and other laws.
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“But the President and Republicans seem far more interested in confusing the issue and attacking their opponents than getting honest answers.
Let’s be clear: there is no question that Americans were misled into war in Iraq. Simply put, they were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when he did not.
The issue is whether they were misled intentionally. Just as there is a distinction between being wrong and being dishonest, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and making statements that you know are not supported by the intelligence. “The bottom line is that the President and his Administration did mislead America into war.
In fact, the war in Iraq was and remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history. The facts are incontrovertible. The act of misleading was pretending to Americans that they hadn’t made a decision to go to war, and would seriously pursue inspections when the evidence strongly suggests that they had already decided to take out Saddam Hussein, were anxious to do it for ideological reasons, and hoped that inspections, which Vice President Cheney had opposed and tried to prevent, would not get in their way. “The President misled America about his intentions and the manner in which he would make his decision. We now know his speech in Cincinnati right before the authorization vote was carefully orchestrated window dressing where again he misled America by promising that “If we have to act, we will take every precaution that is possible. We will plan carefully.” He did none of these things.
“The act of misleading was just going through the motions of inspections while it appears he really couldn’t wait to just kick Saddam Hussein out of power.
“The act of misleading was pretending to Americans the real concern was weapons of mass destruction when the evidence suggests that his real intent was to finish the job his father wisely refused and remove Saddam Hussein to “remake the Middle East”. “The act of misleading was saying in his Cincinnati speech that “Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable” when the evidence suggests that all along the goal was always to replace Saddam Hussein through an invasion. For most of us in Congress, the goal was to destroy weapons of mass destruction. For President Bush, weapons of mass destruction were just the first public relations means to the end of removing Saddam Hussein. For most of the rest of us, removing Saddam Hussein was incidental to the end of removing any weapons of mass destruction.
“In fact, the President was misleading America right up until two days before launching his war of choice when he told Americans we had exhausted all other avenues. The truth is that on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday launch of the war, there were offers Security Council members to pursue an alternative to war, but the Administration, in its race to go to war, rebuffed them, saying “the time for diplomacy is over.”
“By shortcutting the inspections process and sidestepping his own promises about planning, coalition building, and patience, the President used WMD as an excuse to rush to war. That was an act of misleading contrary to everything the President told Americans about the walkup to war.
“The very worst that Members of Congress can be accused of is trusting the intelligence we were selectively given by this Administration, and taking the President at his word. But unlike this Administration, there is absolutely no suggestion that we intentionally went beyond what we were told were the facts. That is the greatest offense by the Administration. Just look at their most compelling justification for war: Saddam’s nuclear program and his connections with Al Qaeda.
“The facts speak for themselves. The White House has admitted that the President told Congress and the American public in the State of the Union Address that Saddam was attempting to acquire fuel for nuclear weapons despite the fact that the CIA specifically told the Administration three times, in writing and verbally, not to use this intelligence. Obviously, Democrats didn’t get that memo. In fact, similar statements were removed from a prior speech by the President, and Colin Powell refused to use it in his presentation to the UN.
This is not relying on faulty intelligence, as Democrats did; it is knowingly, and admittedly, misleading the American public on a key justification for going to war.
“This is what the Administration was trying so desperately to hide when it attacked Ambassador Wilson and compromised national security by outing his wife. It is shameful that to this day Republicans continue to attack Ambassador Wilson rather than condemning the fact that those sixteen words were ever spoken, and that so many lies were told to cover it up.
How are the same Republicans who tried to impeach a President over whether he misled a nation about an affair going to pretend it does not matter if the Administration intentionally misled the country into war? “The State of the Union was hardly an isolated event. In fact, it was part of a concerted campaign to twist the intelligence to justify a war they had already decided to fight. Again playing on people’s fears after 9/11, the Administration made statements about the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq that went beyond that what the intelligence supported. As recently reported by the New York Times, in a Cincinnati address the President said “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases” despite the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency had previously concluded that that source was a fabricator.
“The President went on to say that ‘Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons’ despite the fact that the Air Force disagreed with that conclusion. As the Wall Street Journal reported, ‘the Air Force dissent…was kept secret even as the President publicly made the opposite case…before a congressional vote on the war resolution.’ That’s two more memos that Congress never got.
“In fact, when faced with the intelligence community’s consensus conclusion that there was no formal relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the Administration set up their own intelligence shop at DoD to get them some answers better suited to their agenda. Again, there is a fundamental difference between believing incorrect intelligence and making up your own intelligence.
“Where would Republicans and the President draw the line? No where. How else would 70% of the American public be lead to conclude that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11? This was no accident. In fact, I had to correct the President in the first debate when he said it was Saddam Hussein who attacked us. Why else did Vice President Cheney cite intelligence about a meeting between one of the 9/11 hijackers and Iraqis that the intelligence community and the 9/11 Commission concluded never took place? Why else make false statements about Saddam’s ability to launch a chemical or biological weapons attack in under an hour without clearing that with the CIA - which mistrusted the source and refused to include it in the NIE? Why else would they say we would be greeted by liberators when their own intelligence reports said we could be facing a prolonged and determined insurgency? Why else tell Americans that Iraqi oil would pay for the invasion when they had to know that the dilapidated oil infrastructure would never allow that? “And what about the President’s promises to Congress that he would work with allies, that he would exhaust all options, that he would not rush to war? If the President wants to use quotes of mine from 2002, he might look at the ones that were not the result of relying faulty intelligence and trusting the President’s word. As I said in my floor statement before the authorization vote: “If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day…Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible.”
“In my speech at Georgetown on the eve of the war, I said: ‘the United States should never go to war because it wants to, the United States should go to war because we have to. And we don't have to until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people…We need to make certain that we have not unnecessarily twisted so many arms, created so many reluctant partners, abused the trust of Congress, or strained so many relations, that the longer term and more immediate vital war on terror is made more difficult…I say to the President, show respect for the process of international diplomacy because it is not only right, it can make America stronger - and show the world some appropriate patience in building a genuine coalition. Mr. President, do not rush to war.’ Today our troops continue to bear the burden of that promise broken by this Administration. “We need to move forward with fixing the mess the Administration has created in Iraq, and I have laid out in detail my views about how to accomplish our goals and get our troops home in a reasonable amount of time. But that does not excuse our responsibility to hold the Administration accountable if they knowingly misled the country when American lives were at stake. We can, and we must, do both. And Republicans need to stop pretending it doesn’t matter if the Administration stretched the truth beyond recognition and start working to find the real answers the country deserves - and the real leadership our troops in Iraq deserve from a Commander in Chief, not just a Campaigner in Chief.” # # #
http://kerry.senate.gov/v3/cfm/record.cfm?id=248761&Video of the entire speech at the link.
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