[Peace-discuss] Why impeach even now

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following is David Swanson's introduction to Rep. Kucinich's book, "The 35 
Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush." --CGE]

	Kucinich, the Resolution, and the
	Prosecution of Impeachable Crimes
	By David Swanson

When former president George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are
finally hauled into court, their first line of defense is likely to be, “We
served the American people, whose representatives chose not to impeach us.” If,
on the other hand, they are impeached, even after having left office, the
likelihood of prosecution and of successful prosecution will increase
dramatically. Impeachment after January 2009 would not remove them from office,
but could cut off their public pensions and bar them from ever holding any
public office again. Those would be trivial results, but the primary impact of
impeachment would be to establish for future presidents and vice presidents that
there is a penalty to be paid for violating the law or abusing power.

For the penalty to include prison time will require prosecution at the federal,
state, or local level, or in a foreign country or international court. The
possibilities for prosecution are more diverse and more likely than for
impeachment. While Congress has not yet aided the cause of prosecution by
impeaching, Dennis Kucinich has done so by drafting an extensive indictment in
the form of the 35 articles of impeachment contained in this book.

On the evening of June 9, 2008, Congressman Kucinich of Cleveland, Ohio, had
been working many hours without a break or a bite to eat, and I would have
assumed that he was near the point of collapse had I not worked with him before.
But it was Dennis, and he grabbed a thick sheaf of paper from the printer, and
continued making changes as he headed to the floor of the House of
Representatives, and read aloud, for nearly six hours, 35 Articles of
Impeachment against President George W. Bush. The impeachment news flashed
across the internet and through the radio waves, and C-Span’s viewership soared.
Two days later, after the clerk of the House had read the entire resolution (H.
Res. 1258) aloud again, the full House voted to send it to the House Judiciary
Committee, to be considered or ignored, as that committee’s chairman or his
party’s leader saw fit.

Kucinich had introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick
Cheney, in April 2007, and reintroduced them to force a vote in November ‘07
that sent them to committee. When Dennis introduced the 35 articles of
impeachment against Bush in June 2008, he threatened to come back with 60
articles in July if no action had yet been taken. That didn’t happen, but
Kucinich did go back to the floor in July and forced a vote on a single article
of impeachment against Bush related to the invasion of Iraq, the issue Kucinich
had focused on above all others.

At that point Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, told John Conyers, Chairman of
the Judiciary Committee, to hold a hearing at which Kucinich could present his
case for impeachment, but to announce in advance that no actual impeachment
proceedings would follow the hearing, no matter what was heard there. The
hearing was held on July 25th, and Kucinich and other members of Congress,
former members of Congress, former prosecutors, and other experts argued for
impeachment, many of them drawing on the arguments made in Kucinich’s 35
articles. The hearing, like Kucinich’s reading of his articles, took six hours,
and was probably the most devastating indictment of a sitting president and vice
president in the history of the nation. The corporate media almost completely
ignored it. A couple of weeks later, some concerned citizens caught up with
Pelosi, who was touring the country to sell her new book, and asked for her
opinion of Kucinich’s articles of impeachment. She replied that she had not yet
read them.

If you find this book valuable and believe that Speaker Pelosi can’t possibly
read it too many times, you can mail your copy along with a personal note to:

	Nancy Pelosi
	450 Golden Gate Ave. — 14th Floor
	San Francisco, CA 94102

Or you can politely ask that a local news outlet deliver her the book by sending
it, along with a note, care of:

	San Francisco Chronicle — Attention Political Desk
	901 Mission Street
	San Francisco, CA 94103

As you may have just surmised, I’m an activist. I don’t believe any citizen of a
democratic republic has a right to be anything else. Congressman Kucinich is a
politician, and would not urge people to flood Pelosi’s office with books. His
role is to listen to the majority will of the people of his district and of the
nation and to act accordingly, and he fulfills that responsibility far more than
any other participant in the money-choked, party-controlled, media-suffocated
system in which he works. A few dozen other Congress members stand out by
following at a safe distance behind Kucinich. Sadly, in a House made up of 435
members, most of whom simply follow their parties’ leaders, that’s not enough.

