Memo to Nancy Pelosi: Stick to Your Guns...Jane Harmon Must Go!

David Zephyr

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Mon Nov-27-06 06:46 PM
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Memo to Nancy Pelosi: Stick to Your Guns...Jane Harmon Must Go!

Let's get this out and in the open now. Jane Harmon must go!

Congresswoman Jane Harmon should be removed from the House Intelligence Committee because she has clearly failed in her responsibility and capacity there, and in doing so, she betrayed her party, the American public, and far worse, she failed our troops in their mission. Failure in such matters can not be tolerated. The failure must be singled out, made an example of, and yes, punished. Harmon’s failure can only be attributed to one of two things: she either willingly participated in misleading her fellow members in Congress as to the nature of the so-called threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States, or she was not intelligent enough to sit on the Intelligent Committee because she was used by the White House who saw her as an easy (dumb) target. Either would require her immediate removal from the Committee.

Worse, the suggestion that she somehow should be promoted to chair the committee is preposterous and must, for three reasons be opposed: the past, the present and the future.

The Past: Contrary to what a lot of neocons and apologists for Bush's failed Iraqi invasion continue to say, "everyone on earth" did NOT believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that he had "reconstituted his nuclear program". The U.N. inspectors (who actually know something on the subject, along with Hans Blix and Scott Ritter) were adamant that Hussein did not have WMD. That wasn’t good enough for the White House, and it wasn’t good enough for Jane Harmon either.

Harmon, in her critical and lofty position, was privy to intelligence that many other Democrats were not as the White House led this nation to war. Harmon facilitated the White House lies to her fellow Democrats in Congress in her breathless urgency that we were all in great peril from Saddam's ability to attack the U.S. with WMD's. Her role in misleading Democrats and the public is, in my eyes, far more insidious than even that of Judith Miller, who used the New York Times as a mouthpiece for White House propaganda.

Still, in spite of the fact that the average Democrat in Congress was not privy to much of the classified material that Harmon was, they nonetheless were able to make up their own minds, draw the correct conclusion about the so-called "evidence" of WMD, and courageously vote against Bush's pre-emptive war. One of those brave Democrats was none other than House Speaker-Elect, Nancy Pelosi. She and a substantially large group of Democrats in the House and the Senate refused to authorize America's first "pre-emptive" war". And time and circumstances have now proven them right.

On the other hand, Jane Harmon was a hold over of the Gephardt/Dashle crowd that had been complicit in Bush's illegal, immoral and disastrous policies. Want to hear an ugly truth about our Democratic Party in those days? The crowd in Bush's White House, between 2001 and 2003 did not even need a Republican "rubber stamp" congress to achieve its ends because it had enough traitorous Democrats helping them all the way, hell, even cheering them on as they cavalierly violated our Constitution and international law. And through it all, Jane Harmon was one Democrat that Bush could count on.

The Present: Harmon and her supporters (including the Bush White House and many within the Corporate Media) are working a public relations campaign to see her seated as Chair of the Intelligence Committee, a position that depends not on seniority, but the appointment by the Speaker of the House. The insinuation is that Harmon has "earned" the chairmanship. The truth is that she should be fired from the committee as soon as the new Congress convenes in January.

The Future: The American people want and need to know how it came to be that Intelligence was cooked-up, manipulated by the Defense Department, the CIA and the Pentagon and fed to unsuspecting members of Congress in order to wage war in Iraq.

The American public is expecting probing questions into how did 3,000 Americans wind up dying to create this Civil War in Iraq.

Our citizens are angry and are expecting a thorough investigation into how we came to piss away $11 Million every hour since this war began, how tens of thousands of our troops are wounded and how and why some 500,000 Iraqi innocent civilians have died in vain.

We want to know how it is that we went to war wasting blood and treasure to essentially give over a great part of Iraq to Iran. Jane Harmon is part of the problem. She certainly can not be trusted to provide the scrutinizing of the Iraq War policies when she should be scrutinized herself. No wonder the Republicans are crossing their fingers that Harmon becomes the chair to that committee: the fox would be guarding the henhouse.

Speaker-Elect Pelosi has promised to clean the House. Well, the very first sweep of her broom should be toward the House Intelligence Committee. And Jane Harmon should be the very first to enter her dust bin.