By Dave Lindorff

    I found myself listing to a talk radio show on NPR’s Philadelphia affiliate WHYY today, which focused in part on the agonies suffered by families of American troops killed or seriously maimed in Iraq.

    Left unsaid—and this I think is the case in nearly all the reporting that gets done on the costs of the Iraq War that are being borne here in the US by relatives of troops—is the terrible reality that we’re talking about the relatives of just 4500 American servicemen and women killed, and perhaps 30,000 seriously wounded (not counting the hundreds of thousands suffering mental damage).  Not to diminish that suffering, it needs to be pointed out that by some accounts, well over 1 million Iraqis have died in this illegal, uncalled-for and criminal war.

Whatever you think of Scott McClellan, one thing is clear: he's tough.

After days of attacks by Busheviks, McClellan went directly into the lion's den to battle Bill O'Reilly on his home court. And even O'Reilly admitted McClellan held his own.

So now that the dust is settling, what's the bottom line? Did McClellan provide any evidence that Bush committed statutory crimes and/or impeachable offenses?

The broadest charge against Bush is that he lied to Congress and the American people to win support for invading Iraq even though Iraq never attacked us or even threatened us.

McClellan comes close to endorsing that charge, but refuses to cross the line.

When all the pre-war lies were finally exposed, the Busheviks settled on one final lie to justify all their discredited lies. As Bush told Politico on May 14,

intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment.

As I wrote then,

Bullshit.

The intelligence agencies of Germany, France, Russia, and China didn't believe it. That's why their governments opposed a second U.N. resolution to authorize a U.S. invasion, and why Bush had to create a  "coalition of the billing willing" outside the U.N.

We don't know for certain whether Britain's MI6 believed it or not. We know Blair's political hacks "sexed up" the intelligence, while the professional analysts did not agree. The same process was at work here in the U.S.

While all progressives suspected Bush was lying about Iraq's WMD's before the war, the first major proof of his lies came on 7/6/03, nearly four months after the invasion, when Joseph Wilson published his now-famous op-ed, What I Didn't Find in Africa. (Wilson was punished for this by having his wife outed, which endangered her life and may have cost the lives of spies in her network.)

The second major proof of Bush's lies came two years later with the publication of the now-famous Downing Street Memo in the Times of London on 5/1/05. (The U.S. Corporate Media still refuses to acknowledge the existence of this devastating memo.)

George Bush has been tied to a prostitution ring involving as many as 50,000 women and girls and is expected to resign or be impeached, according to Congressional sources.

The prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million desperate Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the U.K. Independent.

Bush's invasion destroyed the Iraqi government and unleashed a wave of political and sectarian violence that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and forced 4 million to become refugees, according to the UN.