Wolfowitz’s Admission Should Cause Impeachment
A number of recent revelations confirm that the Administration knowingly lied about the war and its causes. From their own mouths we know with certainty that they cooked up an explanation for the war that would most scare people - the facts be damned. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s key aide, was quoted in Vanity Fair magazine as saying, "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." Since the Administration was flooded with angry letters, undoubtedly many from families of U.S. soldiers, following the publication of the Wolfowitz interview, the Pentagon attempted to do damage control, asserting that he was misquoted. But that didn't help much either. The Pentagon’s own version of the interview has Wolfowitz saying: "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."
The public now knows, as does every member of Congress, that in April 2002 Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair secretly agreed to wage unprovoked war against Iraq at a meeting at Bush’s Crawford ranch in Texas. This fact and other incriminating information about the secret maneuvers to wage unprovoked war are contained in British government documents, obtained by Michael Smith, a defense specialist writing for the Sunday Times of London. They include a memo of the minutes of a meeting July 23, 2002, between Blair and his intelligence and military chiefs; a briefing paper for that meeting, and a Foreign Office legal opinion prepared before an April 2002 summit between Blair and Bush in Texas.
In a letter to Bush earlier this month 89 House Democrats expressed shock over the documents. They asked if the papers were authentic and, if so, whether they proved that the White House had agreed to invade Iraq months before seeking Congress' OK. (Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2005)
"If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of our own administration," the letter says.
"While the president of the United States was telling the citizens and the Congress that they had no intention to start a war with Iraq, they were working very close with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone conclusion," the letter's chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said Wednesday.
The evidence is clear. As Ramsey Clark recently stated: "Impeachment now is the only way we, the American people, can promise ourselves and the world that we will not tolerate crimes against peace and humanity by our government. Knowing what we know, to wait longer is to condone what has been done and risk more." |
