In taking the Senate into special session today, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid exhibited what has been missing on the national stage since the Bush era began: real gravitas:
SEN. HARRY REID: America deserves better than this. They also deserve a searching and comprehensive investigation into how the Bush administration brought this country to war. Key questions that need to be answered include:
– How did the Bush administration assemble its case for war against Iraq? We heard what Colonel Wilkerson said.
– Who did the Bush administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?
– How did the senior administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?
– What was the role of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics? We know what Colonel Wilkerson says.
– How did the administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the administration’s assertions? We know what happened to them — I listed a few.
– Why has this administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that would shed light on their misconduct and the misstatements?Unfortunately, the Senate committee that should be taking the lead in providing these answers is not. Despite the fact that the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine these questions more than a year and a half ago, he has chosen not to keep that commitment. Despite the fact that he restated the commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing. …
Mr. President, enough time has gone by. I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that Senate go into closed session.
SEN. DICK DURBIN: Mr. President, I second the motion.
Actually, I don’t know what Col. Wilkerson says. Am I the only one?
Kudos to Harry Reid for doing something that should have been done two years ago – taking on the Republicans head-on, about the lies they used to take us into war against Iraq.
Democrats get nowhere by trying to be “patriotically correct” and saying this war was justified, but that the way it was carried out was flawed. That’s a crock. It was NOT justified, Iraq was no threat to anyone and we should have let the UN weapons inspectors finish doing their jobs. Instead, Dumbya, in a sick, perverted Oedipal snit, tried to prove he was more macho than his daddy and invaded a beaten, Third World country run by a tinhorn dictator that Bush’s dad promoted, funded and armed. In a just world, both of these Bushes would be on trial for treason!
Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to then-Sec of State Powell, said that in the run-up to the war, US foreign policiy was highjacked by a “cabal” run by Rumsfeld and Cheney, who took planning out of the normal policy apparatus and cowboyed it themselves.