It’s hard to imagine how things could possibly be worse for the Bush Administration’s ambitions for a successful outcome in Iraq.
On the trail of George Tenet’s revelations that there was no serious consideration of anything other than war in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Senator Durbin, who sat on the Intelligence Committee, revealed this week that the members of the Committee who had witnessed the intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war, knew that lies were being fed to the public, but were bound by secrecy laws from revealing this to the media.
These testimonies put a death knell into the argument that the Bush Administration made an honest mistake and that the intelligence community failed were derelict in their duty.
… The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it,” Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.“I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn’t do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can’t walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.”
…Sen. Durbin (D-IL) said that he and Sen. Rockefeller KNEW that Bush was lying because of briefings to the Intelligence Committee but could not tell because they were “sworn to silence”. … Sen. Rockefeller put a memo for the record in his file to try to cover his ass. … He said that this was an “ethical problem”. … If the president is LYING that’s the ethical problem. … The Senators had a moral responsibility to uncover this falsehood and save us 3,00 lives, the Iraqis 600,000 lives and a trillion dollars. … They are in my mind accomplises to this tragedy.
This week, the Great White Hope of the Surge, General Patreaus, gave a grim assessment in Washington, admitting that not only was the situation… in Iraq more complicated than even he had imagined, but also gave the grim warning that the situation will get worse before it gets easier and that it runs the risk of higher U.S. and Iraqi casualties.
Retired General William Odom added more gloom to the prediction:
“”¦for … the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war
“Thus, he lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money, and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies. The Congress is the only mechanism we have to fill this vacuum in command judgment.
“To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is ‘absent without leave.’ He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games.
It’s little wonder therefore that the Bush administration is not only scaling back it’s expectations for Iraq, but intends to postpone the prognosis of the surge till as late as possible.
“The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited,” an article in Saturday’s New York Times reports.
Stay tuned for the right wing war lovers to blame this FUBAR on the liberal media.