Congressman King raised an objection at a House Judiciary hearing into the President's power, prompting us to understand the issues driving his objection: Iraq WMD, imminent threats, and war crimes.

Vincent Bugliosi was providing testimony to the House Judiciary Committee reviewing the President's abuse of power. Bugliosi is the author of the book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.

The double talk in Washington was that this was a "review of power," when it sounded more like a discussion of the reasons to prosecute and/or impeach the President for war crimes.  

The DoD emails show the shell game on Geneva was sophisticated. 

The propaganda focused on the possibility of mushroom clouds to
distract attention from no imminent threat of
mushroom clouds.

Bugliosi, when interrupted, said the intelligence community concluded in the National Intelligence Estimate that there was no imminent threat from Iraq.

At 3:10 Congressman King interrupted Bugliosi, saying:

"The Gentleman is talking about classified information in this meeting."

The NIE and an analysis of the dissents are declassified.

Congresswoman Lee asked Bugliosi about the deleted dissents in the classified NIE. King was concerned Lee's time had experies.

Lee wanted to know whether the deleted dissents were presented to the United Nations. Bugliosi said the dissents were not presented to the UN.

An analysis of the differences between the classified NIE and the white paper says:

"The Intelligence Community's elimination of the caveats from the unclassified White Paper misrepresented their judgments to the public"

The National Security Archive summary of the analysis says

"Large sections of blacked-out discussion following the Committee's Conclusions . . . left out the caveats, hedged language, and dissents in the underlying intelligence. . ."

This is a red herring. A close reading of the deleted text would not arrive at a different conclusion about the imminence of Iraq's military threat.  The real issue isn't that the NIE language was or wasn't deleted or accurate. Rather, the United States government was indirectly providing its own intelligence community unreliable information, which others repeated as if fact.

The DoD emails show US-crafted propaganda was fed into the
intelligence community, then to Congress and the public. The inaccurate
information was given credibility merely because of its claimed
classification, not because it was accurate or a bonafide secret.

Feith revealed his (indirect) role in spreading information with this language, which does not expressly deny he was routing information through military analysts:

"Nor did the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy ever approve or adopt any of the draft opinions or conclusions in any of the resulting documents as OUSD(P) positions, views or conclusions." 13 of 53

Feith's hedging is very similar to Rove's.

The real issue is not whether the NIE text was or wasn't accurate; but how the US government sidestepped the "imminent threat" requirement and used propaganda to mobilize the nation for illegal warfare.

Although the hearing was in the House, the problem extends into the
Senate. A casual review of the Senate Phase II highlights the problem.
We rejected the Senate version of the WMD intelligence analysis because of the convoluted investigation. 

Congress is confused because it refuses to take time to sort through
the propaganda with a needed public impeachment investigation.


Evidence there was no imminent threat means the President could be
prosecuted for war crimes. The Geneva requires an imminent threat
before a nation may take pre-emptive military action.