Of the top three Dem candidates, it’s clear that John Edwards is the most progressive. The two main reasons I have had reservations about him up until now is that he has not come out in favor of single-payer health insurance, and that he panders to the Israel lobby. Now I have a third reason. It turns out that because he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the war, Edwards knew that the Bush administration was lying when it claimed that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Therefore, there is no excuse for his voting to authorize the war.
Senator Dick Durbin was also on the committee, and he explained on the Senate floor last Saturday that he voted against authorizing the war because of classified intelligence that he was briefed on as a member of the committee.
I believe that Edwards owes us an explanation for why he voted for the war, given that he knew that the argument for it was based on lies. Simply admitting that he made a mistake is not enough.
Sen. Durban’s speech on the Senate floor:
A few hundred feet away from here in a closed room, carefully guarded, the Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top secret briefings about the information we were receiving and the information we had on the Intelligence Committee was not the same information that was being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it. Members of this administration were in active heated debate over whether aluminum tubes really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons some within the administration were saying of course not it is not the same kind of aluminum tube. At the same time members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom shaped clouds. I was angry about it. Frankly, I could not do much about it cause you see, on the Intelligence Committee we’re sworn to secrecy. I could not go outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the WH is in direct contradiction to classified information that’s being given to this Congress. We can’t do that. We couldn’t make those statements.
So, in my frustration I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq and thinking the American people are being misled. They are not being told the truth. That’s why I twenty-two members of my colleagues in voting no. I did not feel at the time that the American people knew the real facts.
So what happened, we invaded, turned loose, hundreds if not thousands of people looking for these weapons of mass destruction. Never found one of them. Looked for nuclear weapons, no evidence whatsoever.
Crooks and Liars has a video of the speech taken from Countdown. I learned about this very disappointing news concerning Edwards from this piece in Counterpunch. It really does throw Edwards’ character seriously into question.
