By Barry Grey |
The Senate Intelligence Committee report issued Thursday on the Bush administration’s use of phony intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq is yet another exercise in damage control, aimed at concealing the full scope of the criminal conspiracy to drag the American people into a war of aggression.
The 170-page report was released a full five years after the Senate committee began its investigation into prewar intelligence claims. While acknowledging the well-established fact that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then-National Security Adviser and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other top aides knowingly misled American and world public opinion, it minimizes the scale of this deception and draws no conclusions about its implications for democratic rights in the United States.
The Senate report, endorsed by all eight Democrats on the committee and two Republicans, proposes no follow-up investigations or sanctions against Bush and company. Even before the Democrats took control of Congress following the Republican rout in the 2006 midterm elections, Democratic congressional leaders ruled out any effort to impeach Bush, Cheney, or any of the other officials involved in the war plot.
This is in no small measure because the Democratic Party was itself entirely complicit in the drive to war on the basis of lies, echoing the fear-mongering claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi-Al Qaeda ties and supplying Bush with the votes he needed to authorize an invasion. Since gaining control of Congress, the Democrats have continued to supply the administration with the funding it has requested to prosecute and even escalate the war.
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