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.
...
The CIA report appears to support a recently declassified document that revealed the Defense Intelligence Agency thought in February 2002 that the source, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was lying to interrogators.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, this week released the DIA report in alleging the administration cited faulty intelligence to argue for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
...
The document obtained by CNN was provided recently to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been pressing for an investigation into the ways in which the Bush administration used intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war.

In January and February 2003 President Bush and Powell each made dramatic assertions that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda and argued for military action to prevent Baghdad from providing its suspected stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
I'd like to know what Powell thinks of this evidence now surfacing that implicates him as well as the president, even though he was probably just reluctantly following orders. One thing is sure, he lost all his credibility here. It would have been smarter of him to quit, rather than go in front of the UN and lie for Bush and his minions, especially since he probably knew (or suspected) that the intelligence was faulty, and he could have used his sources in the Pentagon to find out if he was right.

This doesn't look good for Bush or the GOP at large. If more evidence comes out that he lied, next year the Democrats might really take back Congress, and then, what's going to stop them from impeaching Bush and Cheney?

No comments: