continued

Similarly, during the 1987 Iran-Contra investigation, congressional Democrats took pains to reach out to Republican members, persuading three GOP senators to sign onto a report that blasted President Reagan for “secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law.” This bipartisan verdict ultimately forced Reagan to jettison his most hawkish advisers, and to recognize the need for a more conciliatory approach to foreign policy. The rapprochement with the Soviet Union—underway since Gorbachev's ascension to the premiership in 1985—intensified, and ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union's breakup in 1990. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz goes so far as to argue that the Iran-Contra hearings helped to end the Cold War.

To be sure, the level of partisan bitterness in Washington is much higher then it was even in the '80s, and Democrats who have tried to work in a bipartisan manner have been taken to the cleaners in recent years. But there's reason to think that once in power, Democrats will be able to attract cooperation from some Republicans. The Bush administration's combination of arrogance, secrecy, and disregard for Congress has alienated more than a few GOP lawmakers. Many have shown an impulse to challenge the administration, from old-guard moderates like Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to newer independent-minded conservatives like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). That impulse has so far been largely kept in check by GOP congressional leaders, who have used the power of the majority—committee assignments, prospects of legislative accomplishments, and old-fashioned pork—to keep their members in line. But if Democrats control the House, they'll be able to use many of those same rewards to lure wavering Republicans into cooperating. The leadership agrees. “I think you will see Republicans participate,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently told a group of liberal journalists. The prospect of a thorough accounting of the Bush years is what keeps the president and his team up at night. “If we don't keep Congress, there won't be a legacy,” a presidential adviser recently told a reporter for Time. “The legacy will be investigations.”

Democrats might wish they could avoid talking about their investigative plans. But if they do, the press and the GOP will raise the issue for them, and they'll frame it around the prospect of impeachment. So Democrats might as well meet the challenge head on, and spend the summer making their case. Of course we'll vigorously investigate the administration if we win, they should say. And we'll do so the same way previous Democratic Congresses have investigated GOP presidents: shoulder-to-shoulder with honest Republican lawmakers willing to put country before party. The fact that the current GOP leadership chose to abandon the great American tradition of bipartisan Congressional oversight is no reason Democrats have to follow suit. Instead, they should embrace that tradition, with the faith that if they do, the president will get the legacy he deserves.

Zachary Roth is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

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Nice copy and paste spam job April. I think your commune leader is calling you to cook dinner for the tribe. Run along now...

Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored?
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ABC News' Jonathan Karl Reports: The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.

Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

ABC News obtained the comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism on Tuesday. Read the report's executive summary HERE.

The study, which was due to be released Wednesday, found no "smoking gun" or any evidence of a direct connection between Saddam's Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist organization.

The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.

The study does, however, show that Saddam Hussein did much to support terrorism in the Middle East and used terrorism "as a routine tool of state power." Saddam's government, for example, had a program for the "development, construction, certification and training for car bombs and suicide vests in 1999 and 2000." The U.S. military is still dealing with the fall-out from this particular program.

The report says Saddam's bureaucrats carefully recorded the regime's connections to Palestinian terrorists groups and its financial support for the families of suicide bombers.

The primary target, however, of Saddam's terror activities was not the United States, and not Israel. "The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq." Saddam's primary aim was self preservation and the elimination of potential internal threats to his power.

Bush administration officials have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror group in their justification for waging war against Iraq.

"What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network," former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations February 5, 2003.

On June 18, 2004 the Washington Post quoted President George W. Bush as saying: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," Bush said.

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," The Washington Post quoted Bush as saying. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."

"We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's Meet The Press March 16, 2003.

"But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda, the cost to the United States of what happened on 9/11 with billions and billions of dollars and 3,000 lives. And the cost will be much greater in a future attack if the terrorists have access to the kinds of capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed," Cheney said.

''There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently Al Qaeda in Iraq,'' former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a interview with Infinity CBS Radio, Nov. 14, 2002.

"It’s very clever of President Bush to argue that Democrats and Republicans both favored removing Saddam Hussein from power and that somehow makes our invasion of Iraq okay. The problem with Bush’s argument is that his own administration misled everyone, including Democrats and Republicans, about the threat Saddam posed.

