[Peace-discuss] FW: [southnews] Francis A. Boyle on Bush Impeachment

[Boyle, Francis A]

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


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Subject: [southnews] Francis A. Boyle on Bush Impeachment

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Professor Boyle argues for the use of impeachment to remove Bush, 
Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsefeld before they can take us into another war 
in Iran and farther along into an American police state.

Professor Boyle, who along with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark 
brought articles of impeachment to Congress at the request of Rep. John 
Conyers just prior to the Iraq invasion to "head off the impending war."

The attempt failed, chiefly because the Democratic leadership did not 
want to jeopardize their as yet undetermined Presidential candidate's 
chances for election.

Professor Boyle brings it all together here:  why impeachment must be 
pursued, what must be done for impeachment to succeed, the peace 
movement, NSA spying, the Fitzgerald investigation, Bush's subversion of 
the constitution and assuming authority to violate over 700 laws, the 
effort by the Neocons to remove Habeas Corpus and create a police state, 
the nuclear agenda of the Neocons and threat of first-use of nuclear 
weapons against Iran, the war crime of destroying an entire city - 
Fallujah - in Iraq and the wider issue of destroying the entire country, 
the Mearshimer and Walt paper, and the connection of the Israel lobby to 
the administration's intent to manufacture a crisis with Iran, or the 
unthinkable - to start a nuclear war.




Talk Nation Radio Interview with Law Professor Francis A. Boyle on 4 
Square Impeachment, the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, 
and Attorney General

Posted on Friday 5 May 2006

     Francis A. Boyle teaches law at the University of Illinois. He is a 
graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He has 
advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war 
crimes, genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. Professor Boyle also 
serves as counsel for Bosnia Herzegovina in application of the 
convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide 
pending before the International Court of Justice. He also represents 
associations of citizens within the country and has been instrumental in 
developing the indictment against Slobdon Milosovich for genocide, 
crimes against humanity, and war crimes, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He 
received a PHD in political science from Harvard University. You can 
find Professor Francis A. Boyle's writing online at Counterpunch.org.


Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human 
rights, and the environment, I'm Dori Smith.

"We were in dire straights under Nixon in Vietnam and we impeached 
Nixon, ended up with Gerald Ford, and the Vietnam War was wound down. So 
I don't think we can ever give up hope but we really have no 
alternative."  - Francis Boyle

Intro: International law expert Francis A. Boyle of the University of 
Illinois is our guest this time to discuss Iran, presidential powers, 
the Plame Affair, the President's decision to override 750 laws, and the 
professor's draft impeachment resolution against President George W. 
Bush written back in January of 2003. In debates held at that time with 
administration officials Attorney Boyle came under sharp criticism for 
maintaining that the President and others in the administration made 
false statements that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. As 
Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle struggle to evaluate 
any illegality on the part of the President and others in his 
administration, Professor Boyle's warnings about the direction the 
government was moving in now seem prophetic.

Dori Smith: Professor Boyle, welcome to Talk Nation Radio.

Francis A. Boyle: Thank you very much for having me on and my best to 
your listening audience.

Dori Smith: You wrote your draft impeachment resolution against 
President Bush back in January of 2003 and in the time since we have 
learned a lot more about pre-war intelligence manipulation and the 
various kinds of disinformation provided to the American people about 
Iraq. Just talk about the ongoing effort to impeach since your 
resolution in 2003. Do you think enough is known for impeachment to 
proceed and can we get there?

Francis A. Boyle: Yes, I think those of us in the peace movement in the 
fall of 2002 were publicly stating that there were no weapons of mass 
destruction in Iraq and this was just a bald faced lie and propaganda to 
generate momentum towards war. And I think we have now been proven to be 
correct. Where the impeachment campaign stands now; I have to review 
just a little bit of history.

On 13 March 2003, that is just before the outbreak of the war against 
Iraq, Congressman John Conyers, the ranking member of the House 
Judiciary Committee, convened an emergency meeting of 40 to 50 of his 
top advisors, most of whom were lawyers, to put in emergency bills of 
impeachment against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and at that time Ashcroft, 
to head off the impending war.

He invited me and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in to debate the 
issue in favor of impeachment. The debate lasted two hours. We had my 
draft resolution on the table and Ramsey also had his draft resolution; 
we don't disagree at all in how we see the issues. And to make a long 
story short the lawyers there did not disagree with me and Ramsey that 
Bush merited impeachment for what he had done and was threatening to do 
so far.

