Letters to the Editor
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Another Former Marine Fed Up With Bush!
This month marks the 31st Anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam. As a former United States Marine who served with the 1st Marine Brigade's Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH-463), aboard the U.S.S. Hancock (CVA-19), during Operations Eagle Pull, and Frequent Wind, the evacuations of Phomn Phen, Cambodia and Saigon, South Vietnam in April 1975, I witnessed first hand the tragic consequences of a President who lead the United States into a war based on faulty intelligence. The lie President Johnson echoed in August 1964 regarding the North Vietnamese patrol boat attack on the U.S.S. Maddox convinced Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which permitted him to engage this nation in a war that resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 U.S. servicemen and women, an additional 300,000 WIA, and wasted over $116 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. That President Johnson knew that the attack against the U.S.S. Maddox never occurred has been verified as recently as December 2, 2005 in an analysis of the event published in the National Security Agency's classified, Cryptologic Quarterly by NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok.
In October 2002, based on intelligence President Bush convinced Congress to pass Public Law 107-243, authorizing him to use force against Iraq to make Saddam comply with U.N. Resolutions that he disarm his nation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. This in spite of former Secretary of State James Baker's declaration on January 9, 1996 during a PBS Frontline interview that "He (Saddam), no longer has the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction, he no longer represents the threat to his neighbors that he did before." This assertion was essentially echoed by former U.S. Marine and top U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, who stated in a Time Magazine interview on September 14, 2002 that "I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it. We have tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn't necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn't done anything." These assertions were proved by the fact that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq, and by the conclusions of the CIA report released on October 7, 2004 that found Iraq's WMD program had been ended in 1991, and that it had ceased its nuclear program after the Gulf War, the same year. The United States weapons inspectors officially concluded their hunt for the Iraqi WMD on January 12, 2005.
That it stains the limits of credulity to believe that the President of the United States was not aware of these facts as declared in the aforementioned statements by both Baker and Ritter, is an understatement at best. For President Bush to believe that Iraq still had a Weapons of Mass Destruction and a Nuclear weapons program means that a bankrupt, third world country Iraq, a state that had lived under the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a nation in history was able to deceive the whole of the U.S. national technical means which we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars engineering, building, and operating over the last four decades including the spy satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Security Agencies (NSA), Project Echelon.
It is time for members of Congress to stop obfuscating and the Senate Intelligence Committee to complete their investigation into Iraqi pre-war intelligence in fully open and public hearings. This nation owes it to the 2,307 men and women of our armed forces who have been killed as well as the 17,000 who have been wounded in Iraq.