The calculating, craven, and ultimately treasonous Democrats admit that they’re not impeaching Bush because of a political calculation; that they can win in 08 by leaving him there, and making use of the status quo. As bad as that is however, there are additional reasons which are far more egregious than playing politics with American and Iraqi deaths and ruin.
It must first be remembered that only 22 Democrats voted against the resolution which unconstitutionally ceded Congressional War Powers to the President; The 2nd Iraq War therefor is inarguably a bipartisan disaster with an actual majority of Democrats supporting it.
Although it’s true insofar as they’ve admitted it, that the refusal to hold Bush accountable through impeachment, is a political decision made for the worst possible reasons, the more important reason Nancy Pelosi flagrantly violated her oath of office by saying “Impeachment is off the table”, is because an impeachment would bring about the presentation of evidence; evidence which would not only prove the case against Bush, but also his enablers.
Dick Durbin recently went public with an accusation against Hillary Clinton; that she, and others who sat of the Select Foreign Intelligence Committee, were privy to declassified intelligence that contained additional facts which were exculpatory to Iraq, beyond those which the rest of Congress were presented. I read the declassified NIE presented to Congress, and like so many others outside of government who studied the matter, I was able to conclude that the case against Saddam Hussien was not only filled with doubt, but that his current possession of the alleged WMD and nuclear capability was highly improbable. If those of us ordinary citizens who correctly read and interpreted the declassified NIE could come to the right conclusion, how much more then, should the members of the Select Foreign Intelligence Committee who received additional intelligence which weakened an already weak case, even further?
The star witness for the prosecution of Saddam Hussein as a “threat” to the United States and his neighbors, was Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s own Son in law and a defector who provided the entire stockpile list of WMD as read by Colin Powel to the UN Security Council as justification for war. I do not know what additional exculpatory evidence the Select Foreign Intelligence Committee was privy to, but the transcripts of the interrogation of Hussien Kamel which were declassified and widely available both to the entire Congress, and you and I via the internet, already contained a piece of exculpatory information which was knowingly and willfully withheld from the court (The U.N.) by the Bush administration: "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal." (p.8)…… "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed." (p.8) ……."I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
(p. 13)…. We gave insturctions [sic] not to produce chemical weapons." (p.13). -Hussein Kamel, head of Iraq's military industries.
LIES, LIES, LIES:
# Prime Minister Tony Blair in his statement to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, said: "It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam's son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered."
# President Bush declared in a 7 October 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."
# Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."
# In a speech on 26 August 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself".
It is a crime against the court in every court to knowingly withhold exculpatory evidence.
The “WMD stockpile” list which was read before the U.N. Security Council was quoted verbatim from Hussein Kamel’s interrogation transcript. The final statements by Kamel –(Those weapons were all destroyed in 1991) was deliberately dis-included from the evidence as otherwise read from the transcript. Furthermore, without the witness in question –Hussein Kamel- there was no “list” of WMD. His testimony was the sole basis for the case presented to the U.N. This was more than enough for me and so many others who did their pre-war homework, to conclude that the case against Saddam Hussein was without merit, and even further, to conclude beyond any doubt, that the deliberate secreting of the most important exculpatory statement on record, was proof positive that the Bush administration was lying through their teeth. The innermerable statements by Bush and Cheney that regarding WMD “There can be no doubt”, was not only the biggest lie ever told in the political history of the United States, but the most easilly proven lie ever told. There was nothing BUT “doubt” and they knew it. It was reported by an un-named source inside the White House, that when Colin Powel was first presented with the charges he read before the U.N. Security Council, that he threw the stack of papers into the air and shouted “This is bullshit!”. Indeed it was, and Powel knew it. But WHY then, did he go on to present a case he knew was a lie?
The answer to that, and many other questions would probably come to light in impeachment proceedings against Bush. We know that under Bush 41, April Glaspie (State Department) was approached by an envoy from Saddam Hussein regarding his ongoing border dispute with Kuwait, and that Glaspie was clearly told by the envoy that Saddam wanted permission from the United States to use military force against Kuwait to “solve the problem” if he could not solve it peacefully. We also know, as a matter of record, that rather than Bush 41’s representative telling Saddam’s envoy “Do not attack Kuwait”, Glaspie’s message to Saddam was “Your internal Arab disputes are none of our concern”.
We know also, that through two-terms of the Clinton administration, the so-called “containment” of Saddam Hussein was predicated on economic sanctions which resulted in the starvation deaths of at least half a million Iraqi children, and we further know that –according to the star WMD witness, Husein Kamel – the Clinton administration was engaged in a policy of brutal economic oppression resulting in the loss of innocent life, with the knowledge that Saddam probably had in fact actually complied and destroyed the weapons in question. This then creates an unavoidable conclusion: The first Gulf War was deliberately fostered by Bush 41 through deceit via the State Department, the decades of so-called “containment” were predicated knowingly to the death of half a million innocent children by the Clinton administration, and that this long range deceit culminated in the final deception; unprovoked, unwarrented war by George W. Bush, with the full support of Bill Clinton; there was a damned good reason Bill Clinton went onto Larry King and had Bush’ back when he said Bush “Didn’t lie”: They all lied. Powel ultimately chose to lie to the whole world because he was up to his ass in decades of deception regarding Saddam; Like any organized crime participant, Powel lied because he was already dirty and he was ultimately forced to.
Any impeachment of George W. Bush has implications far beyond this administration; as the evidence is brought forward, it would inevitably threaten not just Bush and Cheney, but would threaten the entire political establishment through a revelation that “this mess” has been an evolving conspiracy spanning almost 20 years. It would threatened to take down the entire political establishment.
The removal of impeachment from the table and refusal to impeach Bush by Nancy Pelosi, goes far beyond immediate political expediency, as overtly corrupt as that concept alone is; it is protecting the Democratic front runner from voluminous evidence that her husband was first complicit in fraud and crimes against humanity, and that she herself has continued the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon the American people through her knowledge that in fact Saddam probably did NOT possess WMD. Whatever she knew, whatever her husband knew, and whatever Bush 41 initiated, is all threatened with exposure were the requisite evidentiary hearing to proceed concurrent with impeachment proceeding against George W. Bush.
This is why the claims by right-wingers of “Yeah but Clinton thought they had WMD” as a defense, carry absolutely no weight with me in my assessment of the situation. No, he didn’t. Bill Clinton knew with certainty by August of 1995, the date of the defection and interrogation of Hussein Kamel, that the ONLY reliable governmental source for any conclusion of U.N. weapons violations, had cleared Saddam and placed him in probable U.N. compliance.
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