Good column by John Dean in Findlaw (other than him repeating the erroneous version of the Wolfowitz quote from the Guardian article I wrote about earlier this week...) He lists off all the specific allegations Bush made about Iraq's capabilities in the lead-up to the war, gives the reasons that the President could have been given the benefit of the doubt at the time (surely there were checks and balances in the White House, as there usually are in each administration...) Of course, nothing found since has backed up those allegations, and now it seems that there was political pressure on the CIA and on the Pentagon to produce evidence that would support the rush to war. (Even so, the Pentagon released a report last year stating that although the Iraqis were behaving suspiciously, there was no reliable information that Iraq was producing or stockpiling WMDs.)
Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."
