Administration's Offenses Impeachable (Bangor, ME Daily News)

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0603-33.htm

 

Published on Friday, June 3, 2005 by the Bangor Daily News (Maine)

Administration's Offenses Impeachable

by Robert Shetterly

Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago: A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication. So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States. So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place. What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth. Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in. William Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for the prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war. The intelligence wasn't flawed. The weapons weren't hidden. Our elected leaders were lying. Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on trust. We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that we give them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through manipulation, propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy has been subverted. It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue to call it that because we have not the courage or stamina to demand its overhaul. We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their lies. By not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we condone hypocrisy, pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of Americans and Iraqis for strategic control of energy resources that we have no right to. Patriotism demands that we insist on the ideals of democracy, not that we support the "leaders" who cynically destroy them. What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out. Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying about them? We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one's future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true: America's president lied to America's people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It's really no more or less than their duty. It's also the first step toward restoring America's integrity. Robert Shetterly is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine. © 2005 Bangor Daily News ###

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Fw: Iraq 'Pre-War' Launched without Congressional Authority

Rep. John Conyers, who is laying the groundwork to impeach Bush, calls this story "the smoking bullet in the smoking gun".  He has written to Rumsfeld, demanding an explanation.   In the name of the Prince of Peace, whose weapon was words,  Carol Wolman

----- Original Message -----

From: Karim A G

To: Karim A G

Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 9:25 AM

Subject: Iraq 'Pre-War' Launched without Congressional Authority

 http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050613&s=scahill

 

June 1, 2005 (web only)

The Other Bomb Drops

Jeremy Scahill

 

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound. It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode--not just building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual, offensive airstrikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.

"It reminded me of a boxing match in which one of the boxers is told not to move while the other is allowed to punch and only stop when he is convinced that he has weakened his opponent to the point where he is defeated before the fight begins," says former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, a thirty-year career diplomat who was the top UN official in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. During both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Washington has consistently and falsely claimed these attacks were mandated by UN Resolution 688, passed after the Gulf War, which called for an end to the Iraqi government's repression in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. Von Sponeck dismissed this justification as a "total misnomer." In an interview with The Nation, Von Sponeck said that the new information "belatedly confirms" what he has long argued: "The no-fly zones had little to do with protecting ethnic and religious groups from Saddam Hussein's brutality" but were in fact an "illegal establishment...for bilateral interests of the US and the UK."

These attacks were barely covered in the press and Von Sponeck says that as far back as 1999, the United States and Britain pressured the UN not to call attention to them. During his time in Iraq, Von Sponeck began documenting each of the airstrikes, showing "regular attacks on civilian installations including food warehouses, residences, mosques, roads and people." These reports, he said, were "welcomed" by Secretary General Kofi Annan, but "the US and UK governments strongly objected to this reporting." Von Sponeck says that he was pressured to end the practice, with a senior British diplomat telling him, "All you are doing is putting a UN stamp of approval on Iraqi propaganda." But Von Sponeck continued documenting the damage and visited many attack sites. In 1999 alone, he confirmed the death of 144 civilians and more than 400 wounded by the US/UK bombings.

After September 11, there was a major change in attitude within the Bush Administration toward the attacks. Gone was any pretext that they were about protecting Shiites and Kurds--this was a plan to systematically degrade Iraq's ability to defend itself from a foreign attack: bombing Iraq's air defenses, striking command facilities, destroying communication and radar infrastructure. As an Associated Press report noted in November 2002, "Those costly, hard-to-repair facilities are essential to Iraq's air defense."

Rear Admiral David Gove, former deputy director of global operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on November 20, 2002, that US and British pilots were "essentially flying combat missions." On October 3, 2002, the New York Times reported that US pilots were using southern Iraq for "practice runs, mock strikes and real attacks" against a variety of targets. But the full significance of this dramatic change in policy toward Iraq only became clear last month, with the release of the Downing Street memo. In it, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is reported to have said in 2002, after meeting with US officials, that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime," a reference to the stepped-up airstrikes. Now the Sunday Times of London has revealed that these spikes "had become a full air offensive"--in other words, a war.

Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers has called the latest revelations about these attacks "the smoking bullet in the smoking gun," irrefutable proof that President Bush misled Congress before the vote on Iraq. When Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of force in Iraq, he also said he would use it only as a last resort, after all other avenues had been exhausted. But the Downing Street memo reveals that the Administration had already decided to topple Saddam by force and was manipulating intelligence to justify the decision. That information puts the increase in unprovoked air attacks in the year prior to the war in an entirely new light: The Bush Administration was not only determined to wage war on Iraq, regardless of the evidence; it had already started that war months before it was put to a vote in Congress.

It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment process, and Conyers is said to be considering the option. The process would certainly be revealing. Congress could subpoena Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, Gen.Tommy Franks and all of the military commanders and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings going back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both given and received? In those answers might lie a case for impeachment.

But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted for the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war? Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton before him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against a sovereign country with no international or US mandate. That gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.

 

 

Support Rep. Conyers- Impeach Bush by Carol Wolman

1 John 4: 16 God is love.

 

Dear Friends,

 

Congressman John Conyers (Dem- MI), loves his country.  He loves the Constitution which he promised to uphold when he swore his oath of office.  He loves the constituents whom he represents.

 

John Conyers, from his position as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, is laying the groundwork for impeaching George. W. Bush.  To begin with, Conyers has sent a letter to Bush demanding an explanation for the Downing Street Memo, which strongly implies an impeachable offense.  The letter has, so far, collected 94 signatures in the House and 88,000 from the citizenry.   The number of signatures in both venues is snowballing.  You can sign at www.johnconyers.com.

 

John Conyers was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was instrumental in making MLK's birthday a national holiday, so that MLK's cry for peace and justice would be remembered at least once a year.  John Conyers is the second most senior person in the House, and founder and dean of the Congressional Black Caucus.  As a long-term member of the House Judiciary Committee, he has been through two previous impeachment proceedings, against Nixon and Clinton, so knows the ropes.  He is the ideal man for the job. 

 

Committees and coalitions to impeach Bush are forming rapidly.  One such, at        http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/index.php

is getting 1 million hits/day.  You can join the online effort there, and learn how to mobilize your community.

 

God blessed us with a Constitution that provides a peaceful means of getting rid of high officials who commit high crimes and misdemeanors,-  impeachment.  It is a legal process, by which the House of Representatives, acting as Attorney for the People, brings formal charges against the official.  In order to remain in office, the impeached official must plead his case before the Senate, which, acting as judge, must refuse to convict him.

 

In 1974, Rep. John Conyers participated in impeachment hearings against NIxon over Watergate.  Nixon resigned rather than face formal charges.  Clinton was actually impeached for lying about Lewinski, but the Senate refused to find him guilty and he served out his term.

 

Now Conyers is laying the groundwork to bring charges against Bush and others for lying to Congress and the American people about WMD's in Iraq, in order to get backing for an illegal invasion of that hapless country.  This is a much more serious charge than the one against Clinton, and deserves serious consideration. 

 

If there is any justice left in this country, Bush should be impeached, removed from office, and then face charges for his crimes like any other citizen.  Same goes for Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and others.

 

Common wisdom says that this cannot happen right now because of the Republican-dominated House and Senate.  But the House leadership is in disarry- DeLay is hanging on by his fingernails.  Frist in the Senate just suffered a serious setback by failing to stop the filibuster.  The Democrats are ready for bear, and many Republicans are disgusted. 

 

Impeaching Bush et al transcends party lines.  The country has been taken over by pirates and needs to be reclaimed.

 

Our Constitution opens:  We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice,...  

 

Justice demands that criminals be impeached.  The ultimate authority in this country rests with "we the people".  The Congresspeople and executives represent us.  We pay their salaries.  If officials are hurting us, lying to us in order to wage their imperial corporate wars, let's get rid of them.  We have the motive, the mechanism, and the opportunity.

 

We Americans must be greatly loved by God, to have a Constitution which gives us such authority.  He must love us to place a man like John Conyers in such a crucial position at this time. 