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney deserves a nod of recognition, because she
introduced articles of impeachment against Bush (and Cheney and Condoleezza
Rice) before Kucinich did. She did so on her last day in office and the last day
of the 109th Congress in 2006. It was a symbolic gesture, but one we could have
used more of. Even McKinney’s gesture was several steps behind the American
public, which had been clamoring for impeachment for years by then.

The movement for impeachment had been registering major support in various polls
and had seen intense and widespread activism around the country and on Capitol
Hill: phone calls, emails, faxes, lobby visits, public forums, marches, creative
dramas, media activism, civil disobedience, and all forms of public education,
including the production of numerous books, DVDs, and websites containing
proposed articles of impeachment.

In 2005 I worked closely with John Conyers’ minority staff on the Judiciary
Committee to advance the cause of impeachment. In 2006 Pelosi announced that she
would not allow impeachment if she were to become Speaker. In 2007 I was
arrested, along with 50 other people for sitting in Chairman Conyers’ office and
asking him to hold impeachment hearings. It was in such a climate in which
Kucinich stepped forward and led the cause of accountability without apology.

The case for impeachment had never before been laid out as thoroughly as in
Kucinich’s articles, but it had been made in print in 2005 by a group called the
International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the
Bush Administration of the United States, as well as by Congressman Conyers and
his staff in a book written in 2005, and in books in 2006 by the Center for
Constitutional Rights, Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky, Elizabeth Holtzman
and Cynthia L. Cooper, and Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips, among others.

A plausible ground for impeachment can be found in the record of just about
every past US president, at least with the benefit of evidence that has emerged
since their terms in office; but none of them come anywhere close to the record
documented in Kucinich’s 35 Articles. Bush and Cheney have outdone all past
presidents and vice presidents combined in volume and degree of abuses of power.
The 35 Articles could quite easily become 60 or more.

Bush broke more laws on some single days than some of his predecessors did in
their entire terms in office. January 31, 2003, stands out in my mind. That was
when Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House and
proposed possible ways to provoke Saddam Hussein into an attack, which included
the painting of US airplanes with United Nations colors and trying to get them
shot at. Bush also proposed assassinating Hussein. He also promised Blair that
he would try to get the United Nations to legalize the coming invasion, the same
day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a campaign to bug the phones and
emails of key members of the U.N. Security Council. When Bush and Blair finished
their private chat, they held a press conference at which they professed not to
have decided on war, to continue working for peace, and to be worried about the
imminent threat from Iraq to the American people. They claimed that Iraq
possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and had links to al Qaeda and — as Bush
implied but avoided explicitly stating — to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
They also claimed to already have U.N. authorization for launching an attack on
Iraq. At this time the US military was already engaging in bombing runs over
Iraq, and redeploying troops — including to newly-constructed bases — all in
preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and all with money that had not been
appropriated for these purposes.

Half the crimes in the above paragraph did not make the cut in the 35 articles,
and yet Iraq cast such a shadow that misdeeds in other parts of the world didn’t
make the list at all. Who recalls the bizarre incident in which the United
States kidnapped and imprisoned the president of Haiti? Who’s suffering from too
much scandal fatigue to focus on the secret US funding and assistance to an
attempted coup against the president of Venezuela? What about the US
encouragement and aid to Israel’s bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon?
President Bush issued an Executive Order on July 17, 2007, that authorized the
Treasury Department to seize the assets of American citizens on the basis of a
non-judicial process that denies them their Fifth Amendment rights, but how can
we get excited about that when the things Bush did on most other days were worse?

