Comment Grounds for Impeachment
Comment Grounds for Impeachment George W. Bush and his Administration have been so brazen in violating the law and asserting monarchical powers that we, as American citizens, must use the tool...
...Article II, Section 4, states: "The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors...
...Charter, as Kofi Annan himself has acknowledged...
...And he let George Tenet and the CIA know that the gloves are off, in the words of Cofer Black, who was head of the CIA's counterterrorism center on 9/11...
...Charter, Bush was violating Article VI of the Constitution, which says that treaties are "the supreme law of the land...
...But it also gets at the central question of whether here at home the President is above the law...
...custodyatthe handsofU.S...
...The lawyers' group Human Rights First has identified another eleven where "the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention...
...But few people thought Nixon would be impeached after he won reelection by a landslide in 1972...
...Because the CIA's been doing that, too...
...That was standard operating procedure...
...George W. Bush has been subverting our Constitution, and he has repeatedly violated his oath of office to "faithfully execute" his duties and to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States...
...For some of them, indefinitely may mean forever...
...And 52 percent favor impeachment if it can be shown that Bush illegally spied on American citizens...
...personnel killed at least two detainees at Bagram, according to the Pentagon's own investigation...
...It prohibits, among other things, "torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment...
...We have before us in the White House . . . a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous...
...Nabbing people and flying them out to countries that are notorious for torture...
...So, for a time, was the use of unmuzzled dogs...
...At the Constitutional Convention, the drafters had originally restricted impeachmentto"treason" and "bribery...
...For Cheney has been in on every illegal act that Bush has committed...
...Both can readily be shown...
...Those terms "will not reach many great and dangerous offenses," Mason said, including "attemptstosubvert the Constitution...
...some were beaten and abused...
...This question rises to its greatest heights in the NSA warrantless spying program...
...The Pentagon itself acknowledges there have been thirty-four cases of suspected or confirmed homicides of detainees by U.S...
...And those two were not the only victims...
...George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales have repeatedly violated international treaties, U.S...
...If we let Bush get away unimpeached for all the offenses he has committed, then we send the signal that what he has done is OK...
...John Conyers, the Democratic Congressman from Detroit, has introduced a bill to explore grounds for impeachment...
...Maybe the export of detainees for torture...
...We can't let him get away with it...
...But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy...
...So what's Bush's responsibility for this...
...government and the American public, and that's exactly what the top officials of the Bush Administration proceeded to do...
...Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD...
...Lewis Lapham in Harper's "A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war...
...His findings were reflected in the July 23, 2002, memo to Prime Minister Tony Blair, which said: "Military action was now seen as inevitable...
...This not only violated the rights of the detainees...
...Then there's Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the two U.S...
...statutes against torture and war crimes, and the Eighth Amendment by countenancing torture at Guant?namo, in Iraq, at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, in CIA prisons, and by other governments at the behest of the CIA...
...personnel...
...It's about whether we respect the Constitution or not...
...Bush acts like a despot...
...Now a lot of people think even talking about impeachment is silly...
...The Bush Administration has rounded up thousands of people and is holding them indefinitely, and without charges, and without access to any court anywhere...
...Some, especially on the right, may object that given the war on terrorism, this is no time to entertain the idea of impeachment...
...And even though the mainstream media isn't paying attention, people at the grassroots are in favor of impeachment...
...Here the law could not be clearer...
...Leaving aside the fact that Bush has waged an illegal and reckless war, our founders were clear that war should be no obstacle...
...But even beyond this, the way that Bush bamboozled the country into war is itself an impeachable offense...
...We must demand impeachment...
...Others, on the Democratic side, may prefer to settle scores at the ballot box this November or in 2008...
...After that meeting, Dearlove reported back that Bush was intent on war...
...If the Democrats gain control of the House in November, Conyers will become chair of the Judiciary Committee, whose job it is to draft bills of impeachment...
...citizens is by getting a warrant from the FISA court...
...On July 20, 2002, eight months before Bush launched the war, Richard Dearlove, head of British Intelligence, met with George Tenet, director of the CIA...
...Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence...
...Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell issued 237 statements that were "misleading at the time they were made," according to "Iraq on the Record," a report by Representative Henry Waxman of California and the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Government Reform...
...Bush's invasion was a war of aggression, prohibited by the U.N...
...He has done so in four key areas: in the Iraq War, in detentions here at home and abroad, in the torture scandal, and in the NSA warrantless spying program...
...In a disgusting rationale, the Bush Administration told the Supreme Court that it was holding them for "humanitarian" purposes...
...personnel...
...Notice that the Vice President is specifically mentioned...
...citizens seized by the Bush Administration, denied their due process rights, denied access to their attorneys, and kept in military brigs for more than two years, mostly in solitary confinement...
