Shut it ALL down!!!!

November 09, 2005

Shut-R-Down

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Until the Bush administration comes clean – which is to say, is forced to come clean – on its manipulation of prewar intelligence, Congressional Democrats are not only entitled, but obligated to impede all other business. In the nation’s interest they should neutralize the powers that be with every parliamentary trick in the book until we have answers and accountability. No legislation, no spending bills, no court confirmations, no nothing until the governed know how deep the governing malfeasance went.

The latest bombshell pointing to criminal duplicity is that the White House continued disseminating discredited intelligence well after it knew better, a fact that belies apologists’ mantra that the Bush administration only believed what everyone else believed. When it came to intelligence on Iraq’s nefariousness, so the tiresome party line goes, the poor dears at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were as duped as the world and the Clinton administration before.

Now, however, there is direct evidence that the party line on flawed intelligence findings has been as deliberately contrived as the war’s rationalizations, just as so many suspected from the get-go.


According to a Defense Intelligence Agency document released by the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, the administration continued citing – as “credible” – information provided by a Qaeda captive quickly deemed quite in-credible by the defense agency itself.

It seems a certain Mr. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi had at first spun tales to U.S. interrogators about WMD-terrorist-training links between his organization and Saddam Hussein’s government. Yet “newly declassified portions of [the] document … showed that the administration was alerted” by the DIA in February 2002 that the captive “probably was lying.” In fact, “he could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training was taking place….

“The DIA concluded that al-Libi probably was deliberately misleading the interrogators, and he recanted the statements in January 2004,” according to an Associated Press story this week.

Al-Libi’s on-the-record unreliability was of no bother to the White House, though. Notwithstanding classified, contrary evidence the administration continued suggesting a Qaeda-Iraq link, and got its war. I’m not a lawyer, but when, in the act of preliminarily justifying a war, an administration spreads as “credible” a report disputed as untrustworthy by its own intelligence experts, do not high-crimes-and-misdemeanor terms like “criminal negligence” come into play?

Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, protested over the weekend that “work by his committee and other commissions did not point to any evidence that made him believe that intelligence had been distorted.” And White House spokesman Scott McClellan remained on right top of things, saying “he had not seen a report about the documents”; and, well, shucks, “issues about postwar intelligence have been explored in the past.” Besides, McClellan noted with his customary dismissive air, “steps have been taken to ensure the administration has the best intelligence possible.” No doubt he’s on target there, just as he was when denying Karl Rove and Lewis Libby’s involvement in the CIA leak.

McClellan also performed the well-rehearsed song and dance about how members of both parties, as well as the previous administration, “came to the same conclusion, that Saddam Hussein was a threat and a threat that needed to be addressed.” What McClellan didn’t say, and what no one on the right ever says, is that it was this administration that cherry-picked and fed selective intelligence to a gullible Congress, and whatever the Clinton administration might have thought about Saddam Hussein, it wasn’t the one to blindly dive into a full-scale invasion.

Republican Senator George Allen said Sunday that we need proper intelligence, “but what we don’t need is a bunch of partisanship.” He’s so right. We just need the truth. But we’re not going to get it as long as Bush’s congressional allies, such as Roberts and Allen, are allowed to conspire in a partisan cover-up.

Last week, in shutting down the Senate for two hours, Democrats were accused of crass sensationalism. Yet it’s the administration and its Congressional protectors who genuinely excel at what Frank Rich labeled as “change-the-subject stunts” – and before the subject gets changed again, Democrats should shut down Washington’s business as usual until they learn the exceedingly unusual whats, whys and wherefores of the administration’s excellent adventure. There can be no greater duty before Congress than getting at the truth of what sent this nation into war.


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