After 9/11 when Bush's march to war against Iraq got underway, there were very few rational elected officials at the federal level willing to speak out against the madness that was going on around them. Florida Senator Bob Graham was the exception.
He begged his fellow Senators to read the entire 75-page National Intelligence Estimate on Weapons of Mass Destruction, but few did, his colleagues opting to go with the sanitized unclassified Cliffs Notes version. Graham knew they were being had, but he couldn't persuade them otherwise.
...Graham has said the "slick" 25-page document was "substantially different" from the classified document, and selectively put forth risks in favor of invading, while omitting other key information. A "livid" Sen. Graham had complained to George Tenet of the "wildly different impressions" created by the two documents. Sen. Graham's book "Intelligence Matters" recites the contemporaneous evidence available to Sen. Hutchison, had she read it as requested: Saddam Hussein was not going to attack us unless we attacked him. We know the far greater terror risks were known then and served as the focus for the Graham Amendment: war on Al-Qaeda, Abu Nidal, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Liberation Front, and Hezbollah. And, he explains the rational priorities known then: finishing the job in Afghanistan, with General Franks's honest assessment of where the war on terror needed to be fought, known in February of 2002 (Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen) at a time when General Franks disclosed that the intelligence on WMD in Iraq was 'weak.'
As a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he spoke from an informed and knowledgeable position. But he might as well have been some eccentric old kook as far as the media were concerned. But let's take a look at some of that crazy talk he was spouting:
"We are locking down on the principle that we have one evil, Saddam Hussein. He is an enormous, gargantuan force, and that's who we're going to go after," Graham said on the floor. "That, frankly, is an erroneous reading of the world. There are many evils out there, a number of which are substantially more competent, particularly in their ability to attack Americans here at home, than Iraq is likely to be in the foreseeable future."
He told his fellow senators that if they didn't recognize that going to war with Iraq without first taking out the actual terrorists would endanger Americans, "then, frankly, my friends — to use a blunt term — the blood's going to be on your hands."
The jingoistic lamestream media ignored him or insinuated he was some kind of loony-toon, realizing even then on some level that they were complicit in feeding the madness, and rather than face what that meant, they stuck their fingers in their ears and pretended not to notice that Bush-Cheney had cherry-picked intelligence, created the false impression that 9/11 and Saddam Hussein were somehow related, wiretapped American citizens without a warrant, authorized torture, participated in extraordinary rendition, and lied to pretty much the whole world. To confront that, they'd have to acknowledge their own role in it, and face up to the fact that they were journalistically incurious stenographers instead of the upright hard-nosed tough-questioning reporters they fantasized they were. Pathetic.
This time, let's give Graham the benefit of the doubt. He says the CIA lied, and there's no reason to doubt Speaker Pelosi...she'd have a lot to lose by making up an allegation like that. She wants a Truth Commission, and I hope we gets one. Every document should be released so we can all have a look.
Another reason to trust Graham is that he is a stickler for details, keeping a detailed account of his meetings and travels. And that's important because Graham lends even more credibility to Pelosi and reconfirms what she is saying about the CIA misleading Members of Congress.
If he says he didn't meet with the CIA when they're claiming he did, I'm going to go with Graham. Clearly, Graham is no kook. If his colleagues had listened to him in 2002, we'd be living in a much different world right now. He's given us a good reason to believe him.
When we finally know the truth about all this, who wants to bet we'll find that Senator Graham was correct once again?