The main objection was political expedience and in particular John 
Podesta was there. He had been Clinton's White House chief of staff. He 
stated he was appearing on behalf of the Democratic National Committee 
and that as far as the DNC was concerned it was going to hurt their 
ability to get whoever their candidate was going to be in 2004 elected 
President if we put in these bills of impeachment. I found that argument 
completely disingenuous when the Democrats had no idea who their 
candidate was going to be in 2004 as of March 2003. We had no idea.

In any event I'm a political independent so I didn't argue that point. 
It was not for me to tell Democrats how to get their candidates elected. 
I just continued to hammer on on the merits of impeachment. Now, Ramsey, 
as you know he's a lifelong Democrat so he did argue that issue and 
Ramsey's argument was the he didn't think it was going to hurt and it 
might help to put in these bills of impeachment immediately. 
Unfortunately, the Podesta argument prevailed and those draft bills of 
impeachment are still sitting there at the House Judiciary Committee. 
I've been updating impeachable offenses since then sending it in there 
to the House Judiciary Committee.

So the main problem we have now is political. That the Democratic 
leadership in the House where the bill must originate and also the 
Democratic honchos at the DNC are opposed to putting in bills of 
impeachment against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and now Gonzales. So this is 
not a drafting problem, a substantive problem. We've already debated 
these and Ramsey and I won the arguments. And as time has gone on since 
I drafted my bill and this debate before Congressman Conyers, more and 
more evidence has come out of the lies, propaganda, disinformation, and 
further crimes that the Bush Jr. administration has engaged in. 
-Recently; spying on the American people in violation of the 4th 
Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which is a 
felony so obviously another impeachable offense that Gonzales approved.

So that's where we stand. So far we need one member of the House of 
Representatives with courage, intelligence, integrity, principle, and a 
safe seat, willing to put in a bill of impeachment or bills of 
impeachment against the four of them. Right now we do not have that 
member of Congress because the leadership of the Democratic Party is 
taking the position that this would be politically counter productive as 
far as they are concerned.

Dori Smith: You mentioned the NSA spy program. There is also the right 
now Patrick Fitzgerald is working on involving leaks of the name, 
Valerie Plame Wilson, who as we know was a CIA agent. We have many 
documents that have been coming out and so I want to talk with you about 
that. And finally, I do want to touch on the more recent story about the 
President quietly assuming the authority to disobey 750 laws since he 
took office. This is a story by the Boston Globe's Charles Savage, April 
30, 2006.

So taking them one at a time, you mentioned the NSA spy program. Are we 
on the verge of seeing a bipartisan effort to question Bush on that 
program and could that possibly bring up the issue of impeachment if the 
President is unwilling to listen, say, even to the head of the U.S. Senate

Francis A. Boyle: Well it would be nice if we were on the verge but 
Senator Specter was making some noises that he was going to do something 
and maybe have some hearings but so far we don't have them. I really 
don't know what to say. Again, the issues you mentioned all involve 
impeachable offenses. There's more than enough there on the substantive 
merits across the board to impeach these four individuals but I regret 
to say I just don't think the Democrats have the guts to do it. (See 
update in breaking story Thursday, May 4, 2006, one day after this 
program aired that Senator Specter has called for hearings on the 
President's failure to obey 750 laws. Hearings Update

My conclusion is that basically the incumbent Democrats have pretty much 
been complicit with everything Bush has done since September 11, 2001. 
In the NSA spying scandal it came out that the leadership of the 
Democratic Party, the 14 top leaders in the House and the Senate, knew 
full well that Bush was spying on the American people and said nothing 
at all to the American people.

It was the New York Times as you know who broke the story, but they sat 
on it for a year. Well let's put the New York Times responsibility 
aside, the Democratic leadership who knew should have said something. 
Now they gave the lame excuse saying well the information was 
classified. That's baloney. In the Constitution there is what is known 
as the speech and debate clause that gives any member of Congress 
absolute immunity from both civil and criminal proceedings to say 
anything he or she wants to say from the floor of the House or the floor 
of the Senate. This happened in the impeachment campaign against Bush 
Senior where I was counsel to Congressman Henry B. Gonzales and did the 
first draft of his impeachment resolution that was introduced January 
16, 1991, and in support of that resolution as matters went on 
Congressman Gonzales repeatedly got up on the floor of the House and 
released classified information.

Of course Bush Sr. went irate. He sicked the CIA to investigate 
Congressman Gonzales but nothing could be done because of the speech and 
debate clause. As long as the member of Congress only talks on the floor 
of the House or the Senate they can say what they want. They can't go 
back and have a press conference on classified information.

