Potholes in the Road to War
-- Democrats get spine transplants
-- Ashcroft exposed As Iraqi collaborator
-- Yet more "damning evidence against Saddam" is debunked
by Tamara Baker

Sept. 28, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Oh, Lordy, Lordy.

What a week!

Al Gore took the point, then Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy followed, leading the suddenly-waxing charge of the Senate Democrats against Bush's war idiocy. In the house, even Gephardt -- who wants to topple Gore from the position of #1 Democratic Presidential candidate in 2004, and so is hesitant to look like he's actually following the lead of his biggest rival -- is now letting the Unelected One know that his precious blank check to invade Iraq for Halliburton is not quite the gas-pipe cinch it seemed just a few days ago.

The road to war, which had seemed so smooth for the Bushies just last week, has suddenly developed a ton of potholes.

The Congressional Black Caucus has taken up the cudgels now, telling Bush that he hasn't even come close to making a legitimate case for invading Iraq. And even normally-timid Dems like Susan Tauscher of California are joining hands with people like Dennis Kucinich to throw a few roadblocks in the path of the Bush Junta's Juggernaut.

It certainly doesn't help that every single one of the much-trumpeted bits of "evidence" has turned out, on closer inspection, to be bogus. The aluminum tubes? Not the right kind for nukes. The satellite photo? The agency that took it says it doesn't show what the Bushistas say it does.

And remember that International Atomic Energy Agency report that the Bushistas said stated point-blank that Saddam was "only six months away" from having nukes?

Guessss whaaaaaat:

The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report cited by
President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away"
from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist.

"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency,"
Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said yesterday in a
telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Vienna,
Austria. "We've never put a time frame on how long it might take
Iraq to construct a nuclear weapon in 1998," said the spokesman of
the agency charged with assessing Iraq's nuclear capability for
the United Nations. In a Sept. 7 news conference with British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Bush said: "I would remind you that
when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied --
finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic
-- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a
weapon."...

Oh, well.

But, as you all know by now, the Republicans have no trouble using lies and deceit to trick people into supporting their goals.

For example: Last Thursday, September 26, during the testimony of former UN Ambassador Madeline Albright, a Republican senator tried to hornswoggle Albright by reading part of a Senate resolution on Iraq from 1991 and asking her if she had approved it at the time.

She said "Yes," then started to explain, not realizing that she was being led into a trap. But before she could get any further, Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes pointed out that the senate resolution the GOP goon was reading from was not, repeat, not, the one that had been approved by the Senate in 1991, but was instead a draft proposal which had been rejected early on in the Senate's deliberations.

Words fail me.

They also fail me when I have to describe the sight of our Number One Lawman, the Crisco Kid himself, in bed with the very Iraqis that Darth Rumsfeld has sworn to wipe off the face of the earth. Yessir, folks, John Ashcroft is linked to Saddam Hussein via ties that are a good deal more substantial than any Junta "evidence" linking Saddam to Osama.

Seems that both Crisco and the Butcher of Baghdad are both buddies of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), a controversial and violent Iranian dissident group that has befriended a lot of Senators and Congresscritters in recent years. Their very best American friend, as recently-released information shows, is none other Attorney General John Ashcroft, who became involved with the MKO before he lost his Missouri Senate seat to a dead man.

According to the article linked above, Ashcroft spent quite a lot of time lobbying on behalf of this group, a group with a rather dicey reputation and a taste for blood on a par with other US-approved terrorists such as Orlando Bosch. So when do we get to jail Ashcroft as an enemy combatant?

Just yet another pothole in the road to war.