Downing Street

This is from the Baltimore Sun today:

The British privately scoffed at the frightening claims made by the Bush administration. In a memo to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in March 2002, Peter Ricketts, the political director of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said: "US scrambling to establish a link" between Iraq and al-Qaida "is so far frankly unconvincing."

Anyone who follows the news will not be surprised. A long list of whistleblowers, including former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former National Security Council official Richard Clarke, have reported that the Bush administration was obsessed with regime change in Iraq from Day One and regarded 9/11 as an opportunity to put its plans into action. Removing Mr. Hussein was in the 2000 Republican Party platform. Bush administration misuse of intelligence has been well documented.

But the Downing Street minutes and other recently leaked documents illustrate that the intelligence was wrong by design. The documents show officials at the apex of the government of our closest ally confirming among themselves what were the darkest suspicions about the Iraq war among ordinary Americans.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Bush has lied to Congress and to the American people about the justifications for war. It includes a formal letter and report that he submitted to Congress within 48 hours of launching the invasion in which he explained the need for the war in terms that appear to have been intentionally falsified, not mistaken.

Lying to Congress is a felony. Either lying to Congress about the need to go to war is a high crime, or nothing is.

We were told we went to war with Iraq because Saddam had WMD and he was a threat to us. The "shifting rational" is that we went to war to remove Saddam and spread democracy. Sean Hannity was on the View last week and his response to Rosie O'Donnell's question about the war was - Is the world a better place without Saddam?

Mr. Hannity, perhaps it is. But I would ask you, do you think the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq think the world is a better place without their son or daughter? Their kids were sent to an unjustified war. We were lied to so that Mr. Bush could invade.

When Democracy is eroding here how can we possibly hope to spread it anywhere else?