General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: DO NOT BE FOOLED!!! [View all]pnwmom
(109,055 posts)lied through their teeth about WMD's in Iraq. The Democratic system has to be based on trust or it will never survive. Those people violated that trust.
Ted Kennedy said that he voted against it because he had access to special information -- information he couldn't legally share -- as a member of the Armed Services committee. But he understand why other members of the Senate voted yes -- because they had been lied to.
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/foreign-policy-address-edward-m-kennedy/p6834
QUESTIONER: My name is . I work for the State Department's Washington File. In the run-up to the war, Robert Byrd was almost the only voice in Congress making a case against the war. Where were the other members of Congress at that time?
KENNEDY: The question is Robert Byrd spoke out brilliantly against the war; where were the others? They weren't behind Robert Byrd where they should've been. I was glad to be there with Robert Byrd on that issue, but the clearly, we shouldn't have been there. I reached that my decision as a member of the Armed Services Committee listening to members of the military testify and predicting exactly what was going to come. You listen to General Hoar , the principal former leaders both of the Marines and the military, men and women who had experience and had been over in that region of the world, absolutely predicted exactly what was going to happen. And it was so powerful, clear, and convincing, that the decision was an easy one for me.
Quite frankly, our colleagues, some of those that were on the Armed Services Committee, reached the similar conclusion. Senator Byrd is on that Armed Services Committee. But it was the we I think what they would say is they didn't have the kind of balanced information that many of the rest of us had. There's no question, as I mentioned in the talk, that the presentation that was made to the members of the United States Senate misrepresented and distorted the intelligence information. And we have to have, as any democracy has to have, confidence in both what the president is going to tell you and what the president's representatives are going to tell you. And when they had the kind of series of misrepresentations that I've reviewed, this is an indictment of this administration in its own words.