Explain Yourself, Mr. President

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises.

Robert Byrd
United States Senator

Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) has written a letter to President Bush asking him to explain why he cited forged evidence on Iraqi's weapons of mass destruction in his State of the Union Address in January of this year:

The allegation that Iraq sought to obtain nuclear material from an African country was first made publicly by the British government on September 24, 2002, when Prime Minister Tony Blair released a 50-page report on Iraqi efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As the New York Times reported in a front-page article, one of the two "chief new elements" in the report was the claim that Iraq had "sought to acquire uranium in Africa that could be used to make nuclear weapons." According to the Washington Post, the evidence included "a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger."

It wasn't until March 7, 2003 that the world learned this evidence was false when the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, released the results of his investigation into the allegations. Apparently, it was fairly easy for the IAEA to discover this information was forged via rudimentary Google searches.

Waxman states the State of the Union address is always a well-crafted speech that takes months to write. Fact checking is mandatory. He suggests that this lends credibility to the notion that the White House knew this information was false and that the President purposefully mislead Congress and the American people when he made his case for going to war.

Truth seems to be as elusive a commodity in this affair as the discovery of Weapons of Mass Destruction is in Iraq. It should go without saying that, given the state of the world today, Americans deserve honest risk assessments. And the people who are being asked to support our world power status (both in the military and on the homefront) deserve to know the truth. At the very least, we shouldn't be mislead. Hyperbole is not very attractive in the early 21st century. In fact, it can be very dangerous.

Mr. Waxman, please let us know when you get a response from the President.

Related Story: Is Lying About the Reason for War an Impeachable Offense? by John W. Dean