[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Pages 20235-20236]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          DOWNING STREET MEMOS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Speaker, today, the occupation of Iraq continues and 
we learn that another bomb blast, in fact a series of bomb blasts in 
Iraq have resulted in the loss of more than 100 lives. So far, the loss 
of American servicemen and women's lives is almost 2,000. We have lost 
almost 2,000 American servicemen and women in Iraq.
  The American people are asking now with greater frequency a very 
significant question: Why did we invade Iraq and why are we continuing 
to occupy that country?
  Today, the House Committee on International Relations defeated a 
Resolution of Inquiry, which I introduced, and that defeat came 
essentially along party lines. Every Democratic member of the House 
Committee on International Relations voted for the resolution; one 
Republican voted for it; one Republican did not oppose it. But the 
resolution lost by one vote because all of the other Republicans on the 
committee opposed it.
  What this resolution asked was simply this. It asked the 
administration, the White House, and the Defense Department to provide 
to the Congress information with regard to that information which is 
contained in the so-called Downing Street memos.
  The Downing Street memos are very interesting. They were first 
revealed by the Sunday Times of London on May 1, 2005. What these 
Downing Street memos are, are high-level communications between some of 
the most significant members of the British Government, including Prime 
Minister Tony Blair; Richard Dearlove, who was the head of British 
intelligence; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; and others.
  These Downing Street memos were communications between these high-
ranking officials of the British Government. They reveal the essence of 
conversations which took place between members of the British 
Government and members of the Bush administration here in Washington, 
including Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense 
Rumsfeld, and others.
  What the Downing Street memos reveal is that, from the very 
beginning, the Bush administration was obsessed with Saddam Hussein and 
that they used the attack of September 11 not to go after the 
perpetrators of that attack, Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network, 
but to twist and distort the facts in order to justify an attack 
against Iraq, given the obsession that they had with Saddam Hussein.
  So the resolution that I introduced today, and which was defeated by 
the House Committee on International Relations, called upon the 
executive branch of government, the White House and the Defense 
Department, to provide to the Congress information with regard to those 
conversations from the American perspective. All we have now is the 
British perspective. And the British perspective is quite damning 
indeed, damning of the intentions of the Bush administration and the 
way in which this ensuing occupation has been carried out.
  The Downing Street memos make it clear that high-ranking members of 
the Bush administration were determined to twist and distort the 
intelligence and the facts to fit the policy which they had already 
decided to put into action; and that policy, of course, was to attack 
Iraq and to remove Saddam Hussein as the head of that government.
  Many people across our country, including an increasing number of the 
House of Representatives, and I believe the Senate as well, are asking 
the question: How could that attack be justified when we now know that 
the ostensible justification, the justification which was set forth by 
the administration, was completely false?
  First, that justification was that Iraq had something to do with the 
attack of September 11. Then the administration had to back off from 
that assertion when it became clear to almost everyone that there was 
no validity in that assertion whatsoever. Rapidly, the administration 
moved to an assertion that it was important for us to attack Iraq 
because Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, 
biological and chemical weapons. And the suggestion was even made over 
and over and over again, by the highest ranking officials of the Bush 
administration, that the Iraqi government was acquiring nuclear 
weapons, that they had imported enriched uranium from Niger into Iraq 
in order to manufacture atomic bombs, and that we were in danger of 
having those nuclear weapons used against us. So, therefore, they 
sought in that way to justify an attack against Iraq.
  It is now clear to almost everyone, even the most myopic of persons, 
that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction program and was 
nowhere near the development of any nuclear weapons.
  And as is made clear by the information that is possessed in these 
Downing Street memos, other countries were much more dangerous, 
including Libya, Iran, and North Korea, because they were much closer 
to developing nuclear weapons than was Iraq, which had essentially 
abandoned all of its large-scale weapons programs in 1991. That 
information had been made clear as a result of investigations which 
were carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency and by 
weapons inspections teams, two of them in fact from

[[Page 20236]]

the United States. They found no evidence of any weapons of mass 
destruction.
  So information from the administration about these Downing Street 
memos is essential. Why the Committee on International Relations 
defeated that resolution today remains to be seen, but we will be back. 
We will be back until we get the truth about what started this war in 
Iraq, why it was instigated in the first place, and why it is 
continuing to be carried out in such a failing manner.

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