Monday, May 30, 2005

Memorial Day

And how to spend it.
As the rest of Congress shuffles off to their Memorial Day recess, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is drafting a letter to Defense Secretary —Donald Rumsfeld seeking answers after a report in the Sunday London Times revealed the U.S. and Britain may have sought to goad Iraq into war even as UN negotiations were ongoing, RAW STORY has learned.

A staffer said the congressman called the latest revelations "the smoking bullet in the smoking gun."

[...]

"If true, these assertions indicate that not only had our nation secretly and perhaps illegally agreed to go to war by the summer of 2002, but that we had gone on to take specific and tangible military actions before asking Congress or the United Nations for authority," the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee pens.

This time, however, the congressman demands more than answers. In his letter, Conyers will request all computer files relating to questions surrounding the planning stages of the Iraq war.
  Raw Story article

THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.

The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make “regime change” in Iraq legal.

Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that “the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime”.
  UK Times Online article
First the memo, now this. It's not like this information wasn't available to Congress before they jumped on the invasion bandwagon, but how much has to be made widely public (albeit not yet from the U.S. side of the pond) before impeachment begins?

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