July 30, 2003 – In a Rose Garden press conference, the President answered the following:

Q Mr. President, you often speak about the need for accountability in many areas. I wonder then, why is Dr. Condoleezza Rice not being held accountable for the statement that your own White House has acknowledged was a mistake in your State of the Union address regarding Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium? And also, do you take personal responsibility for that inaccuracy?

THE PRESIDENT: I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely. I also take responsibility for making decisions on war and peace. And I analyzed a thorough body of intelligence — good, solid, sound intelligence — that led me to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

We gave the world a chance to do it. We had — remember there’s — again, I don’t want to get repetitive here, but it’s important to remind everybody that there was 12 resolutions that came out of the United Nations because others recognized the threat of Saddam Hussein. Twelve times the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions in recognition of the threat that he posed. And the difference was, is that some were not willing to act on those resolutions. We were — along with a lot of other countries — because he posed a threat.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person. And America is lucky to have her service. Period.

 We now know that within that same time frame, the President also “declassified” parts of the National Intelligence Estimate, specifically the part which identified Valerie Plame. Of course that same part which identified Plame dealt with the Niger yellow cake claim.

Now one can only wonder what changed within those few days. First it was important to prove their case for war by releasing parts of the NIE which also resulted in the outing of a CIA agent whose area of expertise was on WMD, only for the President to accept responsibility for everything in that report to be wrong (with the exception of Joe Wilson being married to a CIA agent – Valerie Plame).

Now let’s move forward to today, where we find this out–

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

Every single reason for Iraq, with the exception of Saddam being a bad man, has been proven false. Even worse, every single reason for the war has been proven lies. How in the world can we, the United States of America, allow someone like Bush to stay in power when the biggest decision of his presidency was based upon a lie – a decision that has put the nation in the poor house and killed over 2300 American soldiers?.

It is time for Congress to act and if they won’t act then we will replace them. We can not allow our nation to continue down this path of self destruction.