Back in 1998, when President Bill Clinton looked squarely into a television camera lens and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," he lied to the American people. For that he was impeached, and the country was subjected to two years of chaos.
And in 1973, when President Richard Nixon looked squarely into a television camera lens and said, "I am not a crook," he lied to the American people and was forced to resign.
Which brings us to January of 2003, when George W. Bush looked squarely into a television camera lens and said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." He went on to say that "our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
Neither of these assertions was true. In fact, the story about the African uranium had been exposed as bogus by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency three months earlier, and articles were printed about it in several major newspapers.
Nor are these the only examples of presidential mendacity that have led to the deaths of more than 200 American and British soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians. In October, 2002, Bush told listeners in Cincinnati, Ohio, that satellite photos showed Iraq to be rebuilding its nuclear facilities and that it possessed a "growing fleet" of unmanned aerial vehicles designed for "missions targeting the United States."
Only two possible explanations exist for these repeated falsehoods. Either Bush was lying to the American people or he was repeating lies told to him by others. If the latter is true, he is even more of a bumpkin than a majority of the nation's voters thought he was in the contested election of 2000.
But if the former is true -- that the President of the United States led the country into an unprecedented "war of pre-emption" based on information that he knew to be counterfeit -- Bush is guilty of high crimes on a level never dreamed of by Nixon or Clinton.
Is he a bumpkin or is he a war criminal? We will probably never know. The Republican-controlled Senate and House both have elected to hold closed-door hearings on the matter.
Even as American boys and girls continue to fight and die in the desert sand.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 1 2003 |