Paging Nancy Pelosi

Let's be clear about one thing.

The impeachable offense is misleading the U.S. Congress into authorizing a war.

Sure, there are dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, of untruths and evasions and defiant refusals to enforce or abide by the laws of the United States.

But the Bush administration's single greatest crime is misleading the Congress and the country into supporting an invasion of Iraq, when the full truth would have led to a very different decision.

If that's what happened.

Today, author Ron Suskind's new book, "The Way of the World," hits bookstores. In it the author claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter to Saddam Hussein from the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001," Suskind writes. "It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq."

In fact, Suskind writes, "There is no link."

The White House denies the claim. Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, told Politico: "The allegation that the White House directed anyone to forge a document from Habbush to Saddam is just absurd."

Is it.

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, formerly with the Wall Street Journal.

The United States is in year six of a costly, blood-soaked military occupation of a country whose former regime, we now know, had no weapons of mass destruction and no operational relationship with al Qaeda terrorists.

The best that can be said for the administration is that in the atmosphere of post-9/11 Washington, the president was unwilling to trust any intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had no active nuclear program and no current stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

The worst that can be said for the administration is that they knew Saddam Hussein's regime posed no immediate threat to the United States, but lied to the Congress and the country -- and the U.N. -- in order to play some geopolitical game of chess with other people's children as pawns.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, currently on a book tour of her own, has said repeatedly that impeachment is off the table.

She might want to come back to Washington and look at that table again.


Copyright 2008

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "George Tenet: Portrait of a clawing careerist," "Dick Cheney's impeachable offense, and "Congressman John Murtha does his job."


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