 

Let us seize the moment- smoking gun, House and Senate GOP leadership in disarry, general discontent among the people about a failing economy and an unjust war.  Let us seize the moment and support Rep. John Conyers, who is probably at great personal risk for taking a leadership role in the drive for impeachment.  Keep him in your prayers.

 

In the name of God who loves us,

 

Carol Wolman

Fw: Road to impeachment- update from citizens' coalition

 

----- Original Message -----

From: David Swanson

To: afterdowningstreet@people-link5.inch.com

Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 2:13 AM

Subject: [Afterdowningstreet] Conyers to Bush: 86,000 Signatures and Counting

 

86,000 Signatures and Counting

By Congressman John Conyers

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=26

 

Late last week Congressman Conyers asked for 100,000 signatures on a letter to President Bush, and said he would deliver it personally to the President.  As of Thursday afternoon, he had collected 86,000 signatures.  Let's make sure we put it over the 100,000 mark today!  Sent this to all of your friends.

 

Sign the Letter: http://www.johnconyers.com

 

 

Backbone Campaign Demands Resolution of Inquiry

The Backbone Campaign writes:
Please join us in sending Spine postcards to your Senators and members of Congress to let them know they should join the Inquiry into the Downing Street Minutes/Memo. You can click here to download a pdf file that can be printed on cardstock or other paper and sent to you members of Congress. This version of the pdf file refers directly to the Downing Street Minutes/Memo issue.
http://www.backbonecampaign.org/media/InquiryPostcard2.pdf 

 

 

If I Want to Ask Bush or Cheney About the DSMinutes, Where Will I Find Them?

Those inclined to organize peaceful nonviolent demonstrations aimed at asking Bush or members of his administration about the Downing Street Minutes may benefit from this schedule of upcoming appearances.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=32 

 

 

A Poster to Take With You:

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/poster-tell.gif

 

 

 

 

Teach-In is Today

Former C.I.A. Analyst Ray McGovern and Attorney John Bonifaz Will Headline Progressive Democrats’ Panel Discussion In Washington, D.C. on Friday, June 3
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=17 

 

 

Website Getting 1 Million Hits Per Day

The www.AfterDowningStreet.org website has become extremely popular, and now receives a little over 1 million hits per day.  Alfredo Lopez, whose www.people-link.org hosts the AfterDowningStreet.org site said, "I'm elated. This is what we're on Earth to do, but we've never had a site get a million hits in a day before."

 

 

What Does Your Brother In Law Think of the Downing Street Minutes?

If you speak face-to-face or by phone or Email with your family members, neighbors, and friends, we would love to hear what they think of the Downing Street Minutes, especially if you convince someone that a congressional investigation is needed. How did you persuade them? What did they start out thinking? What did they learn from you? What did you learn from them? Please open this article and post Comments at the bottom.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/admin.php?module=NS-AddStory&op=EditStory&sid=23 

 

PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL

 

In Solidarity,

David Swanson
www.afterdowningstreet.org

---

_______________________________________________
Afterdowningstreet mailing list
Afterdowningstreet@people-link5.inch.com
http://people-link5.inch.com/mailman/listinfo/afterdowningstreet

road to impeachment- update from Rep. John Conyers

To summarize: As of Weds, 86,000 citizens had signed Conyers letter to Bush, demanding an explanation for the "smoking gun" memo.  More members of Congress are signing- now up to 94. The list is at the end of this post; if your Rep hasn't signed yet, contact him/her.   You can sign at:   www.johnconyers.com

 

by Congressman John Conyers - Thu Jun 2nd, 2005 at 12:27:04 PDT

I wanted to update you about the Downing Street Minutes letter.  Late last week, just before the holiday weekend, I asked for your help in getting 100,000 signatures on a letter to the President asking for answers about the Downing Street Minutes.  (For those who have not yet heard about the minutes, they detail a meeting between
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers, during which Blair and his advisers reveal details about pre-war conversations with their American counterparts. These details cast substantial doubt on the honesty of contemporaneous claims made by the Administration to Congress and to the American people about the Iraq
war.  For more information go to http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/index.php

The response has been outstanding.  To date, I have relied on hardworking volunteers to maintain my website and, frankly, the response has overwhelmed them.  Over the holiday weekend, there was so much activity on the letter that my website froze, and we are still in the process of compiling the data.  I thank you for your continued patience.

