Durbin
Gives Edwards More
To Apologize For
By Kevin Zeese
02 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
On
April 28, 2007 Sen. Dick Durbin attempted to cleanse the blood off his
senate suit by admitting that as a member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee he had been told the opposite of what Bush was telling the
Congress and the American people. But, Durbin remained silent. And,
as Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote “The cruelest lies are often told
in silence.”
Durbin
said he “couldn’t believe” how the administration
was giving different information to the American people than “the
information we had on the Intelligence Committee.” He says “I
sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate
about invading Iraq and thinking the American people are being misled.
They are not being told the truth.”
What did he do about it? Nothing. He kept the information secret until
five years into a bloody and disastrous war. He did not fulfill his
larger responsibility to stop an illegal war based on lies, deceptions
and false information.
Durbin can’t cleanse
the blood of his senate suit so easily, but he is not the only one who
has some explaining to do. There were sixteen members of the Senate
Intelligence Committee who were given the same information as Durbin.
They all remained silent. They let the administration lie to the Congress
and mislead the American people into a catastrophic war. They let a
war begin on false pretenses. A war that has cost hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis their lives, destroyed their country and started a civil war.
A war that cost thousands of Americans their lives and resulted in fifty
thousand causalities of war – more than two hundred thousand if
illnesses like post traumatic stress disorder are counted. And, it has
cost the American taxpayer more than $400 billion thus far with projected
costs of over $1 trillion.
If ever silence was complicity,
this is that time. Sixteen elected officials, sworn to uphold the Constitution
– a Constitution that gives the Congress the sole power to declare
war – knew Bush was lying when he sought the power to go to war
and remained silent. They are complicit in Bush’s actions because
if they had been honest with the American people and their fellow elected
officials the war could have been averted.
Among those sixteen members
of the Intelligence Committee was Democratic presidential candidate
John Edwards and potential Republican candidate Fred Thompson. Can we
trust these men to be president?
Edwards has apologized for
voting for the war resolution. But now that we know that he was told
by the intelligence community that the administration was lying is his
apology enough? Doesn’t this raise serious questions about his
judgment? Voting for a war when he was told the basis of it was false
is not the kind of judgment we need in a commander-in-chief.
Durbin’s revelation
raises questions not only about Edwards vote for the war resolution
but also whether we can trust him to be honest with the American people.
He knew we were being lied to about the most important issue a country
can face. He knew his colleagues in the Congress were being lied to
about the most important decision the Congress is responsible for –
whether to go to war. And what did he do about it? He remained silent.
Can we trust someone who remains silent in such circumstances?
Edwards better hope that
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was wrong when he said “In the end
we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our
friends.”
The same questions come up
for former Senator Fred Thompson the potential Republican candidate.
He has not made any apology for his vote for the war – a vote
based on information he knew was false. Indeed, his current view on
the war is that it is wrong to set a timetable for withdrawing U.S.
troops from Iraq because he believes that the U.S. should leave on “our
terms and not al-Qaeda's.” Talk about bad judgment!
Last week I participated
in a dramatic demonstration
in the Senate Hart office building. The demonstration had several parts,
ending with a ceremonial “Funeral for the Next Soldier.”
Two banners were dropped one was a message to Congress about their failure
to hold President Bush accountable and their failure to end the war.
Now, it seems the sign also applies to their failure to stop the war
from starting:
Kevin Zeese is Director of
Democracy Rising (www.DemocracyRising.US)
and co-founder of Voters for Peace (www.VotersForPeace.US).
You can see Senator Durbin’s
statement on the Senate floor at: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/28/
sen-durbin-drops-bombshells-on-the-senate-floor/
Below is a transcript
of Durbin’s statement.
Statement of Sen. Durbin
on Inconsistency -Between Intelligence Briefings and Bush Administration
Statements - Speech on the Senate Floor April 28, 2007
“A few hundred feet
away from here in a closed room, carefully guarded, the Intelligence
Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top secret briefings about
the information we were receiving and the information we had on the
Intelligence Committee was not the same information that was being given
to the American people. I couldn’t believe it. Members of this
administration were in active heated debate over whether aluminum tubes
really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons some within
the administration were saying of course not it is not the same kind
of aluminum tube. At the same time members of the administration were
telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom shaped clouds.
I was angry about it. Frankly, I could not do much about it cause you
see, on the Intelligence Committee we’re sworn to secrecy. I could
not go outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the
WH is in direct contradiction to classified information that’s
being given to this Congress. We can’t do that. We couldn’t
make those statements.
“So, in my frustration
I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate
about invading Iraq and thinking the American people are being misled.
They are not being told the truth. That’s why I twenty-two members
of my colleagues in voting no. I did not feel at the time that the American
people knew the real facts.
“So what happened,
we invaded, turned loose, hundreds if not thousands of people looking
for these weapons of mass destruction. Never found one of them. Looked
for nuclear weapons, no evidence whatsoever.”
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