A bipartisan panel formed by the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence concluded that Bush exaggerated available intelligence and ignored disagreements among spy agencies about Saddam's weapons programs and links to Al Qaeda. The report also accused Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of 9-11.

"The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, called the report a "selective view" (Jetblast: Pretty ballsy considering how selective Bush's view was) and said the the Bush administration's public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by Foreign intelligence services. (Jetblast: Perino is using a transparently false blame-placing excuse here trying to pose Bush as an innocent victim instead of the deliberate information-distorter he was).

The report on the pre-war statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Mr Bush, Mr Cheney and other senior officialswere generally "substantiated" by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. (Jetblast: Bullshit. The panel is helping their own crooks here) But it found that the administration official's statements did not reflect the intelligence agencies' uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes amongst them. (Jetblast: An internal committee's diplomatic way of saying they lied)

Pentagon officials met with Iraqi dissidents in clandestine meetings in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian "hit" team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said. (Jetblast: Iran was very helpful in eliminating the Taliban in western Afghanistan. It offered to help the US but US declined. The sum total of this is reduced to "Iran planned to attack US in Afghanistan." Our media is inherently dishonest) The report concluded, though Wolfowitz, and national security adviser Hadley acted within their authority to send Pentagon officials to that meeting it was ill advised and accused them of keeping the State Department in the dark about those meetings which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation. This report was the second part of a first report that identified "grave faults" in the CIA's analysis of the threat posed by Mr Hussein.

The report on Iraq was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and raising the possibility that Mr Hussein might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons. "Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and lead the nation to war on false premises" Mr Rockefeller wrote. (Jetblast: So now we have the legal basis for a war crime. Where are those sophist phonies who argue 1441 now?)

Mr Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report's findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: That the CIA failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited (Jetblast: More Republican balls and trying to pose Bush as a victim. No consideration that CIA was working with Bush to distort)

In a detailed minority report four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Clinton and Mr Rockefeller (Jetblast: More ballsy shifting of blame).

As an example,they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the "inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat (Jetblast: Republican devils don't afford Rockefeller the same excuse as being a victim of bad intelligence. The same bad intelligence the report cites Bush for)"

The report about the Bush administration's public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone," because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies "are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried." (Jetblast: It would be hard to describe this as anything other than a direct lie. Aside from the fact those weapons did not exist)

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said that Congress had never been told about the national Intelligence Council's assessment. (Jetblast: Criminal concealment of determining information)


Jetblast: So how would we have used this exact same indicting information against Saddam? We have a full case for a war crime here. This is where America proves its sanctimonious claim of "rule of law".

I"m sure you are correct, though 'war crimes' is usually used to refer to crimes committed in the conduct of war: violations of the Geneva convention, genocide, abuse of civilians, tacky uniforms, that sort of thing.

I'm glad this report did not mention the source of this intelligence information, George Tenet.
That would have meant this report may have had some credibility.

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Democrats have betrayed the American people.

it realy dosent matter at this point.

Jetblast, I believe Bush lied like a dog to invade Iraq. I also believe the 8 years of hard time known as the Clinton administration was one lie after another. Bush daddy before Clinton was mr.deception also. GW seems the most dangerous of all.

When you mention war crimes I just hope you're thinking of America's judicial system because you really don't want to stump for an international war crimes trial. Not good!

Here are a list of international statutes Bush has violated. His actions constitute criminal behavior punishable under international law.
Quote:
The United Nations Charter

Article 1: The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

Article 2, paragraph 4 All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. Article 39 The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Quote:
General Assembly Resolution 3314

On December 14, 1974, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3314, which defined the crime of aggression. This definition is not binding under international law, but it is often cited in opposition to military actions.
This definition makes a distinction between aggression (which "gives rise to international responsibility") and war of aggression (which is "a crime against international peace"). Acts of aggression are defined as armed invasions or attacks, bombardments, blockades, armed violations of territory, permitting other states to use one's own territory to perpetrate acts of aggression and the employment of armed irregulars or mercenaries to carry out acts of aggression. A war of aggression is a series of acts committed with a sustained intent.The definition's distinction between an act of aggression and a war of aggression make it clear that not every act of aggression would constitute a crime against peace; only war of aggression does. States would nonetheless be held responsible for acts of aggression.
Quote:
Waging a war of aggression is a crime under customary international law and refers to any war waged not out of self-defense or sanctioned by the UN.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
-Robert H. Jackson
Quote:
Nuremberg Principles

Principle I

Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II

The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V

Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VI


The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War Crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.
Quote:
Article 7 of the treaty stated that:


For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

(a) Murder;

(b) Extermination;

(c) Enslavement;

(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;

(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;

(f) Torture;

(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;

(j) The crime of apartheid;

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

What kind of penalty is appropriate for such crimes?

