Last week Senate Minority Leader Richard Durbin took the Senate floor and admitted to the American people that he and his fellow Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were in fact aware that the White House was misleading the nation into war, but because he was sworn to secrecy his hands were tied and he was forced into remaining silent. First of all, if this is in fact true, then Durbin has a lot more questions that he should have to answer, but the mainstream media has ignored his comments and the Senator's lies will likely disappear without the serious attention that they merit.
If the Senator is trying to make an honest mea culpa with the American public, the media needs to give him the forum he deserves to convince the American people that he should be treated as credible when accusing the Bush White House of lying to Congress and the American people to sell their case for war in Iraq. Interestingly, the Senator insists that because his hands were tied and he couldn't publicly voice his decent to the intelligence estimates of Iraq's WMD programs, he was left without an outlet for exposing the very truth which he and his colleagues have previously claimed to have been ignorant to. But Dick, what about the silent yet affective strategy of VOTING AGAINST THE RESULTION?!
If the Senator is genuine in his confession, then it is morally indefensible for him and his Democratic colleagues to continue accusing the president of lying to them and the American people to "sell" this war when it is reasonable to argue that by remaining silent AND voting to authorize the president to use force, they were acting in good faith because of false information. Former-CIA director George Tenet has made clear in his recent memoir and during numerous talk show appearances that everybody believed Iraq had weapons and thus in hindsight it is only legitimate to accuse them of being wrong, instead of the Democrats preferred version of events which paints the Administration as misleading and manipulative.
My question is, if they were so skeptical of Bush and Cheney (as they now claim they were) why didn't they share their concerns with their fellow Democrats in Congress, and why did they choose to remove comments such as "there is no doubt that Saddam has WMD" from their party's talking points? I am willing to wager that there are several members who would likely have been grateful for the heads-up and may have refrained from making some of the comments documented in the videos below.
I have spent a couple hours trying to track down video of prewar talking points from speeches given on the Senate floor, so when I have found and organized these videos it will be added to a revised version of this post.
If the Senator is genuine in his confession, then it is morally indefensible for him and his Democratic colleagues to continue accusing the president of lying to them and the American people to "sell" this war when it is reasonable to argue that by remaining silent AND voting to authorize the president to use force, they were acting in good faith because of false information. Former-CIA director George Tenet has made clear in his recent memoir and during numerous talk show appearances that everybody believed Iraq had weapons and thus in hindsight it is only legitimate to accuse them of being wrong, instead of the Democrats preferred version of events which paints the Administration as misleading and manipulative.
My question is, if they were so skeptical of Bush and Cheney (as they now claim they were) why didn't they share their concerns with their fellow Democrats in Congress, and why did they choose to remove comments such as "there is no doubt that Saddam has WMD" from their party's talking points? I am willing to wager that there are several members who would likely have been grateful for the heads-up and may have refrained from making some of the comments documented in the videos below.
I have spent a couple hours trying to track down video of prewar talking points from speeches given on the Senate floor, so when I have found and organized these videos it will be added to a revised version of this post.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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