Lynn C. Woolsey: “on October 10, 2002, despite the objections of 133 Members, myself included, this body, the House of Representatives…”

“on October 10, 2002, despite the objections of 133 Members, myself included, this body, the House of Representatives, voted to give the President of the United States the authority to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq. If we had the information on that day that we have now, I wonder how many votes the war resolution would have garnered. If we had known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction; if we had known that the President was hell bent on going to war no matter what, regardless of the intelligence, with or without the U.N.'s blessing; if we had known that we would have still been occupying Iraq nearly 4 years later; if we had known that our occupation would give rise to a violent insurgency, sectarian strife, and all-out civil war; if we had known that the cost of this war would approach $.5 trillion; if we had known that more than 2,550 brave Americans would never come home and thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians would be killed for the sake of their so-called liberation; if we had known of the atrocities and constitutional desecrations that would be committed in the name of war, from Abu Ghraib to domestic spying to Guantanamo Bay. Along with many of my colleagues, I raised these concerns at the time. We were vocal critics of the war before we even knew what a debacle it would become. But our objections were ignored and our voices drowned out by a steady drumbeat of misinformation coming from the administration and its allies.…”