So everyone knows this and in my opinion my reading then went with the 
NSA spy scandal it came out that the Democratic leadership has simply 
been complicit with Bush. They were complicit on the war against 
Afghanistan. They were complicit in the war against Iraq. We in the 
peace movement told the leadership of the Democratic Party that there 
was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction for those of us who also 
have been following this matter for 20 years. You know, these are 
intelligent people, they had access to the same information I did and 
Ramsey Clark did and others. So, the problem is we have a leadership in 
the Democratic Party that has been complicit in all of these 
Constitutional violations being inflicted by the Bush Administration.

I think we are going to have to elect people; men and women of good 
faith whatever party, who are willing to put in bills of impeachment 
because otherwise we are quickly degenerating here into a dictatorship. 
You mentioned that story in the Boston Globe. The President is just 
ignoring laws or issuing these signing statements saying he is not going 
to enforce them. Well the President has an obligation under the 
Constitution to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. If he 
believes they are unconstitutional he has to go to the Supreme Court and 
get the Supreme Court to strike them down.

He has also taken an oath to uphold the Constitutional laws of the 
United States as required by the Constitution. So this behavior, this 
pattern of behavior rises to the level of an impeachable offense. The 
test is subversion of the Constitution and clearly you have over 700 
laws that the President has said he is not going to enforce.

Dori Smith: In terms of which laws we are looking at his unwillingness 
to adhere to laws recently passed, since he took office, asserting that 
he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it 
conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. And now this has 
gone to issues like torture. He has said he can bypass the torture ban. 
There are other laws involving the Military, armies, the ability to 
declare war, make rules for captured enemies, make rules for government 
and regulation of the land and Naval forces and also regulate the 
Military; and this is traditionally a role that Congress does play.

Francis A. Boyle: That's correct. If you read the Constitution Congress 
is given all sorts of powers with respect to the conduct of warfare and 
most importantly the power to declare war, not the President. Look what 
we have in operation here is the [Fuhrer] principle that was rejected by 
the Nuremberg Charter judgment and principles that the President is 
above the law, he's above the Constitution, he's above international 
law, he can do whatever he wants. He can take United States citizens, 
strip them of their rights, and throw them into Military brigs. We have 
to remember that in the first draft of the USA Patriot Act that was done 
by a Federalist Society lawyer for Ashcroft, in the first draft they 
tried to have in there the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus which 
is all that stands between us and a police state. -It's your ability if 
you are detained by any law enforcement official to have a lawyer go 
into court and the judge you know produce the body, a person appears in 
court, and then the government has to explain what is the legal 
authority for this person to be detained and if there are any problems 
with condition of detention, I.e., torture or something like that.

John Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers tried to get Congress 
to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for all of us U.S. citizens. 
Fortunately a Congressional staffer saw that and it was struck out. But 
clearly that is their ultimate objective; to set up a police state.

Dori Smith: Well now you say that, a lot of the laws that were ignored 
did turn out to be military rules and regulations, but also there were 
Affirmative Action provisions, requirements Congress be told about 
immigration service problems, whistle blower protections for nuclear 
regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in 
federally funded research. We could look at any one of those and find 
lots of stories to work on, but let's talk about the nuclear aspect 
because I know you have looked at that as well and we do see a new 
nuclear arms race going on where the White House is now working on how 
to describe programs that are already underway, we are already looking 
at testing, we are already looking at development and replacement with 
some of the weapons systems and various kind of new technologies; and an 
emphasis on new weapons that may be "usable" under the new sort of 
description of a nuclear conflict, which is the old traditional label of 
"Low Intensity Conflict" that has to do with these surgical strikes 
again with a nuclear warhead.

Francis A. Boyle: That is correct. As you know in December of 2002 they 
put a new policy on the White House web site, a new National Security 
Policy that supplemented the one they had done earlier that fall in 
September endorsing preventive warfare. And in the December 2002 policy 
and I discuss this in my book, Destroying World Order they made it clear 
that they were prepared to use weapons of mass destruction to carry out 
that policy. And now it has come out from the Seymour Hersh article in 
the New Yorker that they are prepared to use nuclear weapons against 
Iran they say low yield, but we are talking of orders of a little bit 
less than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Just recently President Bush and Secretary of State Rice were asked 
about the use of nuclear weapons with that name, by the way, with 
respect to Iran, and both the President and the Secretary of State said 
"all options are on the table."

