Is it possible, can it really be true, that President Bush deliberately misled the American public about Iraq? Please, say it isn’t so. Somebody tell me this is all a bad dream.
By now you must surely know that an official report released last Thursday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says that President Bush and Vice President Cheney knowingly made false allegations about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, and used those false allegations to justify sending America into a war with Iraq. In other words, the Committee report said, our president and our vice president lied.
They knowingly lied to Congress and the public about the threat Iraq posed to the United States in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Let me repeat that so that we can all really get it. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says that President Bush and Vice President Cheney…
…knowingly LIED TO CONGRESS and the PUBLIC about the threat Iraq posed to the United States in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
This, combined with the scathing allegations of the same thing coming from Scott McCellan, then White House press secretary, have to make it virtually impossible for anyone…even the staunchest Republicans or supporters of the war, to not shake their head in disappointment and deep sadness at the very thought that this even could be true — much less that it is.
And those who must feel the greatest sadness of all have to be the Americans who lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters — and who are losing them still today — because of all this alleged deception.
Conversations with God speaks of a new kind of world, a new kind of politics, a new kind of life on our planet in which we never again lie, deceive, falsify or manipulate information about anything for any reason whatsoever. I don’t want to believe that my president and my vice president deliberately lied to me. I don’t want to believe it.
But the far bigger thing that I don’t want to believe is that we may actually buy into this Fear Story again. Now we have John McCain telling us that Barack Obama’s plan to get us out of this war within 16 months of his inauguration is going to threaten our security once again, forcing us to leave Iraq “before the job is finished” (I am paraphrasing here, but I believe that is the essence of his statements) and while we are “finally making some progress.”
Now I want to say this about George Bush and Dick Cheney. I do not believe that they deliberately lied. Not to the Congress, not to the press, and not to the American people. What possible reason would two upstanding public servants of the caliber of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have to falsify facts or distort the data in order to justify a plan to invade a sovereign nation, start a war, and depose a dictator?
Isn’t it possible that the president and the vice president were honestly and truly misled by the torrent of intelligence data they were receiving — and innocently passed their misunderstandings and misinterpretations on to us?
I want to believe — I deeply want to believe — in the fundamental goodness and the basic honesty of our president and our vice president. They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction being hidden in Iraq. They were wrong about the presence of disguised mobile chemical plants building biological weapons to use against us. They were wrong about any connection between Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist group and the government of Iraq. They were wrong, wrong, wrong about every single justification they used to urge us into war. But they were not deliberately lying to the Congress, the media, and the whole world.
…were they?
Well, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has concluded, after months and months of investigation, that they were. But I don’t believe it, do you…?
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