* Frank Rich: linking Iraq and anthrax (4-26-09)

Frank Rich writes in the NYT (4-26-09) …

• Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.”
• As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
• In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.
• But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it.

LMW COMMENT …

Frank Rich is so right. President Obama might prefer not “looking back,” but he really has no choice. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has stated so clearly and often, to be a nation of laws we must enforce the law.

The laws that were broken, purposely and knowingly, by the Bush administration are not trivial matters. Bush and Cheney and their cabal broke laws in order to convince the American people to support an invasion of Iraq which Bush and Cheney had long before determined as their war of choice.

Linking Saddam and Al- Qaeda was one part of the Bush/Cheney strategy. Linking Saddam and anthrax was another part of the infuriating pattern of lies that led us to Iraq and all of the horrific consequences that then flowed.

 

read Rich’s entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html