A law called the Hatch Act bars the use of federal resources for partisan
politics, and prohibits partisan political events and other partisan efforts
during work hours at federal government facilities, but Karl Rove routinely
worked on partisan politics out of the White House and held over 100 illegal
events in the Old Executive Office Building and at a variety of government
agencies. The First Amendment bans state religion, and yet Bush and gang used
numerous departments of the government to promote Christianity, in violation of
a variety of laws. In fact, you can pick just about any department answering to
the president and find that Bush and/or Cheney (usually Cheney) exercised an
unprecedented degree of control over it, reversed the decisions of the head of
the department, censored the reports of the staff, and imposed policies in
violation of laws.

Take the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an example that didn’t find
its way into the 35 articles. In July 2008, former EPA official Jason Burnett
blew the whistle on Dick Cheney, reporting that Cheney’s office had pushed
successfully to have “any discussion of the human health consequences of climate
change” removed from testimony that Julie Gerberding, director of the Center for
Disease Control had presented to Congress in 2007. Under administrator Stephen
Johnson, the EPA consistently took its orders from Cheney and Bush, and
pressured scientists to make their findings conform to White House demands.

In August 2003 the Bush Administration denied a petition to regulate C02
emissions from motor vehicles by deciding that C02 was not a pollutant under the
Clean Air Act. In April 2007 the US Supreme Court overruled that determination.
The EPA then conducted an extensive investigation involving 60 to 70 staff who
concluded that “C02 emissions endanger both human health and welfare.” These
findings were submitted to the White House, after which work on the required
regulations was effectively delayed for the remainder of the Cheney-Bush presidency.

Johnson’s EPA set ozone pollution limits at unhealthy levels after rejecting the
conclusions of its own scientists, and then weakened those limits further after
a late-night intervention by Bush on the eve of announcing the new standards.
And Johnson and the EPA stonewalled Congress, refusing to produce subpoenaed
documents, leading top senators and Congress members to pathetically ask Johnson
to resign, which of course he did not do, as he was merely following orders from
Cheney and Bush whom Pelosi had promised never to impeach.

A close look at Bush and Cheney’s handling of the economy might find impeachable
offenses as well, ranging from protection of (rather than from) predatory
mortgage lenders, neglect of a foreclosure crisis, and abuses such as the
incident in March 2008 when Bush and his Treasury Secretary transferred a
mountain of public money to J.P. Morgan/Chase via the Federal Reserve, in order
to induce J.P. Morgan/Chase to assume the liabilities and assets of Bear Stearns
and Company at a price not determined in the free market or via public bidding,
in violation of the limitations expressly set forth in the Federal Reserve Act.

Most of the 35 Articles below address Bush, Cheney, and Bush’s other
subordinates, and rightly so. The framers of the Constitution chose a single
executive in order to hold him (or her) accountable for the entire branch of
government. But articles focused on Cheney would have added more crimes to the
list. The resolution that Kucinich introduced in April 2007 did not attempt
comprehensive coverage. It included only three Articles of Impeachment, alleging
that Cheney had misled the Congress and the public about “weapons of mass
destruction” and about ties to al Qaeda, and had threatened an aggressive war on
Iran. Cheney had also personally profited financially from the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, via no-bid contracts that he awarded to a company still
paying him “deferred compensation.”

And, of course, more crimes and abuses have emerged since July 2008, including
evidence of partisan hiring practices at the Justice Department, and more
evidence has emerged in support of the allegations found in the 35 articles,
including evidence of war lies reported in Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World.
It is a good bet that yet more evidence will continue to be made public in the
coming months and years.

Again, impeachment will remain possible, even with Bush and Cheney out of
office. Penalties that can be imposed include removal of pension and barring
from ever again holding public office. Civil and criminal prosecution will be
far more likely with Bush and Cheney and their subordinates out of office.
Whether impeachment or prosecution or other major steps to reform our political
system occur will largely not be determined by the outcomes of elections, and
the question of whether they occur is more important than the outcomes of elections.

I agree with George Mason’s analysis of our system of government when he said on
July 20, 1787, that “No point is of more importance than that the right of
impeachment should be continued. Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall
that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?”

