'Iraq might be Bush's Watergate'
Sunday, June 15 @ 09:14:10 EDT
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By Tom Brazaitis, Cleveland Plain Dealer
On March 21, 1973, at a meeting in the Oval Office, John Dean warned President Richard M. Nixon, "We have a cancer close to the presidency that's growing."
Dean's warning went unheeded and Nixon's presidency was consumed in scandal. For his own role in the Watergate cover-up, Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, spent four months in prison. Three decades later, Dean says Americans are witnessing "the first poten tial scandal that could make Watergate pale by comparison."
Writing for the Internet publication FindLaw, Dean says President George W. Bush must answer for launching a war against Iraq on the basis of numerous unequivocal statements that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction when, in fact, no such weapons have been found.
"If Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean says. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security in telligence data, if proven, could be a high crime' under the Constitution's impeach ment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.' "
Dean stops short of calling for Bush's impeachment, but warns that "after Wa tergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a seri ous abuse of presidential power."
To refresh your memory on what the president said about Iraq's WMD, here are just a few of many citations in Dean's case against Bush:
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." - Radio address, Oct. 5, 2002
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, in cluding mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas." - Cincinnati, Ohio speech, Oct. 7, 2002
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever de vised." - Address to the nation, March 17, 2003
Although he rejected pleas to give United Nations inspectors more time to search for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons before launching the war, Bush now asks for an indefinite extension of time to find the weapons he had assured the world were stockpiled in Iraq.
Before "rolling out" its plan to invade Iraq (to use the advertising term adopted by Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff) members of Bush's national security team debated various selling points.
In an interview in Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz let slip, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason."
Dean says there is still a chance that the alleged WMD will be found, which would fit this president's pattern of lowering ex pectations, then exceeding them. But Dean puts forth three other possible scenarios: 1) that the stockpiles of weapons were smuggled out of Iraq and are now in the hands of terrorists, 2) that U.S. intelli gence agencies badly misread the situa tion, or 3) that "the intelligence was satis factory but that it was manipulated so as just to present to the American people and to the world those things that made the case for the necessity of war."
A Washington Post story last week quotes an unidentified senior intelligence official accusing the CIA of "extremely sloppy handling of a central piece of evi dence in the administration's case" against Iraq. A senior CIA analyst goes further by saying the case "is indicative of larger problems" involving the handling of intel ligence used to justify the war. "Informa tion not consistent with the administra tion agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized," the story quotes the analyst as saying.
So far, the American public does not seem disturbed by the suspicion that the country went to war on false pretenses. Large majorities tell pollsters that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was reason enough to launch a pre-emptive strike.
As for the president stretching the truth, at least some members of the public be lieve that Bush's so-far-unverified claim that Saddam was sitting on thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons pales next to Bill Clinton lying under oath about an extramarital affair.
In an e-mail making just that compari son, reader Ken Ross of Brecksville wrote, "Regardless of the efforts to discredit our president, parents and grandparents will be ever thankful to him and the military for having the courage to take the neces sary action to dispose of Saddam and his regime that posed such a grave threat to the future of the free world."
Pass the freedom fries.
Brazaitis, formerly a Plain Dealer senior editor, is a Washington columnist.
tbrazaitis@starpower.net
Reprinted from The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
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