Frank Rich, of the New York Times, publishes a column this morning, called "Bush of A Thousand Days" asserting that the Downing Street Memo has proven to be accurate.
Available To NYT Select Subscribers Here While this is not news to Daily Kos readers, the credibility and impact of Frank Rich's somber and devastating conclusions about President George Bush's pre-war Iraq intelligence deceptions will have quite an impact on mainstream readers. Excerpts are available to nonsubscribers at the Raw Story website. This article alone is worth the price of today's paper.
Frank Rich: Downing Street memo 'proved accurate' Raw Story reports:
After a three month hiatus, Frank Rich returns to the New York Times with a column slated for Sunday's edition which asserts that "[e]ach week brings new confirmation" that the Downing Street memo leaked last May has proved accurate. Excerpts from Rich's column:
The Downing Street memo -- minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began -- has proved as accurate as "Mission Accomplished" was fantasy.
Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix "the intelligence and facts" around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq.
Today Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing WMD to "faulty intelligence," but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the CIA can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty -- and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.
Frank Rich Concludes The Evidence Shows President Bush Knew His 2003 State of the Union Speech Niger Uranium Claims Were False!
While most of us here at dkos arrived at this conclusion quite some time ago, such a matter of fact statement from Frank Rich in the New York Time is extraordinary.
Remember, that Representative Maurice Hinchey has argued that such a finding would appear to make President Bush, and all those who participated in the preparation of this speech, as well as the related filings to Congress seeking the authorization for the Iraq War, guilty of violations of USC (Criminal Code) 18 Sections 1001 and Section 371. These are felonies and would therefore be impeachable offenses.
Many us have been struggling for almost a year to think of ways to assist Representative Hinchey, Waxman, and Conyers in a Mission Impossible type of quest to gain subpoena powers to obtain the multiple draft of the 2003 SOTU address to prove President Bush knew these claims to be false at the time. A critical pre-requisite for a USC 18 Section 1001 violation.
Copies of the Oct 2002 Stephen Hadley NIE memo to President Bush along with Stephen Hadley's testimony that he informed Bush might also constitute such proof, however, no means of forcing Hadley to testify has been available without the House Judiciary Committee authorizing a Resolution of Inquirty.
But Rich looks at the evidence and concludes the only reasonable explanation is of course the President knew. Although, this carries not legal standing, it raises pressure on the HJC members to fullfill their oaths of office. Their oaths of office require them to protect our Constitution and Government buy resolving such questions if the evidence warrants.
Each week more and more credible and objective observers are announcing their conclusions that the evidence suggests such a conclusion. The next action step for us is escalate demands for explanation from President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And resignations if guilty.
It is not longer acceptable for them to pretend none of this is happening, merely by stonewalling. So many smoking guns have emerged so quickly, that the implications almost snuck by unannounced. This is the significance of the restatement of the known facts by Frank Rich who says:
The latest evidence that Bush knew that "uranium from Africa" was no slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address was uncovered by The Washington Post: The coordinating council for the 15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday, "60 Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.
"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war," Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year CIA veteran and an on-camera source for "60 Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the CIA in the fall of 2004, Drumheller has played an important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Drumheller conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent WMD labs, an Iraqi emigre known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator. "The real tragedy of this," Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the ((300,000)) to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi army."
Conclusion
While focusing so much of our attention on the stonewalling by the GOP controlled Congress of any formal investigations, it has come as an astonishing surprise to me, how quickly mainstream editors and opinion columnists such as Frank Rich have looked at the evidence and arrived at the obvious conclusion without the need of Congressional investigations.
What an embarrassment this should be for the Congress people, whose inaction may be coming close to rendering themselves irrelevant to their institutional obligations to defend, preserve, and protect the Constitution of the United States. The Forth Estate with the help of the blogosphere appears ready to step into the vacuum of responsibility and pick up the slack in leadership.
Let's keep up the good work. Congratulations and thanks to Frank Rich for stepping forward and leading the way to greater media responsibility in restoring integrity to the White House and Congress.
Let's hope members of the House Judiciary Committe are ready to respond and do their duty. I will post their contact information in the comment sections below.