[Peace-discuss] Impeachment

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The editor of The Progressive magazine sets out a bill of
particulars for impeachment.  --CGE]

  Grounds for Impeachment
  By Matthew Rothschild
  March 7, 2006

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. That tool is
impeachment.

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.”

Notice that the Vice President is specifically mentioned. So
while we’re advocating the impeachment of George W. Bush,
let’s not stop there. Impeach Dick Cheney, too. For Cheney has
been in on every illegal act that Bush has committed.

And notice the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” At
the Constitutional Convention, the drafters had originally
restricted impeachment to “treason” and “bribery.” But George
Mason, one of the influential delegates, found those terms
insufficient, according to Articles of Impeachment Against
George W. Bush, a new and highly informative book by the
Center for Constitutional Rights. Those terms “will not reach
many great and dangerous offenses,” Mason said, including
“attempts to subvert the Constitution.” After some wrangling
over wording, the founders agreed to James Madison’s phrase
“high crimes and misdemeanors.”

And that is exactly what George W. Bush has been committing:
He’s 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.”

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.

First, Iraq. Bush’s invasion was a war of aggression,
prohibited by the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of that Charter
says, “All Members shall refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force against the
territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
Article 51 provides an exception for “self-defense” but only
“if an armed attack” has already occurred against that state.

Saddam Hussein had not attacked the United States.

International law also provides an exception for imminence: if
you’re just about to be attacked.

Saddam Hussein was not about to attack the United States.

By waging this aggressive war, Bush was violating the U.N.
Charter, as Kofi Annan himself has acknowledged.

And by violating the U.N. Charter, Bush was violating Article
VI of the Constitution, which says that treaties are “the
supreme law of the land.”

But even beyond this, the way that Bush bamboozled the country
into war is itself an impeachable offense. 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.

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. After that meeting,
Dearlove reported back that Bush was intent on 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. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy.”

To fix the intelligence and the facts is to engage in a fraud
against the U.S. government and the American public, and
that’s exactly what the top officials of the Bush
Administration proceeded to do. 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.

Here are two of the biggest whoppers.

Just days before Bush ignited the war, Cheney went on Meet the
Press to discuss the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Cheney said: “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted
nuclear weapons.”

And in Bush’s address to the nation on March 17, 2003, he said
there was “no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess
and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

Remember, this was after the U.N. weapons inspectors had been
scouring Iraq for evidence of those weapons and had found
nothing.In fact, Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency who received the Nobel
Peace Prize last year, told the Security Council weeks before
the remarks of Cheney and Bush that not only did Saddam not
have any nuclear weapons, there was no evidence that he had
even reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.

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. 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.”

That fits Bush and Cheney to a T.

The second ground for impeachment is Bush’s illegal
detentions, in the United States and abroad. After 9/11,
during the Ashcroft Raids, the Bush Administration rounded up
thousands of Arabs and Muslims and held them for months. They
had no access to lawyers, no access to their family members,
who didn’t even know where they were. Many were held in
solitary confinement; some were beaten and abused. As the
Center for Constitutional Rights notes, “any person detained
by the government must be brought before a magistrate judge
within 48 hours so that the appropriateness of their detention
may be reviewed. The Administration violated the law, failing
to bring detainees before a judge for weeks and months.”

This not only violated the rights of the detainees. 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.

Then there’s Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the two U.S.
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. In a disgusting rationale, the Bush
Administration told the Supreme Court that it was holding them
for “humanitarian” purposes.

These are U.S. citizens, who were denied their most basic
rights under the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments by
orders of the President of the United States. The Supreme
Court eventually ruled in the Hamdi case that a “state of war
is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the
rights of the nation's citizens."

But Bush has filled in that blank check, and the amount is
staggering.

Take the mass detentions at Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan,
and the secret prisons the CIA is running around the world.
The Bush Administration has rounded up thousands of people and
is holding them indefinitely, and without charges, and without
access to any court anywhere. And indefinitely may mean
forever. According to James Risen’s State of War, the Bush
Administration has no intention of ever releasing some of the
detainees in CIA prisons. There they will languish, without
ever being charged with a crime or provided a hearing. This is
a blatant violation of international law.

The third major ground for impeachment is the torture scandal.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto
Gonzales have repeatedly violated international treaties, U.S.
statutes against torture and war crimes, and the Eighth
Amendment by countenancing torture at Guantánamo, in Iraq, at
Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, in CIA prisons, and by other
governments at the behest of the CIA.

At Guantánamo, prisoners have been beaten, they’ve had lit
cigarettes put out in their ears, they’ve had to endure false
executions and sensory deprivation. And when some of them went
on hunger strike to protest their treatment, they were forced
into restraint chairs where guards shoved feeding tubes
repeatedly into their noses until they bled, and they were
then confined in those restraint chairs until they defecated
and urinated on themselves.

In Iraq, we all saw the photos at Abu Ghraib. 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. That was standard operating
procedure. So, for a time, was the use of unmuzzled dogs.

