Senator Susan Collins: servant to the Masters of War

She's allowed to play Republican as long as she promotes the imperial adventure


This is amazing. The Bangor Daily news has a very conservative history.

I want to wildly thank the Bangor Daily News from the bottom of my heart for covering an action yesterday by 100 peace activists that exposed Susan Collins as a perpetrator of fraud in her justification for war against Iraq.

She purported to deliver a speech on "The Ethics of Conscience: Continuing the Legacy of Margaret Chase Smith" Tuesday afternoon. She was not allowed to forget how her utter lack of skepticism, despite strong protest from the peace community at the time in 2002 and 2003 has led us into the disaster of death and destruction that Iraq is today.

On October 9, 2002, she spun this fabric of lies before her colleagues in the US Senate:

The CIA has concluded all key aspects of Iraq's offensive biological and chemical weapons program, including research and development, production and weaponization, are active and, in some cases, larger and more advanced than before the gulf war.

In addition to the weapons unaccounted for in the post-gulf war inspections, there is significant evidence that since 1998, Saddam has expanded his stockpile of chemical and biological weapons; rebuilt and expanded manufacturing sites, including mobile biological production facilities; developed more effective delivery systems, such as unmanned drones; and sought to procure materials for a nuclear bomb.

The reports demonstrating Iraq's violation of U.N. resolutions are numerous, compelling, and indisputable. They are based on the findings of U.N. weapons inspectors, credible reports from Iraqi defectors, sophisticated surveillance equipment, and other strong evidence.

Even more troubling is the evidence compiled by the American and British intelligence agencies that Iraq has converted its L-29 jet trainers to allow them to be used as unmanned aerial vehicles, capable of delivering chemical and biological agents over a large area.

While the evidence of Iraq's pursuit of biological and chemical weapons is overwhelming, it is more difficult to determine the state of Iraq's development of nuclear weapons. Numerous reports suggest, however, a renewed determination by Saddam Hussein to obtain the materials for a nuclear bomb.

A September report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies paints a chilling picture of Saddam's quest for nuclear weapons. Had the gulf war not intervened, Iraq ``could have accumulated a nuclear stockpile of a dozen or so weapons by the end of the decade,'' according to the report.

It further concludes that the scientific and technical expertise of Iraq's nuclear program remains intact, and the British Government has revealed that Iraqi nuclear personnel were ordered to resume work on nuclear projects in 1998.

According to British intelligence, Iraq has also attempted to obtain uranium from Africa. This is extraordinarily troubling. Since Iraq has no active civil nuclear power program or nuclear powerplants, it simply has no peaceful reason to attempt to secure uranium.

In addition, the Iraqi Government has attempted to procure tens of thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges designed to enrich uranium to produce the fissile material necessary for a nuclear bomb.

How soon could Iraq acquire nuclear weapons? The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that Iraq is probably years away from producing nuclear weapons if it has to rely on indigenously produced material. It points out if Iraq were to acquire nuclear material from a foreign source, the timeframe could be reduced to a matter of months....

Her weak defense is that this is what ``everyone thought.'' Wrong. She misstates what the UN inspectors said then, and what they later reported was a picture of Iraq pretty much disarmed, even before the war. And we know how fraudulent the ``defectors'' turned out to be, with severe doubts on record at the time.

Her ongoing cheering for the destruction of Falluja and her failure to stand against torture (preferring it to be viewed through a ``blurry'' lens) piles on to an already despicable record.

Thank you, Scott, for pulling this off. You are a true peacemaker.