I was reading Booman’s post about not reading the Patriot Act. Seems to be habit.
From The Dark Side, a PBS special about Dick Cheney:
NARRATOR: The NIE was kept in a locked room where Congress could read it, but few did. In mid-October, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraqi war resolution. A declassified version of the NIE, known as the “white paper,” was prepared by the CIA and released three days later.
Ah, can you imagine what would have happened if only all the Senators had done as Senator Bob Graham begged…and read the NIE about the WMDs in Iraq? Imagine if we had been right instead of being strong and wrong.
From a dead link at the Palm Beach Post…Graham was passionate before the IWR vote. They should have listened becase my governor and senator was actually very hawkish, not prone to passion at all, soft-spoken.
…”On Oct. 9, 2002, Graham — the guy everyone thought of as quiet, mild-mannered, deliberate, conflict-averse — let loose on his Senate colleagues for going along with President Bush’s war against Iraq.
“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.”
It was a watershed moment. Gone was the meticulous thinker who would talk completely around and through a problem before answering a question about it…
(I can not get the Palm Beach Post link to work in the post…it keeps giving error. Will keep trying.)
And even General Tommy Franks was talking to Graham, though he later denied it. Imagine if they had been listened to at the time. This is from the Frontline site at PBS…the transcript of the Dark Side. I can NOT get links to appear correctly today.
Narrator: How did you hear about it, that they were headed in this direction in February of 2002?
Graham: Well, I heard about it during a briefing at Central Command , which is located in Tampa, Fla., on the Afghanistan war. The briefing was very positive. Things were going well; victory appeared to be close at hand. Then I was told in a private meeting that no, that wasn’t the case; that in fact, we were beginning to recede from the war in Afghanistan precisely to get ready for Iraq.
Narrator: Who told you?
Graham: Gen. Tommy Franks.
Narrator: Take me into the meeting. What’s happening? …
Graham: The general said, “Senator, I would like to speak with you privately.” We went into his room, and he proceeded to tell me that they weren’t fighting a war in Afghanistan; that they were, in fact, beginning to redeploy assets. He particularly mentioned special operations personnel and the Predator unmanned aircraft as examples of assets that were being redeployed from Afghanistan to get ready for Iraq.
He then laid out what he thought the strategy should be for victory in the war on terror: Finish the job in Afghanistan; move to other areas that had large numbers of cells of Al Qaeda — Somalia, Yemen being number one and number two. He went on to say that Iraq was a special case, that our intelligence there was very poor, and that the Europeans knew more about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction than we did.
Narrator: The head of CENTCOM, a four-star general, is telling you this information. How do you react?
Graham: I was stunned…
What if all this talk was made more public? What if they had listened to Graham and actually read the NIE before voting for the war.
Graham was angry. He told them the classified version did not support all the claims being made. He asked them to read the 90 classified pages instead of just the 25 unclassified.
The cafe format permitted a lengthier explanation than in the debate’s 90-second answer, so I discussed the classified intelligence contrasted with unclassified at the time of the Iraqi war vote in October 2002, when Sen. Bob Graham begged his colleagues on the floor of the Senate to read the 90 page classified NIE on WMD (as opposed to the 25 pages of declassified materials).
“Friends, I encourage you to read the classified intelligence reports which are much sharper than what is available in declassified form,” Sen. Graham reports stating on the floor of the Senate in October 2002.
“We are going to be increasing the threat level against the people of the United States.” He warned: “Blood is going to be on your hands”
Sen. Graham has explained that the classified version did not support the later claim by George Tenet that the WMD issue was a “slam dunk.” The former Florida senator has also explained that the 25-page declassified document didn’t accurately represent the classified NIE; “gone” were the assessments of Saddam Hussein’s intentions to use WMD, omitting “a huge component” selectively removed.
If they read and listened they would have been better informed. Just imagine if our Democrats read what they voted on all the time. The online forums knew, before the vote. They did not listen, they did not read. And this was only 90 pages, not as long as the Patriot Act.
Perhaps Clinton’s view it was better to be “strong and wrong” than to appear weak and right had a lot to do with it.