In Afghanistan, on top of all of these brutalities, detainees
were kept naked and doused with freezing water.

U.S. personnel killed at least two detainees at Bagram,
according to the Pentagon’s own investigation. And those two
were not the only victims. This torture scandal is also a
homicide scandal.

According to the Pentagon itself, there have been thirty-four
cases of suspected or confirmed homicides of detainees by U.S.
personnel. 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.”

That’s forty-five suspected or confirmed homicides of
prisoners in U.S. custody at the hands of U.S. personnel.

If that doesn’t appall you, I don’t know what will.

Maybe the export of detainees for torture? Because the CIA’s
been doing that, too. Nabbing people and flying them out to
countries that are notorious for torture.

So what’s Bush’s responsibility for this?

He conveyed, by word and by deed, that the laws and treaties
against torture need not be followed. As did his Vice
President and his Secretary of Defense.

On the evening of September 11, Bush told his counterterrorism
staff, according to Richard Clarke, that “any barriers in your
way, they are gone.” And he said: “I don’t care what the
international lawyers say, we’re going to kick some ass.” He
also authorized the CIA to send detainees to third countries
for torture. 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.

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. 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.”
It prohibits, among other things, “torture of all kinds,
whether physical or mental,” and “outrages upon personal
dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Cheney, from the start, has been the torturer’s advocate.
After 9/11 he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that “we also
have to work, though, sort of the dark side.” And more
recently he lobbied Capitol Hill for the right to torture.

Rumsfeld is culpable, as well. He sent out a directive on
December 2, 2002, instructing subordinates in interrogation
techniques that breached the Geneva Conventions, including
“using detainees’ individual phobias (such as use of dogs) to
induce stress.” Six weeks later he rescinded this memo, but
according to The New Yorker he proceeded to approve many of
the same techniques. Rumsfeld also has admitted to keeping an
Iraqi detainee from the International Red Cross. The U.S.
government has a policy of holding such “ghost detainees,” a
policy that Rumsfeld and Tenet approved.

And for two years, the Justice Department asserted, in an
August 1, 2002, memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay
Bybee that interrogation was legal that did not result in
organ failure or death, and even then, the torturer could get
off if he said he didn’t intend to cause such results.

This torture scandal has done much to tarnish the reputation
of the United States abroad. But it also gets at the central
question of whether here at home the President is above the law.

This question rises to its greatest heights in the NSA
warrantless spying program. Here the law could not be clearer.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) explicitly
states that the “exclusive means” for spying on U.S. citizens
is by getting a warrant from the FISA court.

As a result, Bush has violated the rights of thousands of U.S.
citizens. And Cheney has, too, since he served as the point
man for this NSA program.

Bush, to this day, claims he doesn’t need to go to the FISA
court to get warrants on U.S. citizens, and he insists that
he’ll continue to bypass the law.

As John Dean of Watergate fame said, Bush is “the first
President to admit to an impeachable offense.”

Now a lot of people think even talking about impeachment is
silly. They say it’s not going to happen. But few people
thought Nixon would be impeached after he won reelection by a
landslide in 1972.

And even though the mainstream media isn’t paying attention,
people at the grassroots are in favor of impeachment.
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. And 52 percent favor impeachment if
it can be shown that Bush illegally spied on American citizens.

Both can readily be shown.

John Conyers, the Democratic Congressman from Detroit, has
introduced a bill to explore grounds for impeachment. It now
has twenty-seven co-sponsors.

As more revelations come out, especially on the illegal spying
that Bush has been engaged in, the number of co sponsors will
rise.

And as more and more of us press for impeachment from below,
the number of co-sponsors will rise.

And 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.

Some, especially on the right, may object that given the war
on terrorism, this is no time to entertain the idea of
impeachment.

Leaving aside the fact that Bush has waged an illegal and
reckless war, our founders were clear that war should be no
obstacle. 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; particularly in
times of war when the military force, and in some respects the
public money, will be in his hands.”

Others, on the Democratic side, may prefer to settle scores at
the ballot box this November or in 2008.

But this isn’t about partisanship. It’s about whether we
respect the Constitution or not. It’s about what kind of
system of government we’re going to have. 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.

And his encroachments and aggrandizements will linger in the
Oval Office for some subsequent President to enjoy at the
peril of our democracy.

“It would set a precedent that … would lie around like a
loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future
occupant," warns Bruce Fein, who served as an associate deputy
attorney general in the Reagan Administration.

Bush has taken our country down a frightening path toward a
form of government our founders loathed. And he has done so by
cloaking his actions as wartime necessities.

The Supreme Court, back in 1866, warned of this current
situation, as Lapham notes in a footnote. In Ex Parte
Milligan, it said, “The Constitution of the United States is a
law for rulers and people; equally in war and in peace, and
covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men,
at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine,
involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by
the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be
suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.
Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.”

Bush acts like a despot.

We can’t let him get away with it.

We can’t let him continue to disgrace the office of the
Presidency, violate his oath of office, and trample on our
Constitution.

We must demand impeachment.

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