I do have some preliminary results, however.  As of Wednesday, in five days, we had at least 86,000 signatures on the letter.  This would not have happened without your help and hard work. This is so important that I have concluded that it is time to do more.  My new
goal is a quarter of a million signatures and I once again must ask for your help.

If you haven't already ask your friends to sign on at
www.johnconyers.com (Use that link instead of the interior link - because of another web glitch, it is rotated while data is compiled), post this on any websites you visit, and if you have your own blog, please post this link conspicuously.

For my part, I am recirculating the letter to the President from Congress to my Congressional colleagues on Monday to give them another opportunity to sign on.  Many who missed the opportunity to sign on the first time around have contacted me about doing so.

I have already sent one additional letter to the President adding several names and requesting that they be considered as original signatories.  I have attached an updated list below of members who have signed on thus far.

This is by far the most important issue we are faced with.  The most serious matter for the Congress and the President is the decision to go to war.  It is the sole constitutional responsibility of Congress to decide whether to declare war.  The President has a
constitutional responsibility to be straightforward and candid with the Congress in providing it with the information it needs to evaluate the case for war.  If that decision is skewed or corrupted by false or misleading information, it raises the most serious Constitutional questions and substantial issues about abuse of power.

The tragic reality is that over 1600 of our men and women in uniform are dead in a war that was entered into under false premises.  Tens of thousands have been severely injured.  Many more innocent Iraqis have been killed or injured as well.

If, as the Downing Street Minutes appear to clearly indicate, the falsehoods that led us into war were deliberate manipulations of the public and Congress, we deserve to know and we deserve answers.  More importantly, we need to hold this President accountable for a very grave abuse of power.

LIST OF CONGRESSIONAL COSIGNERS

Neil Abercrombie
Brian Baird
Tammy Baldwin
Xavier Becerra
Shelley Berkley
Eddie Bernice Johnson
Sanford Bishop
Earl Blumenauer
Corrine Brown
Sherrod Brown
G.K. Butterfield
Emanuel Cleaver
James Clyburn
John Conyers
Jim Cooper
Elijah Cummings
Danny Davis
Susan Davis
Peter DeFazio
Diana DeGette
Bill Delahunt
Rosa DeLauro
Lloyd Doggett
Sam Farr
Bob Filner
Harold Ford, Jr.
Barney Frank
Al Green
Raul Grijalva
Louis Gutierrez
Alcee Hastings
Maurice Hinchey
Rush Holt
Jay Inslee
Sheila Jackson Lee
Jessie Jackson Jr.
William Jefferson
Marcy Kaptur
Patrick Kennedy
Dale Kildee
Carolyn Kilpatrick
Dennis Kucinich
William Lacy Clay
Barbara Lee
John Lewis
Zoe Lofgren
Donna M. Christensen
Carolyn Maloney
Ed Markey
Carolyn McCarthy
Jim McDermott
James McGovern
Cynthia McKinney
Martin Meehan
Kendrick Meek
Gregory Meeks
Michael Michaud
Juanita Millender-McDonald
George Miller
Gwen S. Moore
James Moran
Jerrold Nadler
Grace Napolitano
James Oberstar
John Olver
Major Owens
Frank Pallone
Donald Payne
Charles Rangel
Bobby Rush
Bernie Sanders
Linda Sanchez
Jan Schakowsky
Jose Serrano
Ike Skelton
Louise Slaughter
Hilda Solis
Pete Stark
Ellen Tauscher
Bennie Thompson
Mike Thompson
Edolphus Towns
Stephanie Tubbs Jones
Tom Udall
Chris Van Hollen
Nydia Velazquez
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Maxine Waters
Diane Watson
Melvin Watt
Robert Wexler
Lynn Woolsey
David Wu
Albert R. Wynn


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/2/15274/55931