Treason charge scalds Hillary

If sending America's young men and women to a war launched on false pretenses isn't treason, then I don't know what treason is.

Sure, the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party is too polite for that particular descriptive. Yet when the senator from New York faces continuous challenges about her pro-war vote in 2002, is she not forced to contend with the issue of treason?

As she campaigns for the party's presidential nomination, she has been cornered by the antiwar group which asks why she doesn't apologize for the vote and admit to a mistake.

Her response is that she was misled by faulty prewar intelligence on Saddam's alleged WMD stockpile. Funny that other attentive Americans were not misled. Also, she surely knew how baseless was the White House propaganda implying that Saddam was somehow linked to the attacks of 9/11.

But as neocon Paul Wolfowitz once effectively admitted, the WMD issue was a political ploy meant to get waverers on board the war wagon. Hillary knew the 9/11 link was phony, but she had political cover with the WMD link.

The point is that Hillary, along with numerous others, knew that Americans were being sent to war, in part, based on false claims about 9/11, claims hoked up by Murdoch's Fox News. I am quite sure she doesn't see her vote as an act of treason. Yet she surely knew that Americans, and Iraqis, would die based on hyped-up, phony claims.

On the other hand, her war vote stood her in good stead with her onetime nemisis, Rupert Murdoch, who started publicly making nicey with the Clintons. The naturalized media mogul, of course, has a cold-fish view of Americans, as is obvious from his soulless propaganda machines.

Now one may take the position that he or she is unsure about whether 9/11 was an inside job. But, can such a person easily dispute that the Bush bunch's cold-blooded misuse of that atrocity in order to send Americans to war is -- calling a spade a spade -- treason?

Recall that though it was Dick Cheney who specified unverifiable links between Saddam and 9/11, it was Bush who not only didn't repudiate Cheney's claims, but capitalized on them by repeatedly invoking 9/11 whenever beating the war tom-toms against Iraq.

We also know that Bush was not sincere about the reasons for the war because U.S. troops are still there. Yet, the publicly stated mission has been accomplished. Saddam was removed from power and Iraq poses no threat as to weapons of mass destruction.

So, clearly, Bush had and has a hidden agenda in Iraq.

So there it is: Hillary threw in with treason for political gain and is now trying to squirm out of that awful taint.

Obviously, she believed that the mass media would remain closely tethered, perhaps by her ally, the Israeli lobby. But, though the media remain constricted, there is still some fight left, unfortunately for her.

Postscript: Dick Morris says in a Feb. 23 column that Edwards dared to express the view that silence on Iraq was "betrayal" and that "Clinton gunslinger" Howard Wolfson then blasted Edwards for negative campaigning.