Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report

The Bush administration was dealt another body blow yesterday from its pesky political adversary known as the truth.

The report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. released yesterday blew apart repeated lying insistences by top Bush administration officials that the unilateral and unprovoked invasion of Iraq was justified because of Iraq's ties to the al Qaeda terrorist organization and the 9/11 attacks.

The tie was a key cornerstone to the Bush administration's justification for the invasion, and because of repeated administration lies, polls showed a majority of the American people even recently believed it. This was even though there was never any evidence of the connection, and the fact that Bush was compelled at a press conference awhile back to concede that fact.

Now, news of yesterday's explosive report hits the Bush administration like another huge sucker punch its glass jaw. It follows, of course, revelations that the much touted "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq that Bush insisted were there weren't.

These factors are not election issues, they are impeachment issues. The bumper sticker that reads, "No One Died When Clinton Lied," only begins to address the case.

Clinton was impeached for a "crime" whose magnitude is infinitesimal compared to the lying deceit that the Bush administration engaged in with impunity before the American people, before the Congress and before the world to justify acting on its fixation to invade Iraq.

The effort has not only cost more than a thousand U.S. lives in Iraq, but more lives of innocent Iraqi civilians than were lost on U.S. soil on 9/11. The cost in terms of diverting attention from the real war on terror, in terms of enabling al Qaeda and other terrorist cells to recruit and regroup, in terms of the long-term instability of the Middle East and exacerbated misery of countless indigenous civilians is far greater than for any unprovoked U.S. military offensive in the nation's history. That's without even counting the cost in terms of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

And it's all based on lies, lies spoken from the Oval Office into television cameras beamed to every household in the U.S. not once but repeatedly.

How does this not rise to the level of impeachable offense? Who is it that's to blame for the fact that there is not already a deafening drumbeat of popular fury demanding Bush's early removal from office and indictment on federal charges?

Is it the media, the Bush-friendly Washington, D.C.-based media such as the Washington Post? The newspaper that brought down Nixon and almost succeeded with its Republican friends against Clinton seems now more obsessed with groundless allegations against Congressman Jim Moran than with the volumes of lying public statements by Bush officials.

Don't forget that the Post was foursquare and uncritical in its support for Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Some media, including the New York Times but not the Post, have undertaken a self-criticism exercise, wondering how it turned out they were so willing to report favorably about just about anything Bush did in his first two years. It now concludes that was a mistake and a disservice to the American public, albeit influenced by the 9/11 events and the felt-need for the nation to pull together behind its leadership.

The Democratic Party leadership might be wise to do likewise and admit it was wrong to uncritically back the administration's post-9/11 excesses, including the war resolution, instead of trying forever to defend its actions.

Were it to do so, then it would be quicker to demand Bush's head, not in November but right now.

Otherwise, with both sides trying to ignore the elephant sitting in the room, the advantage lies with Bush. The public is forced to wonder if it is crazy for thinking Bush's crimes are far worse than anyone's actually saying and is more likely to wind up cynically abstaining from the political process as a result.

The truth, telling it like it is, both indicts the liars and inspires the exploited. Both sides need to speak it, or there will be no indictments and no inspiration.