Pelosi: Republican Cover-Up Congress Refuses to Investigate Iraq War Abuses
Pelosi: Republican Cover-Up Congress Refuses to Investigate Iraq War Abuses
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Washington, D.C.- Today, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi introduced a privileged resolution to demand that Republican Congressional leadership conduct athorough investigation of abuses relating to the Iraq War. The resolution failed by a party line vote, 220 to191, when Republicans unanimously moved to table, or effectively kill, the resolution.
"A vote to table is a vote to cover-up," Pelosi said. "Congress has the responsibility to find out why so many things in Iraq have gone so terribly wrong. That is why I asked the House to investigate abuses relating to Iraq. Yet, Republicans again thwarted efforts to answer the questions of the American people. This Republican cover-up Congress refuses to live up to its oversight responsibility."
"Congress has an obligation to identify and correct the problems that led to the production of flawed intelligence," Pelosi said. "Our troops are at risk until that is done, and yet, there is no sense of urgency to undertake a thorough review of what went wrong. Neither the issue of the quality of the intelligence nor the equally important issue of whether intelligence was politicized, have been investigated by this Congress."
Citing the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, evidence of the Bush Administration's efforts to discredit critics of the Iraq war, prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan, and the responsibility of Congress to oversee the decisions and actions of other branches of government, Pelosi demanded investigative action by the Republican Congress.
The war in Iraq has resulted in the loss of more than 2,000 American lives and more than 15,000 wounded soldiers, and has cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars, providing further evidence of the need for oversight.
http://democraticleader.house.gov/press/articles.cfm?pressReleaseID=1258