If you look at the Pentagon policy manual on war fighting, which I have 
reviewed, that came out I believe a year ago, implementing then the 
December 2002 policy on weapons of mass destruction, and they are 
currently integrating nuclear weapons with conventional weapons all up 
and down their operational policy. So this is going on now as we speak.

As you know at Nevada they have this, Nevada test site, this Operation 
Divine Strike, that is again going to simulate bunker busters, and it's 
clear they are getting ready there to resume nuclear testing. So if you 
add it all up it looks horrendous and of course then you don't want 
nuclear whistle blowers going out and trying to tell the American people 
what's really going on. But if you make a very close examination of 
what's already out there in the public record it is startling and 
extremely disturbing.

If Bush were to go ahead and actually do what Seymour Hersh says he is 
going to do we could be witnessing the outbreak of the third world war. 
And I know Noam Chomsky has recently taken the same position on that 
independently of me.

Dori Smith: That brings us to CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson again but 
it turns out that she was working on Iran at the time she was outted by 
this White House, then we see that her husband Joseph Wilson had been in 
Niger on a mission to determine the degree of any validity to this 
suggestion that Saddam Hussein was trying to get nuclear material from 
Niger, that turned out to be false and of course he said so in his OP-ED 
piece that is now so famous. So here we see two people who did try to in 
a way warn us back at the time that this was all starting to come out 
and now we see that every argument they made is being legitimized if you 
will with more and more of the documents that are coming out through the 
Special Prosecutor as he proceeds with his case.

Francis A. Boyle: You know Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon 
Papers has publicly stated that it is in the interest of the 
preservation of our republic that people inside the government who have 
this information have to start leaking because otherwise I'm afraid the 
Bush people are going to lead us into a total catastrophe. It could be a 
nuclear catastrophe.

As to Mr. Fitzgerald my reading of him is he is not an Archibald Cox or 
Leon Jawarski. Remember he was appointed as U.S. Attorney in the 
Northern District of Illinois by President Bush himself. So he is not 
really independent of anything and it seems to me he is pretty much 
going with their play book which is to narrow his focus as much as 
possible and zero in on underlings and avoid the responsibility of the 
people on the top. So I'm afraid we really can't rely on Mr. Fitzgerald 
to do the right thing. He might. I'm not discounting him. But he's no 
Archie Cox he's no Leon Jawarski. He is a creature of this administration.

Again, it's really going to be up to us, the American people, to take a 
stand here because otherwise the Bush people I'm afraid will lead us 
over a precipice with this purely concocted crisis with Iran. It's the 
exact same playbook they used on Iraq. It appears they are timing it to 
coincide with the November elections, again, Karl Rove at work again. It 
looks like the Republicans are afraid they are going to lose control of 
either one of both houses. And what better way to keep that control than 
to manufacture this crisis with Iran, distract attention from all their 
other problems that they have, and try to hold on to the House and the 
Senate, to prevent a bill of impeachment or investigation or whatever. 
So this is the dilemma we are in as American people.

Dori Smith: I just want to ask again about the potential to use 
impeachment as a remedy for the present crisis in Washington; a crisis 
of economics, a crisis of leadership, and as it turns out a crisis of 
just plain old honesty because we have seen again and again corruption 
at the highest levels of the land and so often we can trace that 
directly to the doors of multinational corporations. Let me just ask you 
if the American people are ready to hear that they need to stand up for 
impeachment and if we can translate that into a state by state effort.

Francis A. Boyle: First of all it did work with Nixon so we have a very 
powerful precedent there. Now, I admit at that time the Democrats 
controlled Congress, it was a different party. But even eventually most 
of the Republicans came along to the need to get rid of Nixon just for 
the good of the country. So we have that precedent.

Number two, we have the precedent of what happened all over this country 
for immigration reform. We've had hundreds of thousands of people take 
to the streets all over to advocate in a peaceful nonviolent way for 
human rights, for undocumented aliens in this country. So there is an 
enormous potential out there that the peace movement is going to have to 
mobilize. As I see it we are going to have to sit down and figure out 
how did the immigration reform movement turn all those people out and we 
are going to have to start turning out similar numbers for impeachment 
of Bush and trying to stop the war in Iraq, it's killed now over 2400 
U.S. service members, all needlessly killed, we have no idea how many 
Iraqis, probably 200,000 at least, and to head off what could be a 
nuclear catastrophe in Iran.

