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Seattle Post-Intelligencer - July 7, 2004 Senate report strikes heart of Iraq war By Ken Guggenheim WASHINGTON -- After hundreds of American soldiers have died and billions of U.S. dollars have been spent, a Senate panel is saying the justification for the war in Iraq was wrong. "In the end, what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community, and that information was flawed," said Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan. Roberts said the war might have still been justified on humanitarian grounds. But Congress never debated going to war to stop Saddam Hussein's brutality. The debate was over Saddam's chemical and biological weapons, his ability to deliver them, his nuclear ambitions and his ties to terrorism. The Bush administration told the American public - and the world - that Saddam had to be stopped before he used his weapons of mass destruction or before they fell into terrorists' hands. "The facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, just weeks before the war. Powell's speech was the culmination of months of warnings by top administration officials on the dangers posed by Saddam - warnings the panel is now rejecting... |