Impeachment Dreams

One more dreaming liberal:

Hidden behind the runaway bride and Michael Jackson stories last week was the unveiling of the smoking gun in the George W. Bush impeachment drive. Last week, the Times of London published an explosive top secret British government memo that proves, once and for all, the the Bush administration was fabricating and twisting the evidence on Iraqi WMD’s and ties to al Qaeda. And, once again, the corporate press sleeps. One oligarcy protecting another. Ain’t it grand!

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Now, if the Republican party only had some real morality, they’d kick that criminal right out of the office he stole twice.

Never let context interfere with your conclusions! The most common and meaningful definitions of "fix" are perfectly innocent in this context: 1) "To place securely; make stable or firm"; 2) "To put into a stable or unalterable form"; 3) "To correct or set right; adjust"; 4) "To make ready; prepare". This makes perfect sense to anyone who has ever gathered information in support of a policy position or business decision. You don't dump raw data on your audience; you analyze and reassemble it in a coherent form.

If you want to argue that the author of the memo intended the more inflammatory meaning "To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means" you'd better have some additional evidence to back up your contention. As John Hindraker of Powerline pointed out in this post the known facts point in exactly the opposite direction:

[T]he constant implication of the BUSH LIED! lefties, is that the administration really knew that Saddam didn't have any WMDs, but fixed the intelligence to make it appear that he did. But we know that isn't true. The consensus estimate of the U.S. intelligence community has been made public, and it clearly says that, with a high degree of confidence, Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report has confirmed that this is what the intelligence community believed and reported to the President, and that there is no evidence that the administration improperly influenced the gathering or reporting of intelligence ("The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.")

And, whatever the British note-taker meant by the sentence quoted by Cole, he obviously didn't mean that there was any doubt on the part of British intelligence or Blair's government that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, the notes specifically refer to Iraq's WMDs, in sections not quoted by Cole:

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD...

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

I know responding to stuff like this over and over is a waste of time...Oh, well.