...The Administration violated the law, failing to bring detainees before a judge for weeks and months...
...But George Mason, oneofthe influential delegates, found those terms insufficient, according to Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush, anew and highly informative bookbythe Center for Constitutional Rights...
...The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) explicitly states that the "exclusive means" for spying on U.S...
...This torture scandal is also a homicide scandal...
...He also authorized the CIA to send detainees to third countries for torture...
...Lapham notes that the Supreme Court in Hammerschmidt v. United States said someone engages in a conspiracy to commit fraud against the government when that person obstructs lawful government functions "by deceit, craft, or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest" and when its "legitimate official action and purpose shall be defeated by misrepresentation, chicane, or other overreaching of those charged with carrying out the government intention...
...And notice the phrase "other high crimes and misdemeanors...
...After 9/11, during the Ashcroft Raids, the Bush Administration rounded up 1,200 Arabs and Muslims and held them for months without charge...
...This torture scandal has done much to tarnish the reputation of the United States abroad...
...Bush also notoriously exempted the Taliban and Al Qaeda from protections under the Geneva Conventions, and it's not up to the President to decide who is and who is not covered by those conventions...
...Comment Grounds for Impeachment George W. Bush and his Administration have been so brazen in violating the law and asserting monarchical powers that we, as American citizens, must use the tool that the Constitution provides to reassert our rights, to reset the system of checks and balances, and to reestablish our democracy...
...First, Iraq...
...The third major ground for impeachment is the torture scandal...
...We can't let him continue to disgrace the office of the Presidency, violate his oath of office, and trample on our Constitution...
...It now has twenty-seven co-sponsors...
...As the Center for Constitutional Rights notes, "any person detained by the government must be brought before a magistrate judge within forty-eight hours so that the appropriateness of their detention may be reviewed...
...And his encroachments and aggrandizements will linger in the Oval Office for some subsequent President to enjoy-at the peril of our democracy...
...After some wrangling over wording, the founders agreed toJames Madison's phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors...
...That tool is impeachment...
...But the hooding, the shackling, the dangling of prisoners by their arms, and the sexual humiliations occurred not only at Abu Ghraib but in many other places in Iraq...
...There can hardly be a more grave act imaginable than to dupe a democracy into going to war, but that is what Bush has done, as the Downing Street Memo clearly indicates...
...To fix the intelligence and the facts is to engage in a fraud against the U.S...
...Elizabeth Holtzman in The Nation "The U.S...
...particularly in times of war when the military force, and in some respects the public money, will be in his hands...
...Bush and Cheney were engaging in "a conspiracy to commit fraud," as Lewis Lapham points out in his pathbreaking essay, "The Case for Impeachment," in the March issue of Harper's Magazine...
...As noted by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said: "The Executive will have great opportunities of abusing his power...
...As John Dean of Watergate fame said, Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense...
...It also "grossly violated basic separation of powers principles by denying the judiciary any opportunity to review thousands of detentions," the center writes in its book on impeachment...
...And by violating the U.N...
...Or take the mass detentions at Guant?namo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the secret prisons the CIA is running around the world...
...citizens, and he insists that he'll continue to bypass the law...
...Impeach Dick Cheney, too...
...To this day, Bush claims he doesn't need to go tothe FISA court to get warrants on U.S...
...That's forty-five suspectedor confirmed homicides of prisonersinU.S...
...This is a blatant violation of international law...
...Article 75, "Fundamental Guarantees," of the 1977 protocol to the Geneva Conventions, states: "Persons who are in the power of a Party to the conflict and who do not benefit from more favorable treatment under the Conventions or under this Protocol shall be treated humanely in all circumstances...
...Many were kept in solitary confinement...
...In Afghanistan, on top of all of these brutalities, detainees were kept naked and doused with freezing water...
...So while we're advocating the impeachment of George W. Bush, let's not stop there...
...At Guant?namo, prisoners have been beaten, they've had lit cigarettes put out in their ears, they've had to endure false executions and sensory deprivation...
...That fits Bush and Cheney to a T. The second ground for impeachment is Bush's illegal detentions, in the United States and abroad...
...In Iraq, we all saw the photos at Abu Ghraib...
...It's about what kind of system of government we're going to have...
...Garrison Keillor -Matthew Rothschild...
...As a result, Bush has violated the rights of thousands of U.S...
...But this isn't about partisanship...
...Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense...
...He conveyed, by word and by deed, that the laws and treaties against torture need not be followed...
...If that doesn't appall you, I don't know what will...
...On the evening of September 11, Bush told his counterterrorism staff, according to Richard Clarke: "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass...
...According to a Zogby poll, 53 percent of Americans would favor impeachment if it could be shown that Bush lied about the reasons for going to war...
...They say it's not going to happen...
Vol. 70 • April 2006 • No. 4
