No, Chelsea. Clairvoyance had nothing to do with it.

seafan

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Feb-16-08 03:37 PM
Original message

No, Chelsea. Clairvoyance had nothing to do with it.

February 16, 2008

The question was one she had heard before, but this time it was asked in downright hostile terms.

�Has your mother shown any remorse for the fact that her vote cost Iraqis a million of their lives?� a student asked Chelsea Clinton on Monday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ms. Clinton replied: �She cast a vote based on the best available evidence. Perhaps you had clairvoyance then, and that�s extraordinary.�

.....

With all due respect, Ms. Clinton, were these people in 2002 clairvoyant as well? We already know they were extraordinary.

What about these people?

And these?

They, and many of us knew, before this invasion, that it was a lie and it was wrong.

And what about this man? He knew.

And he knew because he was one of only a few people in Congress who read the entire 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

Your mother was not one of them. She would only steadfastly admit to having been 'briefed on it'.
Because of that decision, she did not have all of the facts. She based her decision to vote for the Iraq War Resolution only on Bush's carefully concocted lies.

Hillary�s War

By JEFF GERTH and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: May 29, 2007

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rose before a nearly empty Senate chamber and proposed that Congress undo one of the most significant acts in its recent history: the authorization of the Iraq war. In remarks lasting just two minutes, she spoke bluntly: The �authorization to use force has run its course, and it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.� She added, �If the president will not bring himself to accept reality, it is time for Congress to bring reality to him.�

This was Clinton�s latest and boldest attempt to distance herself from her own vote for the Iraq war in October 2002 � a vote she has described as �probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make.�

.....

As she had always done, Clinton prepared for her decision on the war vote by doing her homework, or what she has called her �due diligence.� This included, she said, attending classified briefings on Capitol Hill concerning intelligence on Iraq. Indeed, Clinton was far more prescient than many of her Senate colleagues about the potential difficulty of rebuilding the country. In a number of private meetings with top Bush officials, according to people in the room, Clinton asked pointed and skeptical questions about how the administration planned to deal with the inevitable challenges of governing Iraq after the invasion.

But it�s not clear that she was equally diligent when it came to the justifications for the war itself. So far, she has not discussed publicly whether she ever read the complete classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, the most comprehensive judgment of the intelligence community about Iraq�s W.M.D., which was made available to all 100 senators. The 90-page report was delivered to Congress on Oct. 1, 2002, just 10 days before the Senate vote. An abridged summary was made public by the Bush administration, but it painted a less subtle picture of Iraq�s weapons program than the full classified report. To get a complete picture would require reading the entire document, which, according to a version of the report made public in 2004, contained numerous caveats and dissents on Iraq�s weapons and capacities.

According to Senate aides, because Clinton was not yet on the Armed Services Committee, she did not have anyone working for her with the security clearances needed to read the entire N.I.E. and the other highly classified reports that pertained to Iraq.

She could have done the reading herself. Senators were able to access the N.I.E. at two secure locations in the Capitol complex. Nonetheless, only six senators personally read the report, according to a 2005 television interview with Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and then the vice chairman of the intelligence panel. Earlier this year, on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Clinton was confronted by a woman who had traveled from New York to ask her if she had read the intelligence report. According to Eloise Harper of ABC News, Clinton responded that she had been briefed on it.

�Did you read it?� the woman screamed.

Clinton replied that she had been briefed, though she did not say by whom.

The question of whether Clinton took the time to read the N.I.E. report is critically important. Indeed, one of Clinton�s Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, the Florida senator who was then the chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part, because he had read the complete N.I.E. report. Graham said he found that it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed W.M.D. As a result, he listened to Bush�s claims more skeptically. �I was able to apply caveat emptor,� Graham, who has since left the Senate, observed in 2005. He added regretfully, �Most of my colleagues could not.�

On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002, Senate Democrats, including Clinton, held a caucus over lunch on the second floor of the Capitol. There, Graham says he �forcefully� urged his colleagues to read the complete 90-page N.I.E. before casting such a monumental vote.

.....

We and the Iraqis have suffered enormously since that October, 2002 vote. We had the right to expect that all of our elected leaders would leave no stone unturned in the search for the truth about the wisdom of invading Iraq and why George W. Bush was so hell-bent on charging into a country that was not responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001, with murder on his mind.

Senator Graham and only a few others took the time to investigate this NIE. And when he read the evidence in the NIE, he voted against Bush's invasion.

Where was Senator Clinton?

.....

In the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2002, the Senate voted, 77 to 23, to authorize the Bush administration�s war against Iraq. The result was shaped in part by the coming midterm elections. Some of the senators up for re-election did not want to appear weak on an issue that the administration had skillfully tied to America�s �war on terror.� Clinton, having been elected two years earlier, had no such immediate worries. Even so, she positioned herself carefully.

For all the scrutiny of Clinton�s vote, an important moment has been lost. It came several hours earlier, on Oct. 10, 2002, the same day Clinton spoke about why she would support the Iraq-war authorization. In her remarks on the Senate floor, she stressed the need for diplomacy with Iraq on the part of the Bush administration and insisted she wasn�t voting for �any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism.� Yet just a few hours after her speech, Clinton voted against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required the diplomatic emphasis that Clinton had gone on record as supporting � and that she now says she had favored all along.

The long-overlooked vote was on an amendment introduced by Carl Levin and several other Senate Democrats who hoped to rein in President Bush by requiring a two-step process before Congress would actually authorize the use of force. Senators knew full well the wide latitude that they were handing to Bush, which is why some tried to put the brakes on the march to war. The amendment called, first, for the U.N. to pass a new resolution explicitly approving the use of force against Iraq. It also required the president to return to Congress if his U.N. efforts failed and, in Senator Levin�s words, �urge us to authorize a going-it-alone, unilateral resolution.� That resolution would allow the president to wage war as a last option.

Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment or said why she stayed on the sidelines as 11 other senators debated it for 95 minutes that day. In the end, she joined the significant majority of 75 senators who voted against Levin�s proposal. (A similar measure in the House also lost, though it gained the backing of 155 members.) The 75 senators were largely those who voted later that night in favor of the war authorization. Only four senators � Feinstein, Rockefeller, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin � voted yes on Levin�s resolution and then voted yes on Bush�s war authorization. If Clinton had done that, she subsequently could have far more persuasively argued, perhaps, that she had supported a multilateral diplomatic approach.

.....

So, Ms. Chelsea Clinton, with all due respect, "clairvoyance" had nothing to do with it.

Due diligence did.

And precious few of our leaders practiced it, when so many lives depended on it.