To the editor:

Thank you for providing us with Robert Scheer’s article (Thursday, June 19) from the Los Angeles Times. It made numerous, verified points of how we have been deliberately lied to by the current administration. To summarize: In his 2003 State of the Union Address President Bush said, “(We have) learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.”

The document was found to be a fraud by the CIA 10 months earlier. Three senior administration officials confirmed that conclusion was negated by Bush’s staff, including Cheney. Bush also said we were under threat of attack by, “a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles,” capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including, “missions targeting the United States.” The facts are that none of it has ever materialized (and they are looking for it frantically).

The reasons given for going to war were lies that scared the American public into believing we had to go to war to save our selves. The lies worked very well. There was majority support for the unilateral, pre-emptive war.

I liked the quote of Richard Nixon’s former counselor, John Dean, “if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be ‘a high crime’ under the Constitution’s impeachment clause.”

There is definite need for congressional hearings to establish these claims. We are back to, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” — again.

Timothy Bonner,

Lawrence