Restore nation’s credibility, integrity

Thank you for your editorial, “Intelligent Inquiry,” of June 19. I agree that open hearings [to find out what our government really knew before bombing Baghdad] will be essential to restore public confidence. However, I think the hearings need to address more than just the intelligence gathering successes and failures.

I was the only one at Bangor International on April 21 who clapped and shouted “welcome home” to one of the first planeloads of soldiers stopping for refueling between Iraq and their home base in Oklahoma. I was so relieved to see them safe and well, and so were they. I had been worried that our troops would be exposed to chemical and biological warfare – maybe even nuclear. I am sure the troops were concerned and fearful as well. Because that’s what Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and Ms. Rice had insisted were the facts to the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, the “coalition of the willing” as well as the people of the world in order to justify going into Iraq.

As more and more is revealed about the deceptions on the part of the Bush administration concerning this war and the lack of a direct and imminent threat to the United States, lack of a connection to al-Qaida, lack of a nuclear capacity, and, to date, lack of weapons of mass destruction, the more I urge our Congress to conduct a thorough, open, bipartisan investigation into whether there were justified reasons for the pre-emptive war on Iraq; whether the Congress should have given up its constitutional role to declare war last fall; as well as thoroughly discuss the new U.S. foreign and defense policy goals. I urge the press to cover this investigation completely and to broadcast the hearings on television and radio the same way they did during the Iran Contra and Watergate investigations.

Has the Bush administration taken advantage of the horrors on Sept. 11, 2001 to advance its policy goals? Retired Gen. Wesley Clark said he was called that day by a member of the Bush administration and told to use the term “state-sponsored terrorism” when asked on CNN who might be the perpetrators of the attacks – obviously well before any facts were known (“Meet the Press” interview, June 15). Greg Thielmann, recently retired State Department analyst, told Newsweek that “There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused”; a Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA’s information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was “crap.”

A senior military officer quit after seeing the White House exaggerated bad intelligence. Marvin Ott wrote “statements by the President and Vice President … replaced CIA probabilities with almost belligerent certainties.” (Ellsworth American, June 12)

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One of the architects of the Iraq war and new doctrine of unilateralism and pre-emptive strikes, Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, in speaking to the Asian Security Summit in Singapore in late May, answered a question about why North Korea (which flaunts having nuclear capability) was being treated differently than Iraq where only traces of weapons of mass destruction have been found in 2002-2003. Wolfowitz said, “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that, economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” Earlier he said in Vanity Fair that “for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.”

Do you think the hundreds of American and British families (as well as the uncounted thousands of Iraqi families) who continue losing loved ones in this war should accept Wolfowitz’s statements as being appropriate reasons for the war?

I also want to state that I do think Saddam Hussein was (or is) a despot and mass murderer – but I do not believe that gives the United States a right to break the international law which says one country cannot invade another without a truthful “direct and imminent threat” of danger to that country’s citizens … there are loads of despots out there and many countries’ leaders with hair triggers. The United Nations was established after World War II so that international action could be taken against international threats.

C-SPAN carried the June 17 British Foreign Affairs Committee hearings when two former Blair cabinet members spoke. Robin Cook, former foreign secretary, stated that the Iraq war was started “without compelling, convincing evidence.” Cook concluded that the intelligence information released by the British government to Parliament to get their approval to attack Iraq in 2003 had an “absence of recent alarming evidence.” He expressed grave concern about the damage done to the international coalitions fighting terrorism, as well as to the United Nations.

Claire Short, former British International Development Secretary, said four senior British government people told her that Tony Blair committed the British government to join the United States in a war on Iraq on Sept. 9, 2002. The British Defense Intelligence Service and SIS told her they did not think there was a high risk that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction. She believes that the U.N. inspection process in 2002-03 had been not only truncated but also not gotten enough intelligence information from the United Kingdom and United States.

In the June 19 Bangor Daily News article, “International poll finds U.S. viewed as arrogant, threatening,” 58 percent of the 11,000 people in 11 countries (including the United States) polled in May and June reported they had a fairly unfavorable or very unfavorable view of President Bush. Do we, as U.S. citizens, want our country to be perceived as “arrogant and threatening”? Should we approve the policy of pre-emption when there is no imminent threat? Please call our senators and representatives and ask them for a full open investigation now.

Pamela W. Person is a resident of Orland.