Censure the President!

As revelations each day make clear that President Bush and his advisers deliberately misled Americans on the reasons for invading Iraq, a coalition of organizations and individuals -- including a former CIA analyst, an anti-terrorism diplomat and military families -- call on Congress to censure the President.

“This is not about a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of integrity,” said Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War, a coalition of 42 national membership organizations.

“Each day new evidenced dribbles out that the President knew. He knew the evidence wasn’t sufficient to support his claims that Iraq posed an ‘imminent threat’ to the American people,” said Andrews, a former member of Congress from Maine.

“He knew that the intelligence community’s assessment of Iraq’s arms programs did not support the administration’s pre-conceived notion that Iraq had chemical and nuclear weapons. He knew better -- but he chose to mislead us,” Andrews added. It is up to Congress to address this significant abuse of power by the Bush Administration, he said.

Adam Ruben, field director for the grassroots organization MoveOn.org, said it has collected more than 450,000 signatures in a week urging Congress to begin a process leading to censure. He said the organization would use print and TV advertising and its two million members to extend the campaign.

“There should be consequences when the President of the United States misleads the people and the Congress,” said Ruben. “Congress devoted considerable attention and, eventually, voted to impeach President Clinton for misleading the public about a sexual relationship. It isn’t unreasonable to think that misleading the nation about the necessity of going to war constitutes an abuse of power of much greater significance,” he said.

“The President has created the worst intelligence scandal in history, falsely creating a case to go to war when no national interests were at stake” said Mel Goodman, who served at both the CIA and the State Department under Republican and Democratic administrations.

“The reasons we were given for going to war were false. The Bush Administration engaged in a deliberate campaign of information warfare, which employed erroneous and misleading information as part of a broader strategy to build public opinion for an invasion,” added Larry Johnson, who served as Deputy Director of the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism and, earlier, for the CIA.

The parents of two soldiers who were casualties of the war in Iraq demanded accountability.

“I want to know there was a good reason for what happened to my daughter and to all of the others injured and killed in Iraq,” said Adele Kubein of Corvalis, OR, whose daughter was injured by a mortar round while serving with her National Guard unit.

Also appearing was Fernando Suarez del Solar of San Diego, whose son, a Marine, was killed in combat. “It’s very difficult to accept the reality that my son died in a war that was not at all necessary,” he said.