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What's really at stake in the November elections.

By Zachary Roth

There are plenty of reasons why George W. Bush managed to eke out a 51 percent re-election victory in 2004: John Kerry was a lousy candidate; Iraq had not yet descended into civil war; and anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives in several swing states helped bring out conservative voters. But other, less-discussed factors also played a role.

In November 2004, voters didn't know that Bush had personally been warned that a key piece of evidence he had used to make the case for war in Iraq—that Saddam's aluminum tubes were being used to process uranium—was likely incorrect. They didn't know that the president's campaign had received hundreds of thousands of dollars through a corrupt lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, and that Bush had hired one of Abramoff's cronies, David Safavian, as the federal government's procurement czar. They didn't know that the president and vice president had ordered the leaking of classified—and highly misleading—information to discredit the whistle-blowing former ambassador Joe Wilson, even while Bush was declaring his intention to fire the leaker. They didn't know that the president had authorized a massive and probably illegal domestic wiretapping operation. They didn't know that an increasing number of U.S. combat generals in Iraq thought Bush's defense secretary was incompetent and ought to be fired.

The public was unaware of these facts—all of which were true prior to the 2004 election—for one overriding reason: Congress, the branch of government constitutionally empowered to provide the oversight that might have uncovered them, wasn't looking very hard. This is hardly surprising, considering that both Congress and the White House are controlled by a Republican Party that has made ruthless partisan unity its guiding strategy. (We only know these things now in large part because of the somewhat-belated efforts of journalists, whistle-blowers, and non-partisan government prosecutors.) Nor should it be a shock that now, in the run-up to the 2006 midterm elections, the party's top elected officials continue to follow the script that worked so well for them in 2004: Keep a lid on investigations.

Remember how Senate Intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) delayed until after the 2004 elections any investigation into how the administration might have misused intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war? Well, in late April he announced his intention to again postpone that still-unfinished investigation, presumably until after the 2006 elections. In March, his committee also rejected, on a straight party-line vote, a Democratic call for a probe of the administration's wiretapping program. Senate Republicans have blocked the Armed Services committee from hearing the testimony of the retired generals who have publicly called for Rumsfeld's resignation. And despite continued public frustration with the complex, snafu-prone Medicare drug program—latest gem: One in five seniors on the program have wound up paying more for their medicines—GOP congressional leaders have apparently seen nothing that warrants even cursory scrutiny.

The Republican Congress has specialized in Potemkin hearings. The Judiciary committee under Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) made a show of examining the wiretapping program, but when the committee asked for testimony from former attorney general John Ashcroft, and his deputy, James Comey—both of whom, according to Newsweek, had expressed serious reservations about the program's legality—it was politely informed by the Justice Department that neither man “would be in a position to provide any new information.” Rather than use his subpoena power, Specter left it at that. In May 2004, Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chair of the Armed Services committee, loudly vowed to get to the bottom of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, but called it a day after a few hearings, despite clear evidence that senior military and civilian officials were implicated. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used his Indian Affairs committee to look into how Jack Abramoff bilked his tribal clients, but pulled up short when the evidence began to point to administration officials and party operatives like Grover Norquist, whose support McCain will need in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. The Homeland Security committee, under Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) stirred itself to investigate the disastrous federal response to Hurricane Katrina, but refused to look closely at the fatally-flawed White House decision-making process, and blocked Democratic efforts to subpoena White House emails.

The Republican Congress's extreme reluctance to investigate the Bush administration is hardly a secret. Some lawmakers even brag about it. In July 2004, Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) proudly declared: “Our party controls the levers of government. We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn.” Even Virginia Thomas—wife of Clarence—who, as a top aide during the '90s to Majority Leader Dick Armey, ran the fiercely partisan Republican effort to use Congressional committees to investigate and harass the Clinton administration, thinks today's Congress has fallen down on the job. “There's a lot of pressure on Republican members [to avoid oversight] with the Republican administration,” she says. “It's as if it's not civil.”

Congress's disinclination to hold President Bush accountable has few historical parallels, say congressional experts. “In our lifetimes, I can't recall a greater failure on the part of a Congress to do serious oversight,” says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The attitude of the Republicans in Congress has been: Avoid embarrassing the president at all costs.”