From the moment Bush took office he wanted to invade Iraq and had invasion plans drawn up, according to Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. “From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said in an interview.

So when Al-Qeada attacked the World Trade Center, Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq. But they realized that would be an obvious overreach since Al-Qeada and Iraq were enemies and decided to first go after Al-Qeada in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. But once that mission was accomplished, they turned back to their real goal of invading Iraq.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of the Bush’s desire to invade Iraq was our country’s heritage of not taking pre-emptive military action. To overcome this hurdle, the Bush Administration “manipulated” information to make a stronger case against Iraq, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time.

Cheney and Rumsfeld created their own unit to gather intelligence, outside the normal channels. This cabal “hijacked decisions on the run up to the war,” Wilkerson says. These Administration officials approached Iraqi exiles and gathered all the tall tales the exiles could tell. The exiles, who wanted Saddam removed, happily obliged.

The cabal pretended there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qeada. The source for this lie was from an exile who was a known liar. The September 11 Commission, incidentally, reported in 2004 that there was no “collaborative relationship” between the terrorists and Iraq.

Then they began scaring all of us by saying Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, including nuclear weapons, and that if he didn’t use them against us he would provide them to Al-Qeada to do the dirty work for him. “There is a real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said on October 28, 2002.

But again, they over-hyped and manipulated the evidence, including the now famously discredited document that alleged Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. Bush included the charge in his State of the Union address in January 2003, only to have White House officials admit months later it never should have been there.

Next Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations alleged Saddam had mobile bioweapons labs. Only later, did Powell learn that the source of that information was also an Iraqi defector who was a liar. Powell now admits he’s not sure if he would recommend an invasion of Iraq if he knew, as he does now, that Iraq has no stockpiles of banned weapons.

That’s exactly the point. The Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal knew they would not gain enough traction to invade Iraq if they couldn’t show that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was an immediate threat. So they manipulated the evidence. Or in the words of the Downing Street Memo written by an official in Tony Blair’s government: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

It’s time for an independent investigation into the charges that the Bush Administration manipulated us into the war with Iraq. Not surprisingly, Congressional Republicans are blocking such an investigation.

Interestingly, or tragically, the Downing Street Memo also states: “There was little discussion in Washington on the aftermath after military action.” Wilkerson says the Bush Administration believed it could turn things over to Iraqi exiles 90 to 120 days after defeating Saddam’s military. “This is ineptitude and incompetence of the first order,” Wilkerson said.


It also would explain why we never committed enough troops to secure the country. The Bush Administration really believed we would be embraced with hugs and flowers and didn’t have any idea what we would face. They were that naïve despite what Bush’s father had written in his memoirs on why he did not invade Iraq at the end of the Gulf War: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

If only his son could read."

This panal didnt spend a lot of time and effort to reach this conclusion did they ?

A lot of us were saying this as far back as 02 and 03

seems we were right huh ?

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"Happamia, sanoi kettu pihlajanmarjoista kun ei niihin yltänyt" ("Sour, said the fox about rowan berries, being unable to reach them"

What a friggin joke you people are....Democrats, WMD's & The Iraq War

Which Democrats,and based on what and who's info ?

Hummm ?

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"Happamia, sanoi kettu pihlajanmarjoista kun ei niihin yltänyt" ("Sour, said the fox about rowan berries, being unable to reach them"

Hey "Empty" looks as if April 15 is listing the war crimes of the UN Peace keepers , and those conducting war crimes in other regions.

Further when you put out the report from ABC, the lib refuses to let facts get in the way of their agenda. This messes up the template of the lib dogma. To the lib, there is only one enemy. The current Administration. To the lib, it is the USA, that is always wrong.

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Watch the video asshole. Here's a hint: He was a left wing hero until his wife wanted the job at the same time as Dr. Zeus.

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Good points all around "Hawk": I also fault the Congress for enabeling all of these administrations & providing no accountability to these administrations.

If we had a Constitutionally effective Congress that truely represented the American people, then presidents would know that they will be subject to oversight & accountability: without that check on presidential power, we pretty much have a "King for 4 years" and that is exactly what has happened. For some reason Nixon did not get by with his high-&-mighty approach: since that time, Congress has just not functioned as the people's representatives & the check & balance to the Executive. pjwky