Congressman John Conyers Talks About Bush Lying America Into War and His Campaign to Hold Bush Accountable: The Downing Street Memo and Moresnip
John Conyers, Jr.: Well, this has been one of those projects that come to your attention, and you begin to express some surprise that nobody has inquired into it before. This Downing Street declassified British intelligence memorandum wasn’t the result of weeks of hard investigation and deep research on the part of our staff. It appeared in a newspaper and was being widely circulated in the media around Europe. The number of countries in Europe, their newspapers, their television and radio, were all full of it.
And so we were surprised that there had been almost a wall of silence herein the United States that we couldn’t get through, that was blocking us out. And to some extent, we’ve been able to get through this porous wall of silence so that we’ve finally gotten down to the fact that we know that according to the meetings that were going on, that President Bush had enlisted Mr. Blair into a plan to start a war with a country with which we had very little reason to go to war with. And the notion was to find out why they did this and why was the President of the United States denying that it was his intention to go to war when it was very clear among the Bush Cabinet and Mr. Blair and his organization that that was exactly what they were going to do.
And so we have a couple of pretty important questions that leap up at one immediately. And the first was: why did the President deny to the Congress that he was planning to go to war, when at the same time he was implementing plans to go to war? And that is a very disturbing feature. The second thing that comes to mind right away is that if the Congress had known that the President was already laying plans for war, would they have given him additional military authority? The debate would have been quite different, I would presume. I would not give him that authority. I would use his intentions and desire to start a war with another country as an additional reason not to give him the power. And I think a number of other people would have rethought their positions. It would have been a much, much different debate.
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John Conyers, Jr.: What you’re raising deals with the fact that the United States, starting with the President, had to engineer a justification for war by provoking a confrontation with Saddam Hussein. And further, that they had to arrange the scenario, fix the books to make the case for war, as it was stated, to remove Saddam through military actions justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. And the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policies.
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