This is not the approach the GOP Congress took when Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office. Since 1997, the House Government Reform committee has issued over 1000 subpoenas related to allegations of misconduct involving the Clinton administration or the Democratic party—compared to just 15 related to Bush administration or Republican abuses. The seemingly endless probes of the Clinton administration turned up little in the way of corruption, and stymied the Republican revolution: In the 1998 midterm elections, with the Lewinsky scandal in the news, Democrats picked up seats in Congress.

But those investigations left a residue of ill will that Republicans have cleverly turned to their own advantage. In a stunning display of chutzpah, GOP leaders are now exploiting voters' fears of endless partisan investigations—fears that they themselves created with their own behavior in the '90s—to caution with faux solemnity that Democrats, if given control of one or both houses of Congress, would impeach the president and plunge the nation into turmoil. In a recent fundraising email, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman warned that Democrats “will censure and impeach the President if they win back Congress.”

The press corps has been quick to take the bait. “If Democrats win in the midterm elections in November, will the Democrats in Congress move to impeach this president?” Norah O'Donnell breathlessly asked DNC chair Howard Dean on MSNBC's “Hardball” in April. Dean's response suggests how deeply this line of attack has Democrats spooked: He hedged, assuring O'Donnell that impeachment “is going to come pretty low on the list,” and quickly pivoted to talk about jobs and port security. And Dean is the Democrats' attack dog! Other party leaders want even less to do with the question, for fear of giving the Republicans ammunition to argue that a Democratic House would mean endless partisan rancor.

With pundits and Republicans alike crying “impeachment!” it's no wonder that Democrats aren't eager to advertise the fact that capturing Congress would allow them to pursue investigations. The tragedy is that a full accounting of the Bush years is what the country most needs, to put an end to the cycle of lies and cover-ups, and perhaps even fix some disastrous policies, from Medicare to Iraq. Moreover, the notion that it's impeachment-or-bust—that an opposition party conducts investigations and holds hearings only to punish or embarrass the White House—is a product of recent history. The aggressive partisan investigations of the 1990s were an aberration. For most of American history, lawmakers have held presidents to account regardless of party affiliation. This tradition of real bipartisan oversight has allowed government to uncover mistakes, keep itself honest, and move the country forward. It's been pretty good politics, too. And it could be again.

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continued

From Whisky Ring to Monica

To find a historical moment even remotely akin to the present, one has to go all the way back to the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. During all but the last two years of the former general's notoriously corrupt Republican administration (1869-77), Congress was also in Republican hands. During those six years, GOP lawmakers failed to look into several executive branch transgressions—most famously the Whisky Ring scandal, in which federal officials were siphoning off funds from taxes on distilleries and using them for Republican campaign activity. It was only through the efforts of the treasury secretary, William Barstow—who was motivated in part by presidential ambitions—that the extent of the scandal was brought to light.

During subsequent periods when one party controlled both elected branches, lawmakers generally did a better job of fulfilling their oversight responsibilities. It was a progressive Republican senator, Robert LaFollette Sr., who in 1922 kicked off the investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal, in which President Harding's interior secretary ultimately went to prison for taking bribes from oil companies in return for no-bid energy leases on public lands. Having investigated their own party's administration, congressional Republicans wound up gaining House and Senate seats in the next election.

Democrats, too, have gone after their own. In 1941, a little-known senator named Harry Truman led a congressional investigation into waste, fraud, and mismanagement in military procurement. His effort helped save the government $18 billion, landed him on the cover of Time, and propelled him to the vice presidency in the administration he had investigated. And in 1966, amid mounting public opposition to the war in Vietnam, Sen. William Fulbright, the Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations committee, held high-profile hearings challenging LBJ's conduct of the campaign. Though they weren't enough to keep the White House in Democratic hands after the 1968 presidential election, Fulbright's hearings helped constrain the president's freedom of action on the war, and became a point of pride for a generation of Democrats.

But it's not that the Republicans who run today's Congress object to serious investigations, of course. They just object to serious investigations of Republicans. When the GOP regained control of Congress after the '94 midterms, it launched an aggressive effort—about which it was largely open—to use congressional committees and investigations as a partisan political tool, designed to thwart the Clinton administration's agenda and damage the president politically. A memo sent “on behalf of the House leadership” by two Republican congressional power-brokers, Reps Jim Nussle and Bob Walker, directed committee chairs to search their investigative files for “examples of dishonest [sic] or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration,” and to forward them to Virginia Thomas's office “for determining the agenda.” Defending the decision to task Thomas, a top leadership aide, with compiling politically-damaging information on the opposing party, one House committee staffer told Roll Call: “It takes a full-time person to make sure we get all the Clinton scandals exposed.”