Impeachment has been used far more routinely through American history than most
people realize. The history of impeachment is very well told by John Nichols in
his book, The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism.
Impeachment proceedings have been initiated in the House 62 times, and 17 people
have been impeached. Thirteen of those have been federal judges, one a secretary
of war, one a senator, and two presidents. Seven individuals have subsequently
been convicted in a trial in the US Senate, all of them federal judges.

But that’s not the half of it. Impeachment often achieves its purpose of
preserving our democratic rights short of actually arriving at a majority House
vote for impeachment. Richard Nixon was never impeached, but he rightly resigned
from the presidency. Harry Truman was never impeached, but he ceased the abuses
of power for which Congress Members were pushing to impeach him and which the
Supreme Court rapidly ruled against (during “war time” to boot).

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was never impeached, but there was a major
push in Congress to impeach him. Prior to summer recess 2007, there were 32
Congress members who had cosponsored a resolution calling for impeachment
hearings to begin. Many more pledged to sign on when Congress returned in the
fall, but before that occurred, Gonzales announced his resignation.

Our Constitution was written as Edmund Burke was leading the impeachment of
Warren Hastings in England—an effort that did not achieve impeachment but did
restore democratic checks on power. American colonies, too, impeached governors
and justices. In recent years, the British Parliament saw an active effort to
impeach Prime Minister Tony Blair, which weakened his power. Impeachments went
on in nations all over the world during the Cheney-Bush era, and a threat of
impeachment led Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf to resign.

While only two US presidents, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, have been
impeached, and neither one of them convicted in the Senate, articles of
impeachment have also been filed in the House against presidents Tyler,
Cleveland, Hoover, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. That’s a total
of 10 out of 43 presidents, or 23 percent. Some of these cases involved serious
threats of impeachment, and others involved one or a dozen defenders of our
rights in Congress going up against Congressional leaders intent on ignoring them.

Since polling began, the least popular president on record is Bush Jr., but both
Truman and Nixon came close. Both were unpopular for seizing too much power. In
both cases, Congress began steps toward impeachment. In both cases, abuses of
power were checked. Neither Nixon nor Truman, however, ever held as much
unconstitutional power as did the real all-time leader in unpopularity: Dick Cheney.

Even this expanded list of past impeachments leaves out most of the history of
impeachment movements, which have pushed from the local level up, both
successfully and unsuccessfully, for the impeachment of officials in Washington.
One of the judges successfully impeached and convicted was impeached after a
state legislature petitioned the House to impeach him, and another after an
individual petitioned the House. The Jefferson Manual, a book of rules that
Thomas Jefferson originally wrote for the Senate but which is now used by the
House, and which has been much added to since Jefferson’s day, includes
procedures by which individuals and state and local governments have in the past
petitioned, and can in the future petition, the House to impeach. Such petitions
are not binding, but can influence Congress when Congress is willing to be
influenced.

Impeachment has been a path to electoral success throughout US history. After
the Whigs attempted to impeach Tyler, they picked up seven seats, and Tyler left
politics. Weeks after he lobbied for Johnson’s impeachment, Grant was nominated
for president. Lincoln had pushed toward the impeachment of Polk without
introducing actual articles. He, too, was elected president. Keith Ellison, who
introduced a resolution to impeach Bush and Cheney into the Minnesota state
legislature, was elected to Congress in 2006, where he did very little to
support impeachment. After the Republicans pursued impeachment of Truman and won
what they wanted (and the nation needed) from the Supreme Court, they won in the
next elections. After Nixon resigned, the Democrats won the White House and
picked up 4 seats in the Senate and 49 (yes, 49!) in the House. Even during and
following the unpopular impeachment of Clinton (an impeachment the public was
overwhelmingly opposed to), the Republicans held onto majorities in both houses
and lost very few seats. They also had the pleasure of watching Al Gore campaign
for president while pretending he was never close to Bill Clinton and picking
the unpopular Joe Lieberman, an advocate for Clinton’s impeachment, as his
running mate. On the other hand, when Democrats chose not to pursue impeachment
of Reagan for Iran-Contra, so that they could win the next elections, the result
was that they lost the next elections.

