Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was courageous enough in the wake of his committee's blistering assessment of pre-war intelligence to say something truly outrageous in the terms of Washington society: He said he was sorry.
CLARENCE PAGE: CANDIDATES NEVER HAVE TO SAY 'SORRY'
[Sat Jul 24 2004]
What do President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Senators John Kerry and John Edwards have in common besides their fat wallets? Not one of them wants to admit he was flim-flammed abut the Iraq war.
At least Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was courageous enough in the wake of his committee's blistering assessment of pre-war intelligence to say something truly outrageous in the terms of Washington society: He said he was sorry.
The West Virginia Democrat said he now regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq in light of the new information uncovered by his committee and others.
You may recall that the Democrat-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution. Since then, disclosures from the Senate committee, the 911 Commission, inspectors in Iraq and other sources have undermined each of the Bush administration's arguments for the war, such as Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, empire-building intensions and operational links to al-Qaida.
The Senate's first report detailed numerous cloak-and-dagger blunders, including over reliance on a colorfully bizarre Iraqi source appropriately code-named "Curveball." As the Los Angeles Times reported in March, "Curveball" was the mysterious Iraqi defector who provided the Bush administration's bogus prewar intelligence that Hussein had built mobile biological-weapons labs, the "Winnebagoes of Death" that Secretary of State Colin Powell cited in his highly persuasive UN address.
The only American to meet Curveball warned the CIA that he appeared to be an alcoholic hustler. But, according to new documents, a CIA official waved off the warning, saying, "let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen ..." and "the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about."
"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against (the war powers resolution)," Rockefeller said after his committee's report was released. "I have admitted that my vote was wrong."
There, as my elders used to say on the playground, was that so hard?