The Clinton administration provided Congress with more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries—including, at one point, the White House Christmas-card list. But voters quickly came to see the effort, which culminated with the impeachment of the president, as partisan and vindictive, and it backfired. House speaker Newt Gingrich left office in disgrace, while Clinton finished his second term with lofty approval ratings.

Under Clinton, then, a partisan Republican Congress conducted full-bore investigations into everything. Under Bush, the partisan Republican Congress has conducted full-bore investigations into nothing. That GOP attitude is unlikely to change unless the balance of power in Washington changes. Even as the president's poll numbers plunge into the low 30's, jeopardizing congressional Republicans' re-election chances, they've not shown any inclination to conduct serious hearings on the administration's misdeeds. And should Congress remain in Republican hands, they certainly won't become more eager to investigate the Bush administration (and themselves). Rather, they'll breathe a sigh of relief, proclaim their “accountability moment” over, and congratulate each other on their effective strategy of shutting down investigations.

Building a better investigation

The only real chance, then, that Congress will uncover the truth of what's happened in Washington during the Bush years will come if Democrats to win in November—a fact that puts the mainstream press in an awkward situation. While mainstream journalists, for obvious reasons of professional interest, generally support openness and increased access to information, they feel they cannot be seen as siding with one political party over another. Should the Democrats take the House, the press, desperate to stick to a “neutral” storyline, will frame the issue of post-election investigations as being not about accountability and access to information, but about political payback. Hence the current focus on impeachment.

So what will the Democrats really do if they win the House? I spoke to a broad range of Beltway Democrats, both inside and outside Congress, and got, essentially, three different answers. A considerable number seem disinclined to press their advantage if given the chance. “When you do oversight, ultimately, the press is the judge of your credibility,” one top Democratic committee staffer told me. Using investigations to delve too deeply into the past, or to settle old scores, he argued, would be “world-class stupid.” He called the deception over the cost of the Medicare drug bill “old news.” Lanny Davis, who served as White House counsel to President Clinton, went even further, arguing that any use of Congressional investigations that's not directly focused on solving the public's problems will backfire on Democrats. “I could come up with a hundred investigations, and 90 percent of the American public would say: 'Can you please do something about our public school system?' And: 'Would you please tell me why we're not energy-independent enough?' And: 'Would you please get us out of Iraq and make us safe from terrorism?'” he told me. “I don't care about digging up whether Bush lied or not, or whether they manipulated evidence or not. That's just playing gotcha.”

Other liberal insiders advise the opposite. Democrats, they say, should do to Republicans what Republicans did to them in the '90s: design investigations for maximum political impact, and make no effort to give them an even nominal ly bipartisan gloss. “The public never understands what a bipartisan hearing is, so you don't really need that,” Melanie Sloan, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argued. “The Republicans haven't shown a lot of interest in bipartisan hearings. They don't hold hearings. You don't need the Republicans.”

But for the most part, the Hill Democrats who matter the most—those who would be sitting in committee chairs—seem to agree on what their strategy would be if given the chance. They'll hold aggressive investigations and issue plenty of subpoenas, but they'll also find ways to reach across the aisle whenever possible. “I don't think it's payback, but if people purposely manipulated intelligence or lied to the American people, or targeted whistleblowers, I think that's just getting to the truth,” said another top Democratic House committee staffer. “I just think it's stronger and more credible if it's bipartisan.”

That strategy may sound naïve and high-minded, but history suggests it's the right approach, even when the crimes of the White House are indisputable. Watergate offers a model for how Democrats might attract Republican support, and use it to strengthen, rather than weaken, their investigations' impact. The Senate hearings were conducted by Sam Ervin, a conservative Southern Democrat who declared at the investigation's outset that he found it “simply inconceivable” that the president was involved. The House Judiciary committee, for its part, allowed its minority Republican members to rewrite the articles of impeachment when they balked at the original version produced by Democratic lawyers. The strategy paid off, helping to convince the committee's “Fragile Coalition”—a group of wavering Republicans and Southern Democrats, all of whom represented districts that had overwhelmingly backed Nixon in '72—to vote for impeachment. It was the support of the Fragile Coalition that made it impossible for the White House to dismiss impeachment as a partisan witch-hunt, and that ultimately forced Nixon to resign.

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No takers? Not surprised....