Holding Bush Accountable on Terrorism

It's been apparent to many people that Bush has not done a good job on terrorism. Osama bin Laden is still loose. Although Bush had al Qaida on the run four years ago, al Qaida, because of numerous missteps on the part of Bush and his friends has had a resurgence. We've also known for some time that Iraq had no WMDs when we invaded in 2003 and was not any kind of strategic threat but we invaded anyway for reasons that Bush has done a poor job of explaining. We won the war in Afghanistan and have spent the last four years losing the peace so that the Taliban is now in danger of coming back. The list goes on. We now get word from The New York Times of a NIE report where the experts tell us that the terrorism threat is considerably worse because we attacked Iraq than it was before.

I'll let Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo explain the NIE and what needs to be done:

Do yourself and your country a favor this morning.

Call up your representative and senators -- Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter -- and tell them you want the April National Intelligence Estimate ("Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States") released to the public. Now. Before the election. So the public can know what the White House has been keeping from them.

I know the title is a mouthful. So just to be clear, that is the April National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) widely reported on this weekend, that concludes that the Iraq War is making the threat of terrorism worse, not better.

This issue was knocking around on the Sunday shows yesterday, with folks like Majority Leader Frist insisting it's just not so. But I haven't seen this episode yet called for what it is -- a cover-up.

An NIE isn't some random government white paper. It represents the consensus judgment of the entire US intelligence community, with input from all the different agencies, from CIA and DIA to INR and FBI and all the others. In other words, this is the collaborative judgment of the people actually fighting the War on Terror.

In 2002, there was a rush to judgment that led us to go to war in Iraq; we now know it was a war we didn't need and we're stuck cleaning up his blunder. We don't need more wars based on the demands of midterms elections and politics. It's time for Bush to be held to account. No more games, no more spin, no more finding out a year later that Bush was 'misunderstood,' no more scaring the public until the real facts are in our hands and we know what the truth is. Is that too much to ask?