Dori Smith: Finally, you have written about Obliterating Fallujah and 
what the U.S. Military did there. And we have had as a guest on our 
program Dahr Jamail who drew a very devastating picture of what was 
going on in Fallujah, as did a few others who had been there and spoke 
with us about that, Jo Wilding and Rahul Mahajan

We get the impression that not much has been done there by way of 
reconstruction so we see this city basically destroyed, and we see other 
cities in Iraq getting to the point of destroyed, and we see lots of 
refugees being created from the cities; To what extent do you think that 
this is going to have such an impact in the region that that too could 
provoke more war and wider war?

Francis A. Boyle: Fallujah will probably be like Grozny which is 
completely demolished and almost uninhabitable over in Chechnya. What I 
was pointing out in that essay was the legal principles of State; you 
have to go back to the Nuremberg Charter that said quite clearly that 
the wanton devastation of a city, town, or district, is a war crime. And 
what I pointed out was to obliterate an entire city like Fallujah or 
Grozny, these are Nazi crimes to try to put them into perspective. That 
we prosecuted, convicted, and executed Nazis at Nuremberg for doing this 
type of behavior. Now, I'm against the death penalty for anyone 
including Bush and the rest of them. I believe they should be impeached, 
they should be indicted and they should be prosecuted, but not executed. 
-I wrote that piece to try to put this behavior into perspective and 
right now as you saw Senator Biden making the proposal that Iraq should 
be carved up into three pieces? Well that's been their policy all along 
is to destroy Iraq as a viable state. And I am very afraid then that 
this will be implemented and you could see a massive convulsion of civil 
war in Iraq that could draw in, even against their best wishes, the 
neighboring states particularly Turkey, Iran, and others. It's a very 
volatile situation over there. You have Russia arming Iran, China pretty 
much supporting them. You have close to two thirds of all the oil and 
gas supplies in the world at stake there. I don't think I or Professor 
Chomsky have underestimated the potential cataclysm that could happen if 
the Bush Administration continues on its campaign.

But look, we were in dire straights under Nixon in Vietnam and we 
impeached Nixon, ended up with Gerald Ford, and the Vietnam War was 
wound down. I don't think we can ever give up hope. But we really have 
no alternative.

Dori Smith: We see Israel in the press now relating to Iran. The latest 
being that Israel announced the sale of some rockets from North Korea to 
Iran, I believe these were scud type missiles, and Iran has been talking 
about the destruction of Israel and has said some very harsh things 
about the Holocaust. -A very inflammatory situation. Just talk about 
Israel under the new leaders and where we stand in that regard.

Francis A. Boyle: Well I have to agree with the study by Professors Walt 
and Mearsheimer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. If you 
look at the record here in the United States, the only people pushing 
for war against Iran are the Israel lobby people, their sources, assets 
in the news media, and also in Congress. I don't detect any great 
sentiment here on the part of the American people to go to war against Iran.

It's clear under the philosophy of the Neo-Conservatives that they wrote 
Clean Break" ("A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm," 
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, By Douglas J. 
Feith and Richard Perle.) and everything, they want the United States to 
take out Iran as a favor to Israel and so I think we have to be aware of 
these strategies and who is mongering for war against Iran. Again, 
that's not just my reading of it. That's also what Professor's Walt and 
Mearsheimer have stated in their article in the London Review of Books 
with all of the footnotes at the Harvard Kennedy School. I agree with them.

Dori Smith: Francis A. Boyle teaches law at the University of Illinois. 
He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He 
has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, 
war crimes, genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. Professor Boyle 
also serves as counsel for Bosnia Herzegovina in application of the 
convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide 
pending before the International Court of Justice. He also represents 
associations of citizens within the country and has been instrumental in 
developing the indictment against Slobdon Milosovich for genocide, 
crimes against humanity, and war crimes, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He 
received a PHD in political science from Harvard University. You can 
find Professor Francis A. Boyle's writing online at Counterpunch.org.

Some of Professor Boyle's Books:

The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence

World Politics and International Law

Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and 
After September 11th

Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International 
Relations 1898-1921

For Talk Nation Radio, I'm Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in 
the studios of WHUS at the University of Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen 
live Wed. at 5 pm. talknation.org and talknationradio.org for 
transcripts and discussion. Our music is provided by Fritz Heede.

http://talknationradio.org


===================

AUDIO LINK:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=17961


Summary: Professor Boyle argues for the use of impeachment to remove 
Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsefeld before they can take us into 
another war in Iran and farther along into an American police state.
Credits: Produced by Dori Smith at Pacifica Affiliate WHUS in Storrs, CT 
http://www.whus.org

Music by Fritz Heede http://www.fritzheede.com
Notes: Notify Smith of use if possible.
theshockvote at yahoo.com



Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle at law.uiuc.edu



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