Proposals to impeach Bush were almost always greeted by Congress members with
horrified shouts of “But we wouldn’t want a President Cheney!” The greatest
insurance against impeachment was an unpopular and frightening vice president.
Never mind that Cheney’s unpopularity would have hurt his own party had he been
made president. Never mind that impeachment is a process that often accomplishes
great things short of getting to impeachment, much less removal from office.
Never mind that if Bush could be impeached, Cheney certainly could too. It
didn’t matter By failing to impeach Bush and Cheney we have established for
future presidents and vice presidents that they can break the law without
expecting to be impeached.

Congress members and their staffers believed that the Clinton impeachment had
ruined impeachment for good. There were perfectly good reasons to impeach Bill
Clinton, but he was impeached in an absurd bad-faith witch hunt that made a
mockery of our entire system of government.

In March 2006, the Wall Street Journal did—for one day—what most media outlets
never did: cover the movement to impeach Bush and Cheney. While most polling
companies refused to ever poll on the question, even for cold hard cash, Zogby
had released a poll in November 2005 that we at After Downing Street and
Democrats.com had commissioned. The Wall Street Journal led off with a graphic
showing the results of that poll and those of a 1998 poll on impeaching Clinton.
The same pollster had conducted both polls and asked very similar questions.
Both polls were conducted among “likely voters.” The results showed that 27
percent favored impeachment for Clinton and 51 percent for Bush. That would have
been an impressive gap even without the contrasting media attention. The
impeachment of Clinton was promoted in saturation coverage night-and-day for
months, with newspapers editorializing in support of it. The impeachment of Bush
was absolutely unheard of and unmentionable in US corporate media.

The Wall Street Journal did print that one article, but—tellingly—the article was
written exactly as if the reporter had not seen the graphic at the top and was
unaware of the poll results. “Democratic Party leaders,” she wrote, were
“keeping their distance from impeachment talk. They remember how the effort
boomeranged on Republicans in the 1998 midterm elections.” Of course, that
boomerang was minimal (the Republicans lost five seats and held the majority),
but look at those poll results again. The voters didn’t want Clinton impeached,
and did want Bush impeached. So, why in the world would voter opposition to the
former suggest that there would be voter opposition to the latter?

 From Impeachment to Prosecution

To the credit of the American people, the impeachment movement continued to
grow, but off the radar of the Wall Street Journal. The movement educated the
public, influenced elections, and made lies about Iran a lot harder to swallow
than lies about Iraq had been. And now its focus is shifting from Congress to
courts, from impeachment to prosecution. Not all impeachable offenses are
crimes, and not all crimes are impeachable offenses, but there are quite a few
crimes in Kucinich’s 35 articles. Following this introduction is a list of the
crimes alleged. The list was drawn up by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal
prosecutor and the author of United States v. George W. Bush et al., a brilliant
book that depicts a presentation to a grand jury charging Bush and gang with
defrauding the nation into war.

Now, according to Fox News, the only reason any of us ever favored impeachment
was because we hated Bush and Cheney and couldn’t beat them at the ballot box
(on the latter point, see Articles XXVIII and XXIX below). Having failed, at
least so far, at impeachment, pursuing prosecution (even after an election has
solved all our problems or at least altered them) must surely be driven by
nothing other than hatred, right?

Wrong. If I thought we could deter future presidents and vice presidents from
abusing power by giving Cheney and Bush immunity for life, that is exactly what
I would propose we do. I would advocate for any deterrent effect. I take the
matter this seriously because we are preparing to hand what Michael Goldfarb,
Deputy Communications Director for presidential candidate John McCain,
approvingly calls “near dictatorial power” to every future president and vice
president at a moment in history in which the twin dangers of global warming and
nuclear war threaten us far more seriously than has any nation with which ours
has ever clashed.

