This diary is the text of a speech I gave tonight for the South Baldwin Democrats in Alabama. It is quite an interesting group. About half and half Southerners and Yankees (ha ha) with an average age of about 60. We are few, but we are proud and we are growing.
The Constitutional Necessity of the Impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming today and I hope to give you what you paid for. My topic for tonight’s speech is the necessity, the Constitutional necessity, of the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It’s a serious subject and it’s one that I have not approached lightly. Many of the things I will talk about tonight are relatively unheralded and thus virtually unknown to many folks. They’re unspoken about in the MSM. For instance, who here today has read the Downing St Memo? (show of hands "preaching to the choir line) Well, it’s proof of impeachable crimes by the Bush Admin. I’ll get into that more later. What I will try to present tonight is a view of the specific crimes that warrant impeachment and that are proven already to have been committed, along with some exploration of the underlying causes of why the Republican Party, the Regressive Party, have allowed this usurpation to happen.
I would like to have an open question and answer session after my talk, and though I may not know the answers to all your questions, I’ll do my best—and those of you here who might know the answer, feel free to speak up. I’d like for us to discuss this.
Another thing that I want you all to keep in mind is that every effort of this Government has been used—until Democrats took power less than two months ago--to suppress the truth about these issues. To spin the truth, to hide the truth and to spin the hiding of the truth. The reason is that Republicans are in favor of authoritarian government. They don't really trust the people. Democrats believe in people power.
The growing movement that is calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney is not radical. Rather it is Bush and Cheney and the neoconservative cabal they lead who are radical. A January 2006 poll by Zogby, the highly regarded non-partisan polling group, found Americans in favor of impeachment 52-42%. This was in the wake of the illegal wiretapping story. So this view is actually held by a majority of Americans.
It is my belief, and, more significantly, it is established fact, that this Administration is guilty of crimes--crimes against individuals, crimes against nations, and crimes against the Constitution. There is no longer any doubt that this President, with the complicity of his Vice-President, has lied us into war, has illegally tapped our telephones, has deliberately and with malice aforethought exposed a top CIA operative, has committed torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and is, right now, engaged in a conspiracy to cover up these crimes.
There are many things this malAdministration has done wrong. Many things that are difficult to prove, but are nonetheless violations of Oath of Office; and other things that are easier to prove but are not worthwhile to pursue in the people’s court of the Congress. These transgressions I will use only as background for my argument. The President himself has freely admitted to at least one of the actual crimes that call for his removal from office. Namely, he has admitted to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which prohibits, without an order from the FISA court any wiretapping of American communication devices for more than 72 hours. I will be not be concentrating on the incompetence of our Govts response to 9-11, George W Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his incompetence in his response to hurricane Katrina, and his failure to actually win the presidency in the first place. All these are indicators of the complete incompetence, wrongheadedness, and sheer evil of the Admin.,and are possibly crimes in themselves, but they do not approach the seriousness of the actual, provable crimes of this Admin. But just for background sake, I will say that the 5-4 Supreme court vote which handed Bush and Cheney the reins of power by stopping--by actually stopping the vote-counting in FL is one of the most anti-Democratic and despicable decisions ever made by that body.
So what, specifically, are those impeachable, provable crimes? Well, they’re very serious:
- Lying to Congress about justification for War.
- Deliberate outing of a top-level operative of the CIA, a crime that if proved, is Treasonous.
- Wiretapping of phones in violation of 4th Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, and in violation FISA law.
- The state-sponsorship of torture –against the expressed will of Congress, and contrary to our obligations under the Geneva Conventions, which carry the full weight of US law. And of course, extraordinary rendition for the purpose of torture.
Along with an ongoing conspiracy to cover-up these crimes, that makes 4 or 5 provable high crimes or misdemeanors which should be used as Articles of Impeachment against the President and Vice-President.
Let’s look at each of these crimes and the growing evidence showing their commission.
The Justification for War in Iraq
Earlier, I mentioned the Downing Street Memos. These memoranda are actually the written minutes of a meeting among senior British officials who were discussing the possibility of War with Iraq on July 23, 2002, nearly a year before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most damning passage from the memo is this:
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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The Downing Street memo was leaked to and published in the London Times and has never been denied by the British government or the American Admin. It is hard proof of what we already know: namely, that Saddam Hussein posessed no weapons of mass destruction, much less stockpiles of them, contrary to months of assurances from the Admin that he did. Saddam’s non-existent stockpiles of WMD were the main causus belli for the invasion of Iraq, and at least a year before the invasion, the President and Vice-President knew it was false. They were "fixing the intelligence around the policy". In his State of the Union address from January 2003, two months before the invasion, the President used the now infamous "16 words" in which he lied to the Congress and the American people about alleged British intelligence showing that Saddam sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The president knew weeks before the speech that the information was bogus, as did the Vice-President. In fact, the CIA had directed a former Ambassador to Iraq and to the central African region in question, Ambassador Joe Wilson, to investigate the claim. He found no connection between Iraq and Niger regarding yellowcake uranium, and reported his findings to CIA. In fact, the only document supporting the claim was an amateurish, obvious forgery which bore the scrawled signature an official who had been out of power for several years.
