When President George W. Bush visits Grand Rapids, Michigan on Friday to deliver a "major policy speech on Iraq," Bush is expected to lay out his rationale for the continued occupation of Iraq. As has been the case at previous appearances in Grand Rapids, President Bush will be greeted by protestors calling for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq.
According to an email sent out by ACTIVATE, the group organizing the protest, antiwar activist Ray McGovern will deliver a speech at the protest at 12:15pm. McGovern, a former CIA analyst who co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, has been an important critic of the Iraq War as well as the Bush administration's assertions about Iran. McGovern gained widespread media attention in May of 2006 when he confronted former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about his prewar claims that the United States knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction:
RAY McGOVERN: I would like to ask you to be upfront with the American people. Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary and that has caused these kinds of casualties? Why?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, I haven't lied. I did not lie then. Colin Powell didn't lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The President spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people, and he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.
RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were, and we were --
RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were, "near Tikrit, near Baghdad, and northeast, south and west of there." Those were your words.
DONALD RUMSFELD: My words -- my words were that -- no, no, no, wait a minute! Let him stay one second. Just a second.
RAY McGOVERN: This is America, huh? Go ahead.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You're getting plenty of play, sir.
RAY McGOVERN: I'd just like an honest answer.
DONALD RUMSFELD: I'm giving it to you.
RAY McGOVERN: We're talking about lies and your allegation that there was bulletproof evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Was that a lie or were you misled?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.
RAY McGOVERN: Zarqawi, he was in the north of Iraq, in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That's where he was.
DONALD RUMSFELD: He was also in Baghdad.
RAY McGOVERN: Yeah, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren't idiots. They know the story.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You are -- let me give you an example. It's easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style? They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously. He had used them on his neighbor, the Iranians. And they believed he had those weapons. We believed he had those weapons.
RAY McGOVERN: That's what we call a non-sequitur. It doesn't matter what the troops believe. It matters what you believe.
McGovern has continued to be a critic of the Bush administration's rationale for war, with his most recent essay on the Bush administration's Iraq policy, "Is Cheney Right About the Democrats?," criticizing Democrats for their failure to substantively challenge the Bush administration. Specifically, McGovern criticizes Michigan Senator Carl Levin who has promised that the Democrats will not vote to stop funding the war and who has adopted the Bush administration's logic that doing so would mean failing to "support the troops."
McGovern will also speak in Grand Rapids on Saturday, April 20 at the Pax Christi Michigan conference.