While some have talked of hanging Bush and Cheney after the manner of punishment
we imposed on German and Japanese war criminals, I am adamantly opposed to the
possibility of imposing the death penalty on anyone, no matter what they are
convicted of, because it has been shown to encourage violence rather than to
deter it. Future presidents are not more likely to refrain from abusing power if
they might be executed than if they might be imprisoned for life. If they are
imprisoned for life, they can express their regrets in ways that their
successors can understand.

As I write this two months prior to the 2008 elections, we may have an honest
and verifiable election in November, but it’s difficult to see how that is
possible. And though we may elect a president and vice president who abide fully
by the Constitution, the treaties our nation has ratified, and the laws that are
on the books, that’s very unlikely.

In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted Bush and Cheney
for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing,
murdering, circumventing US and international law, spying in violation of the
Fourth Amendment, and basing their actions on “imperial fantasies.” If the
editorial had been about robbing a liquor store or killing a small number of
people or stealing a small amount of money or torturing a single child, then the
writers at the New York Times would have demanded immediate prosecution and
incarceration. In this case they demanded that we sit back and hope the next
president and vice president will be better. How does that deter future crimes?

We can announce new policies, pass new legislation, amend the Constitution. We
can shift power to the Congress, and clean up our electoral system to allow true
representation of the people in the Congress. We can shift our resources from
the military to peaceful enterprises. We can eliminate secret government and
create total transparency. We can perfect the brilliant cuttingedge democratic
system that our nation created over two centuries ago and has done little to
update since. We can put an end to plutocracy, reclaim our airwaves, ban war
propaganda, and develop different public attitudes toward those 95.5 percent of
people in the world who are not Americans. And so we should. But all that would
not be sufficient to chain the dogs of war. Exquisite laws and enlightened
public attitudes are of no use at all as long as presidents and vice presidents
suffer no penalty for disobeying them, and in fact benefit politically and
financially.

During the Democratic primaries, Senator Obama said he’d have his attorney
general look into the possibility that Bush and Cheney had committed crimes, but
that as far as he knew they hadn’t committed any. He later voted to give telecom
companies immunity for cooperating with some of the crimes. In early September
Joe Biden said that he, too, didn’t know of any crimes that had been committed,
but that an Obama-Biden administration would look into the question. He also
promised a justice department that would no longer commit crimes. The day after
Biden made these remarks, he went on TV to insist that an Obama-Biden
administration has no intention of prosecuting Bush and Cheney.

There’s a much more serious potential roadblock to domestic criminal prosecution
than Barack Obama’s (and, of course, John McCain’s) belief that Bush and
Cheney’s crimes should be hushed up, namely the possibility that Bush will issue
blanket pardons of anyone who engaged in crimes he authorized, including
himself. Without admitting that Bush or anyone else has committed any crimes,
Obama or McCain could take a position against any president, himself included,
ever pardoning anyone for a crime that the president authorizes. A focus on
pardons at least begins to limit the power of the individual holding all the
power. Congress, unless it is restored to power, serves — at best — as just more
people lobbying the president.

Now, blanket pardons or self-pardons could be challenged. There may be local and
state and civil prosecutions possible despite pardons and strengthened by
pardons. And prosecution by a foreign country or the International Criminal
Court (ICC) is a possibility as well. With Obama and Biden suggesting they will
“investigate” whether any crimes have been committed, there is no reason that
they could not. That commitment is a second demand that we can make of the
candidates for president or the president elect.

On the subject of local and state prosecutions, The Prosecution of George W.
Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi argues that state and local prosecutors have
jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for the murder of US soldiers from their states
and counties who died in Iraq. We need to identify or elect courageous
prosecutors and pair them up with gold star families.

Some have expressed concern that when Cheney and Bush leave office they will
destroy lots of evidence of their crimes. I do not share this concern, because
they already have destroyed lots of such evidence, and yet more than enough such
evidence is in the public realm. And there is something that cannot be
destroyed: the many potential whistleblowers who have been keeping their mouths
shut.