Realizing that the Admin was going ahead with its claim about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection, Ambassador Wilson published an op-ed piece in the NYT entitled "What I Didn’t Find in Africa". The publication of this essay resulted in the leaking of the name and status of a top CIA operative by at least two "senior Admin officials". The leak was intended to discredit Ambassador Wilson’s report by making it seem that his trip to Africa was simply a "junket" arranged by his wife, a covert CIA operative. The agent’s name is Valerie Plame, and she is, as I have said, the wife of Ambassador Wilson. Ms. Plame’s area of expertise is nuclear non-proliferation, and she had many contacts throughout the Middle-East, especially in Iran. The contacts are likely now dead, and the carefully built intelligence network so painstakingly constructed by Ms. Plame is now compromised. The national security of the United States was callously compromised, for political reasons, by this outing. We now have very little reliable intelligence on Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Also mentioned in the President’s State of the Union speech were mobile chemical weapons labs and high-strength aluminum tubes. Neither existed. The so called "labs" were proved to be weather ballon facilities and the aluminum tubes were rocket fuselages, completely unsuitable for use in a nuclear centrifuge.
All of this means that the Bush Admin concept of "pre-emptive war" in the case of Iraq is more accurately described as a war of aggression, and is therefore illegal and is prosecutable as a war crime.
Illegal Wiretaps
In December of 2005, USAToday published a front page story detailing, against strong resistance from the White House, an ongoing program of illegal wiretapping activity by NSA. The wiretapping was approved by the Bush Admin shortly after 9-11 and was hidden from Congress and the American people. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the approval of a special court, the FISA court, for any wiretap of American communication devices for more than 72 hours. This was not done. The Bush administration simply ignored the law. In fact, they have since admitted in Congressional testimony by Attorney General Gonzales that they ignored the law. No approval by the FISA court was requested, much less received, for the tens of thousands of wiretaps that were executed. The FISA law was written to ensure 4th Amendment protection for American citizens against government power run amok. It was written in response to illegal wiretaps by another Republican President, Richard Nixon. Bush and Cheney simply broke the law. They have been tapping our phones, ladies and gentlemen. This is criminal and it is impeachable.
Torture and Rendition
The horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal turn out to be only the tip of the iceberg. We have photographic evidence, literally hundreds of pictures, of the torture of Iraqi prisoners. We have clear evidence, including flight logs and tracking information of special CIA flights used for the purpose of "extraordinary rendition" a euphemism for the transportation of prisoners to countries and facilities known to use torture. I will quote from a story by David Johnson, a reporter for the NYT, who wrote in the International Herald Tribune:
WASHINGTON: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including one signed by President George W. Bush, that have guided the agency's interrogation and detention of terror suspects.
(snip)
The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one document, as described by the ACLU, is "a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees."
The second document, according to the group is a Justice Department legal analysis "specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members".
We know that President Bush issued a signing statement in response to the passage of a law banning torture by the US government. Over the New Year’s holiday of 2006, Bush reserved for himself the right to ignore the law. He did not veto the bill. He signed it into law, and then wrote a statement alleging that he was free to ignore the law. Since then, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, retroactively giving the President the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, to hold people, including Americans, without charge, and to use any means necessary, including torture, to elicit information from captives. This law is blatantly unConstitutional. The evidence that the United States has been torturing people at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and many other places worldwide is overwhelming. An American citizen, Jose Padilla, has been held at the facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for four years. He was held without charge for 3 ½ years. He was denied access to an attorney for 2 years. During his incarceration, he has been subjected to almost continous torture and sensory deprivation, a form of torture. If the President has the power to declare anyone an "enemy combatant", to hold them without charge or evidence, and to torture them at will, what power does he not have? Where are the limits on executive authority so carefully built into the Constitution? They are gone. The President alone holds the power to torture. He is an authority and power above the reach of any other. This is in direct contravention of the Separation of Powers outlined in the Constitution.
A call for the impeachment of the President and Vice-President is not to be taken lightly. However, in this case, it’s necessary, it’s justified, and it’s right. Impeachment is the only remedy provided by the Constitution in situations such as this. When the top officials of the land have committed and are still committing high crimes and misdemeanors, our only Constitutional recourse is impeachment.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are living in a time of Constitutional Crisis. This crisis is not yet widely reported in the mainstream media. It is not yet general knowledge. It is not yet conventional wisdom. You don’t hear about it on the news and you don’t read about it in the paper. Only on the internet is the message loud enough to be heard. We must decide very soon whether we are a nation of laws or a nation of men. We are sliding down a very slippery slope. The Bush cabal has transformed our society into one of fear and worldwide distrust. Government spying on citizens and torturing. Of reckless disregard for the Constitution. One thing has become very clear: Our current President and Vice-President will stop at nothing in their quest for ever-increasing power. We must be the ones to stop them. For the sake of our society, our Nation and our sacred Constitution.
Author' note for Kossacks: A member suggested we take a straw poll of the sense of the club on the impeachment issue. If I remember correctly, the vote was 13-4 with 2 abstaining in favor of impeachment. Some present did not vote due to not (yet) having paid their dues. Then we took another vote to determine if we wanted the member of the press who was present to publicize the vote. That was also yes, by a slightly thinner margin. The question and answer session afterward was very much fun.