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Worse than Watergate?

I stumbled across this article by John Dean on the ongoing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq while reading The Agonist. I've read a lot of articles on this subject lately, but this one is the most comprehensive by a long shot, featuring quotes from Bush and detailing the whole issue to date. Here's a particularly ominous excerpt about the ramifications of this:

In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute , which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

Posted by jason at June 6, 2003 05:34 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Politics