DEAR EDITOR:
More than half a million people have signed a petition to
Congress circulated by MoveOn.org to censure President Bush.
DEAR EDITOR:
More than half a million people have signed a petition to Congress circulated by MoveOn.org to censure President Bush. Voters are becoming increasingly angry about President Bush’s overstated intelligence findings about weapons of mass destruction and his citation of evidence that didn’t exist or had been discredited. From his first days in office, President Bush was planning for war with Iraq. That decision having been made, the president ran a campaign of misinformation, hype and hysteria that led America into an unnecessary war.
In the run-up to the war, President Bush said, as quoted in the Jan. 28, 2002 Washington Post, that the United States “must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud … We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.”
That was not the message that he was getting from the intelligence community. And in a September 2002 news conference, President Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency report that purportedly said Iraq was six months away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, when in fact no such report ever existed.
President Bush was not honest with the country about why he felt that it was urgent to launch a pre-emptive war in Iraq last March. Before the war, Bush was repeatedly told there was no definitive evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He knew Iraq was not a nuclear threat. He knew there was no Iraq connection to 9/11. Iraq posed no imminent danger to the United States. There was no case for a pre-emptive war.
This war has been enormously costly, in human lives and in tax dollars. More than 500 American soldiers have died so far in the campaign and more than 3,000 Americans have been injured. Thousands of Iraqis have also been killed. I hope congress will censure President Bush for misleading us into war.
Matthew Gerst, Gilroy
Submitted Friday, Jan. 13 to ed****@ga****.com