We should not be relying on Congress. We should not be funneling our money
through electoral campaigns and into TV ads on television networks that are
destroying our country. We should be establishing a whistleblower protection
fund that can guarantee financial security and legal defense to those
considering blowing the whistle on their superiors.

There are also a variety of ways in which citizens can file suit. My friend John
Bonifaz served as attorney on a lawsuit against the President before the
invasion of Iraq on behalf of Congress members (including Kucinich) and military
families claiming an invasion would be unconstitutional without a proper
congressional declaration of war. John consulted in 2007 with a professor at
Rutgers University, who worked up a case with his students for a full year, and
in 2008 filed it in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey. The Complaint,
filed on behalf of a number of peace groups, seeks a Declaratory Judgment that
the President’s decision to launch a preemptive war against a sovereign nation
in 2003 violated Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, which
assigns to Congress the power to Declare War. Every peace and justice group in
the country should be working with lawyers, choosing their favorite Cheney-Bush
crime, and filing a suit, the point being to change the public conversation
until we reach the point that a prosecutor will act.

There is also a procedure called Qui Tam found in the Federal False Claims Act
that allows individual citizens to sue if the government spends money
fraudulently, and to receive a percentage of any funds recovered. Such a suit
could conceivable be filed, or perhaps hundreds of such suits could be filed,
against government officials, including Dick Cheney, who set up illegal
contracts with Halliburton and other corporations, including contracts to spend
in Iraq funding that had been legally appropriated for Afghanistan.

Prosecution is also possible in foreign nations. In May 2008 in Milano, Italy,
25 CIA agents and an Air Force colonel went on trial in absentia for kidnapping
a man on an Italian street and renditioning him to Egypt to be tortured. The
victim’s wife testified for over six hours. A newspaper report read:

    Nabila at first rebuffed prosecutors’ requests to describe the torture
    her husband had recounted, saying she didn’t want to talk about it.
    Advised by prosecutors that she had no choice, she tearfully proceeded:
    “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beaten up, especially
    around his ears. He was subject to electroshocks to many body parts.”
    “To his genitals?’ the prosecutors asked.
    “Yes,’ she replied.”
    The judge said that the current and immediate past prime ministers of Italy
    would be required to testify during the trial.

Foreign victims can also sue in US courts. Also in May 2008, an Iraqi sued US
contractors for torture. Emad al-Janabi’s federal lawsuit was filed in Los
Angeles and claimed that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3
Communications punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame
and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell. In July, three more Iraqis and a
Jordanian who had been held and tortured in Abu Ghraib for years before being
released without charges filed similar suits. Alleged methods of torture by the
US contractors included: electric shock, beatings, depriving of food and sleep,
threatening with dogs, stripping naked, forcibly shaving, choking, being forced
to witness murder, pouring feces on, holding down and sodomizing (a 14-year-old
boy) with a toothbrush, being paraded naked before other prisoners, forcing to
consume so much water that you vomit blood and faint, and tying a plastic line
around your penis to prevent urination.

And on August 15, 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York
announced that it would hear the case against the United States of Canadian
victim of US torture Maher Arar. His suit names, among others, former Attorney
General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, and former
head of “Homeland Security” Tom Ridge.

We can also work at the local level to follow the example of Brattleboro, Vt.,
passing ordinances making it the law that if Bush, Cheney, or key coconspirators
enter our towns they will be arrested.

And we can make citizens arrests all on our own right now. Here’s how:
afterdowningstreet.org/citizenarrest

Judge William Price in Iowa in July heard the case of people who had been
arrested for trying to make a citizens’ arrest of Karl Rove. When told what they
were charged with, the judge remarked “Well, it’s about time!”

And it’s about time we re-established what John Adams called a government of
laws and not of men. To get involved in that project, go to the website:
afterdowningstreet.org and to Dennis Kucinich’s website: kucinich.us.

<http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36845>

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