The Smoking Gun That Could Lead to Bush's Impeachment

By: Chris Marshall

If high-ranking intelligence officials are to be believed, there is a smoking gun which strongly suggests that George Bush should be impeached for lying to the American people in order to generate support and justification for war. Everyone should be clear about what it is. There is much to criticize about how the Bush administration lied and manipulated public opinion. But right now the single most damaging piece of evidence in the case against Bush is the forged letter proffered as evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium for use in nuclear weapons, which Bush touted in his State of the Union speech. It now appears that not only was the document a forgery, it is almost inconceivable that Bush and his cronies didn't know it was a forgery before they presented it to the American people and the world as evidence - a clearly impeachable offense.

Consider the following:

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a column on 5-6-03, reported that he was told by "an insider" who was present at the meetings the following story:

"I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the Vice President's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged... The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted - except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. 'It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year' one insider said."

This story has been corroborated by at least 2 credible sources:

1. Greg Thielmann, Director of the strategic, proliferation, and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until September 2002, who says his agency told Powell the letter was definitely bogus long before the State of the Union speech in which it was presented as evidence.
   
   
2. Condoleeza Rice, who admitted on June 8's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, that the Vice President's office requested the report from the Ambassador and that people in the Vice President's Office may have known (she maintains that the information was held at low levels and didn't make it to the top).
   

Remember that our intelligence agencies were overhauled after 9/11 so that crucial information would not get lost in the intelligence bureaucracies. One of the highest ranking intelligence officers in the State Department says the State Department knew the document was a forgery.

And it is simply not believable that the Vice President's office could send an ambassador on a fact-finding mission, that that ambassador could come back from the mission he was sent on by the Vice President, tell the CIA and the State Department that the document was a forgery, and, with the Vice President's office, the CIA, and the State Department all in possession of this information, that the Administration could somehow not have been informed. Hell, the Vice President's Office, the CIA, and the State Department ARE the administration.

We need to hear a lot more about this from our leaders and from the media.