If the Leaked British Minutes Are Real, the Slide Has Begun

Rep. John Conyers (D, MI) and eighty-seven other members of Congress have written the White House about classified minutes of a secret meeting of the British prime minister and his advisors that occurred on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq, which have been leaked to the British press. So what's the big deal? The minutes, if real and not a plant, corroborate the claims by former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, former White House Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and other insiders that Bush and his advisers manufactured and altered intelligence to support their planned invasion of Iraq. See William Rivers Pitts' article for an excellent and concise summary and analysis.

Rep. Conyers' letter asks the following questions based on these minutes:

1. "Did the Administration lie to the American people about its intentions with respect to Iraq?"
2. "Did the Administration engineer a confrontation with Saddam Hussein to justify the war?"
3. "Did the Administration deliberately manipulate intelligence to deceive the American people about the strength of its case for war?"

If I was a gambling man, I'd wager on the following answers: 1-Yes. 2-Yes. 3-Yes.

Actually, to be allowed to bet on this outcome would be like past-posting, that is, cheating. No one should be surprised by this fact of lies and distortion, of course, at least anyone who read a foreign newspaper or watched a little C-SPAN in the last two years. The big question is whether something is to be done about it.

They gambled, and they lost. They lied, and they've been caught. With over 1700 coalition troops killed, thousands gravely injured, 100,000 Iraqi dead, several hundred billions of dollars spent, nothing but chaos on the horizon in Iraq, and the only reconstruction efforts seemingly focusing only on a prolonged colonial US presence, there is now a time of accountability.

If George W. Bush had one ounce of decency in him, then someone should replay his crotch-enhanced premature ejaculcation from the Viking jet on the deck of the carrier U.S.S Abraham Lincoln in May, 2003. Then he should be shown his minutes of inaction in the Florida classroom on September 11, 2001. A decent man would resign immediately. No, that's wrong. A decent man would not have got us in this mess.