by James Glaser
July 14, 2003

Remember back when you were a little kid and your mom caught you doing something wrong? Maybe like a lot of little kids, you tried to pass on the blame to your sister or brother or maybe it was, "I didn't do it Johnny did."

Well as you grow up you find you have to start taking responsibility for your own actions and if you did something wrong, it was best to own up to it, because in the end you usually got found out.

Today we have a President of these United States that never really grew up. He is still trying to pass the blame on to others. "I didn't do it, it was the CIA."

Fifty years ago we had a President that took responsibility for his actions and always said, "The buck stops here" No matter what went wrong, Harry S. Truman, knew that he was the man in charge and the actions of our government were his responsibility, which he accepted.

Our current President, George W. Bush, won't do that. Bush will pass the blame on to whoever he can so he can look good, but just like a little kid, in the end he too will get found out.

This President Bush has lived a privileged life. Things were handed to him and if he failed it was always someone else's fault. Through out his life there was always daddy there to make things right and George never had to take responsibility for his actions. We shouldn't expect him to start now.

When this President addressed the nation in a State of the Union speech we all thought what he said was true and now to find out we were deceived, seems so very wrong. When the President of The United States speaks to the American people we expect everything said has been checked out so many times there is no chance that false information could be presented to us.

Now we find that it wasn't just the report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that was false, but a whole list of other falsehoods came out of President Bush and his administration.

Think back a ways about all the times that Saddam Hussein was linked to the September 11th. There was always that story about Iraqi intelligence meeting terrorist Mohammed Atta in Prague. Later on Czech intelligence reports that the Iraqi's contact could not have been Atta

Washington did nothing to tell us that this report about Iraq and Atta was a myth and let two thirds of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on the World Trade Center and that Iraqi citizens were involved. In fact no Iraqi was involved in that terrorist attack, but President Bush and the people working for him let that rumor swell because it served their purpose. That was to get us in a war with Iraq.

President Bush, time after time talked about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, but the truth is that except for mustard gas, Iraq never had the technology to produce materials with a shelf life of 12 years. That is the amount of time between the two wars and Iraq would have needed that better technology to stop its supply of those weapons from deteriorating to the point that they became useless. Many experts, some of them our own people reported about this, but again reports like this were not the type of reports that would help George get his war so they were down played.

No matter what the British said, the Bush Administration repeated it, always saying, "According to British Intelligence" Iraq has twenty missiles that can hit British forces in Cyprus or Iraq can deploy weapons of Mass destruction in 45 minutes. Washington knew these and other reports were false, but they were not saying it, the British were, so it was OK to report it to the American people and let them decide if they believed it or not.

How many times did you hear that previous weapons inspections had failed or that Saddam Hussein kicked the inspectors out? Both false. We pulled the inspectors out, so we could bomb Baghdad. In 1999 a UN Report concluded, "Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq's proscribed weapons programs has been eliminated. Did you ever hear that from the State Department or the White House? No, that would have hurt their push to get us into this war at all costs..

Remember how just before the troops went in, all that was talked about was how Saddam had told his troops to deploy chemical weapons around Baghdad? That was the "Red Line" that was shown every night on the news. General James Conway, the head Marine in Iraq, later reported that there were no such weapons found. So who told us about Saddam's order?

General Conway said, "we've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there. We were simply wrong." Telling the truth is not devastating and now General Conway by his statement has gained much in the way of credibility, something the White House gave up with its repeated falsehoods.

President Bush went to Poland and told the world that we had found weapons labs in two mobile trailers. Bush said, "Those that say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons - they're wrong. We found them." It is now almost certain that those trailers were for the production of hydrogen for weather balloons, as Iraq claimed in the first place. We know the company that made them and no traces of banned chemical or biological agents were found in them.

The President was wrong on that one too, but after he finds out that the information he thought was true, turns out to be false, what does he do? Well this President continues to repeat the report, only now he knows he is being untrue.

Honesty and integrity go hand and hand in being traits we desire in a President. It is a shame that this President has some growing up to do. Repeated false reports to the American people that he uses to give justification to his attack and killing of thousands in Iraq has no place in our form of government.

Each and everyday as more facts come out, President Bush loses more of the respect he had before these lies came to light. This President should come to the American People and tell us what he knows to be true and if he wants to pass the blame on to others for his lies then he better start cleaning house and fire all of those that gave him false information.

It bothers me that both those in Congress that voted to attack Iraq and those in the White House will tell you that even without all of the false information, they still had enough evidence to make all the killing in Iraq justifiable. If that is true, then why didn't they let the American people decide on this war on the merits of truthful evidence, instead of filling the airwaves and the halls of Congress with lies? If their argument was so good with just the truth, then why did they constantly repeat things they knew were untrue?