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re: On the WMD Issue
Robert — (archived)

Mark, you reveal your partisan agenda in the first sentence when you drag in "Bill and Hillary". Only the Right gives a rat's ass. It's the actions of the present Administration that are at issue here.

There are facts that you can't suppress simply by shrieking "treason!". The Bush Administration turned out to be utterly and completely wrong in their strong claims of the certain existence of WMD in Iraq. The question of why their statements proved false is absolutely vital no matter whether the answer is incompetence or deception. If it was an intelligence failure we need to fix it. If it was duplicity, in the form of cherry-picking and "cooking the books" and pressure on analysts to spin their analyses, we need to know that too, to prevent the miscreants from doing it again. I know some Rightists think that the means don't matter if they produce the desired outcome, but that's a very dangerous attitude--American policy, most of all decisions to go to war, have to be based on reality and not wishful thinking. Some day that attitude will lead to a debacle much worse than Iraq.

If there were no evidence at all that the Bush Administration had put pressure on analysts, had selected information based on whether it supported their policies, and ignored information that contradicted those policies; if there weren't evidence that the Bush Administration took office gunning for Iraq...then maybe one could call such speculation fabrications and thus possibly "treason!". But there is room for reasonable doubt. To fail to explore those doubts is, yet again, a failure of the duty of a citizen in a democracy to keep an eye on the government, and to hold its feet to the fire if there's suspicion of wrongdoing.

I cannot in good conscience turn a blind eye to the possibility that we were lied to. The issue and its consequences are too important. If this be treason, so be it.

Here's the FBI's online tip form: https://tips.fbi.gov/. Go for it. If you honestly believe that this is treason, then under the doctrine of "misprision of treason", you have no choice but to turn me in.

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