Dear Editor:

I hope our senators, Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, will censure President Bush for misleading us into war.

From his first days in office, President Bush was planning for war with Iraq.

That decision having been made, the president ran a campaign of misinformation, hype and hysteria that led America into an unnecessary war.

Here is an excerpt of his misinformation staring us in the face, which no one seems to realize or care about:

In the run-up to the war, President Bush said that the United States “must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud…We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.” [Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2002]

That was not the message that he was getting from the intelligence community.

Here’s an excerpt from CIA Director George Tenet’s remarks about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which summarized the pre-war views of the intelligence community:

“Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the Estimate. They never said there was an “imminent” threat.”

[Transcript of 2/5/04 speech at Georgetown University]

Before the war, Bush was repeatedly told there was no definitive evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

He knew Iraq was not a nuclear threat.

He knew there was no Iraq connection to 9/11.

Iraq posed no imminent danger to the United States. There was no case for a pre-emptive war.

Yet he relentlessly led us into a war that has cost 500 American lives, left 3,000 seriously injured, and wasted tens of billions of dollars.

To date, some 7,000 to 10,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed thus far in the war. This number is never seen in the news, nor are the coffins of our brave soldiers.

How then are we supposed to weigh the true price of war?

Our senators must act to censure President Bush.

Nathan Brown Sophomore, anthropology