"Brainwashed"

My choice for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, should a Dean-Clark or Clark-Dean combination not work out, seems to be the first one to figure out just how to cover his ass on having voted for the war: Point out that he and his colleagues were systematically lied to. Why is it so hard for others to point out that they were given specific false information that influenced their votes? Is it the specter of Michigan Governor George Romney admitting in 1968 that he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the Vietnam War?

(thanks to The Daily Kos)

Local News

Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.

Nelson said claim made during classified briefing

By John McCarthy
FLORIDA TODAY

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
...
Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

There should be nothing controversial about this claim, since Bush said just about the same thing publicly. For the most part, I think that Senators don't really have the option to disbelieve specific factual statements given them by the administration, so there should be no reason to be afraid of admitting that one voted on the basis of false statements.

Unfortunately, the "unmanned aerial vehicles" claim is one that was so stupid and implausible that you have to doubt the intelligence of anyone who fell for it, even if knowledgable administration officials did pitch it with a straight face and no one challenged it. I don't know anything about this field, but it should be obvious that, since the earth is round, you couldn't control a drone from Iraq, or even from a boat in the mid-Atlantic, over the horizon without help from a network of satellites, which isn't something the Iraqis had at their disposal.

But it's apparently very hard to look an administration official in the eye and say, that's ridiculous.