July 24, 2003	Thursday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1424

SAN FRANCISCO: The letters are pouring in like a burst water main — fast and, yes, furious. From Alabama: “We want to know the truth!” From Arizona: “If there’s nothing to hide, what’s the harm in a bipartisan inquiry?” From Mississippi: “We must get to the truth — whatever it is!”

About 400,000 people from every state have contacted members of Congress in the last three weeks as part of a MoveOn.org petition that asks Congress to investigate the controversial claims that led to the war on Iraq, with more than 50,000 people signing on to the liberal activist Web site in the last five days alone.

“It seems more and more people who supported the war are signing on,” said Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org’s campaigns director. “They’re angry. People who in the last couple of weeks before the war decided to support it are swinging back.”

For organizations that opposed the war, these are busy days. Not since hundreds of thousands of people nationwide marched in antiwar rallies in the weeks before the US-led invasion has the rationale for the preemptive war come under such fire. The groups hope to galvanize a broad spectrum of the American people, a majority of whom supported the war, but with reservations. The goal is to persuade public officials to support an independent, bipartisan commission modelled on the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In the week since the administration admitted that President Bush’s State of the Union speech in January should not have mentioned that the British had “learned” Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons programme, antiwar groups say that more and more Americans have been contacting them, looking for answers.

“You know an issue has momentum,” said Andrea Buffa, co- chair of the United for Peace and Justice coalition, “when people are coming into your office to ask if there’s a protest planned about it.”

And, with other intelligence claims about an Iraq nuclear programme under scrutiny, weapons of mass destruction yet to be found and US soldiers dying in Iraq nearly every day, antiwar coalitions are seizing on the public’s growing concerns over the war, as recent polls have indicated, to try to reenergize their movement and force an examination of the process and the policies that led to the war.

So far, Congress has been split along party lines on the issue of formal reviews and the issue, some in the movement fear, could become a strictly partisan one, diluting its appeal. The Democratic National Committee has begun running a television ad accusing Bush of deception — ads the Republicans have asked broadcasters not to air. Last week, Senate Democrats proposed examining the prewar intelligence, while Republicans in the majority voted against the proposals, each side accusing the other of playing partisan politics. (Republicans also say that intelligence reviews are already underway in House and Senate committees.)

But antiwar groups, almost by definition also anti-Bush, say they hope this issue reaches beyond party politics. They point out that two House bills — one to create a nonpartisan, independent commission on the intelligence questions, the other to create a committee in the House to investigate the controversy (and to complete its findings before the 2004 election), are sponsored by California Democrats who voted to authorize the war, Reps. Henry Waxman and Ellen Tauscher, respectively.

Both United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War, the largest mainstream antiwar coalitions, with hundreds of member groups, including the National Council of Churches and the AFL- CIO, have launched campaigns that include petitions demanding an investigation into the intelligence that led to war, print and television ads that accuse Bush of misleading the nation with discredited or unproven claims about Iraq’s nuclear arsenal and suggestions for organizing at the local level to reinvigorate the broad movement that developed in the weeks before the war.

“Since the war started we’ve had a pretty lackluster response from the grass roots and this issue has really lighted a fire,” said David Cortright, co-founder of Win Without War and president of the Fourth Freedom Forum, a foreign policy think tank that advocates nonviolent conflict resolution. “Our strategy is to keep trying to reach those persuadable voters. We’re going to do a new ad and pick major cities — say, Detroit or Des Moines — to air them and at the same time try to work on local events. Local groups will lobby their members of Congress. We’ll have a series of public communication action efforts.”

Groups such as Cortright’s Fourth Freedom Forum, which investigated several administration claims, including linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, say they have been ready for this moment to disseminate the information they have gathered over the last several months.

The public is clearly anxious for information, said Erik Gustafson, a Gulf War veteran who founded the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) in 1998 to call attention to what opponents of US policy describe as a humanitarian catastrophe created by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq because of the 1991 war.

“The number of people who actually read our e-mail alerts was 3,000 last June and 10,000 this June, which gives you some indication of interest,” he said. But, he added, the public also clearly needs the authority of a full-scale official investigation. When he tried convincing Americans that the case for war had not been made, he said, “the greatest challenge was the number of people who said, ‘There must be something there.’ But I think even the Americans who will say that war was a good idea overall want accountability.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post