Senate Intelligence Report: Can You Say “Impeachment”?

The Progressive | With the release of the Senate Select Committee Report, impeachment is more urgent than ever. Here we have the proof that the President and the Vice President repeatedly misled the nation into war.

They failed to acknowledge uncertainties within the intelligence community over Saddam’s alleged nuclear weapons program and his biological and chemical weapons.

They fast-forwarded the timeline when Saddam could actually acquire a nuclear weapon, and Cheney himself at one point prior to the war said Saddam had actually already “reconstituted” nuclear weapons.

Their claims that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a partnership and that Iraq was providing weapons training to Al Qaeda “were not substantiated by the intelligence.”

And their claims that Saddam was prepared to hand off WMD to terrorists for an attack against the United States “were contradicted by available intelligence information.”

In short, Bush and Cheney were making stuff up to buttress their case for war.

“In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq, Administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security,” wrote

Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV at the back of the report. “The President and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the [9/11] attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the Nation to war on false premises.”

Taking a country into war on false premises certainly rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Rockefeller should send a copy of his report directly over to the offices of Representative John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, who has an obligation under our Constitution to initiate impeachment proceedings immediately.

After more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed and 30,000 wounded, after hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died for Bush and Cheney’s lies, after $600 billion has been squandered, will we not have accountability in this country?

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