Some Of Us Have Known This All Along

The Senate is clumsy and slow. They do much investigating after the fact and take no action before and during many situations. Some things are just impossible to fix after the fact. Bartelby.com gives the meaning of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” as “A little precaution before a crisis occurs is preferable to a lot of fixing up afterward.” Ironically this is what Bush claimed he was doing by invading Iraq, but he was lying about the reasons for the invasion. Many Americans knew that Bush was lying about Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda all along. Why didn’t the Senate?

The Senate is clumsy and slow. This is a good thing. It is how it was set up to be. The Senate did not do its job when they abdicated their authority to declare war by passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. The time for the Senate to investigate and deliberate about all of this should have been before the invasion. Maybe then it would have never happened and more than 4000 Americans would still be alive. Instead they destroyed one of the main principles of our Republic and handed all authority over to one man.

From Senate report slams Bush over prewar intelligence:

The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday.

The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report.

Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said.

The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Read the rest here.

There is more at talkingpointsmemo.com. They have asked readers to look through the Senate intel committee's report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq and offer comments. My favorite so far is from blogenfreude:

No one could have predicted that an incurious buffoon and a bloodthirsty sociopath would lie to further their War to Resubjugate Brown People and line their friends' pockets.

Impeachment is long overdue. It is one way the Senate could repair some of the damage it has done.