Letters

Readers respond to "WMD, MIA?" by Jake Tapper.

Published April 18, 2003 10:35PM (EDT)

[Read the story.]

If coalition forces don't find massive, and I mean humongous, stocks of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq -- all three: nuclear, chemical and biological -- then George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and Colin Powell should resign.

If they don't resign, they should be impeached and removed from office and then tried for perjury and as war criminals and then sent to rot in Guantánamo for being the liars, traitors and war criminals they are. The Bush administration's treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors make Bill Clinton's own little peccadillo look like a sandbox.

Impeachment and removal of the mostly chickenhawk Bush cartel would place Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert into office as a caretaker president until the elections of 2004 when, hopefully, a much needed regime change will begin at home.

I also suggest international supervision of the 2004 elections, especially in states controlled by Confederate Republican governors like Florida and its Jeb Bush.

If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Powell and the others have traded in these vicious lies for all these months, they are unfit for public office. That they would come up empty on the WMD charges -- even after having captured those two western Iraqi air bases on day one of the war -- shows that neither Bush nor any of his comrades have any remaining credibility at all.

This administration has proved, by the absence of substantial caches of WMD and delivery systems, to be the biggest liar in the history of human civilization.

Frankly, from this point onward, any discovery of WMD in Iraq should be subject to a high standard of proof that such evidence was not planted by American-led forces.

And it is indeed unfortunate that the Bush maniacs didn't go for the capture of Saddam instead of ordering soldiers to kill him. A captured Saddam, indicted at the Hague, would have stood trial and presented every incontrovertible instance of his heinous crimes against humanity.

Now, due to the Bush administration, that won't happen. Further, the Bush charges regarding WMD will have been proven false -- rendering the current U.S. government completely illegitimate.

-- Thom Prentice

I've been waiting for someone to follow up on the reason for going to war in the first place. The national media is so caught up in a race to out-patriot each other that no one is asking the tough questions and holding our leadership accountable for their justification of an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country.

There are many, many people in this country who went along with Bush's fear-mongering, and it has to be the media who make the hawks pay a political price if it turns out that no WMD are found.

The Democrats certainly won't. They're too timid to raise their voices over the chorus of self-congratulation at deposing an evil, vain tyrant.

Since the calls from Russia and France for independent verification will likely be met with snickers and frog jokes here, relentless journalism is the public's only defense against what has the potential to be a spin job of the first order.

Thanks for staying on message.

-- Josh Pate

Please get Jake Tapper to repeat as often as possible that the only WMD used in the Persian Gulf of late have been by the U.S.

Depleted uranium bombs are high up on the U.N.'s list of what qualifies as weapons of mass destruction. This needs to get repeated until someone hears it.

-- R. Deutsch

Now that most of the non-embedded journalists on the scene in Iraq have been attacked, killed, or otherwise ousted, censored, abused and intimidated by coalition forces, I'm thoroughly convinced that weapons of mass destruction will surely be found in Iraq. Then we can all go home feeling vindicated and move on to the next manufactured siege.

-- Dee Rapposelli

This administration damns itself in the details of every step it takes; how did we let them get away with it?

If we really knew that Iraq had WMD that were capable of being delivered into a U.S. city, Bush would have been morally obligated to invade Iraq as soon as possible to prevent the catastrophe, U.N. be damned. He didn't, and instead we got several months of an "invade Iraq/kill the U.N." two-fer.

After the argument that Saddam could nuke Manhattan next week was debunked, we stressed that Iraq still had some weapons. And when we finally invaded, we didn't give it a name like "Operation Obliterating Shield" or "Operation Castrating Scimitar," which would have suggested we were neutralizing a dangerous foe. We called it "Operation Iraqi Freedom"; in retrospect, it was the first shot in the postwar spin campaign.

Counter-spinners, return fire!

-- Adam Morrow


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