January 31, 2007
CHENEY’S NOTE IMPLICATES BUSH
Mission Control wrote this in the late evening:
Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Karl Rove, Facts: Breaking the Law, GOP, Iraq War Crimes, Cover Up, Oversight/Investigations, Neocon Madness
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Not all lies are created equal. It is understood that there is a chasm of importance between little white lies and big black ones. Most would agree that lying about a consensual sexual affair, even by the president, is of significantly lesser concern than lying about the proliferation of nuclear weapons as an excuse to take the nation to war.
I know the Democratic leaders in Congress have said that impeachment is “off the table”, but that is one campaign promise that should not be kept. Oversight of the Bush Administration is not enough.
While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.
The motivations for an Iran strike were laid out as far back as 1992. In classified 
Approximately a year ago, I wrote in this magazine that President George W. Bush had committed high crimes and misdemeanors and should be impeached and removed from office. His impeachable offenses include using lies and deceptions to drive the country into war in Iraq, deliberately and repeatedly violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on wiretapping in the United States, and facilitating the mistreatment of US detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act of 1996.
Since then, the case against President Bush has, if anything, been strengthened by reports that he personally authorized CIA abuse of detainees. In addition, courts have rejected some of his extreme assertions of executive power. The Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees, and a federal judge ruled that the President could not legally ignore FISA. Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s recent announcement that the wiretapping program would from now on operate under FISA court supervision strongly suggests that Bush’s prior claims that it could not were untrue.
“It has been my privilege to serve my country as a Marine Corps infantry officer, a Marine Corps service-level intelligence plans officer, a clandestine case officer (spy) for the Central Intelligence Agency, and the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps Intelligence, responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Command.
Considering the Bush administration’s assault on our civil rights, the Constitution itself, American principles as we know it and rampant republican cronyism, there is no shortage of books to read that outline the worst Presidency in American history. In fact, there is a literal litany of them to read and depress one’s self over it all. The problem with such a plethora to pick from is you can’t read them all and many of them are either too dry, histrionic or too full of legal blather to bother with.
A bill now pending in the Senate would make the Bush administration’s enemy wiretapping program more practical and flexible, removing all doubt about its legality. But that worries some of Bush’s fiercest critics.
The often illegal and un-Constitutional administration of President George W. Bush is not giving up on its program to use the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. The administration Friday asked a federal judge to delay enforcing her order for a halt to the NSA’s warrantless communications surveillance program.
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If anyone knows anything about international law it’s Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he’s more than a little ticked off at the moment at President Bush. Dr. Boyle’s credentials are little short of amazing.
Yesterday’s ruling by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the US District Court in Detroit against warrantless eavesdropping did not beat around the bush, so to speak. Her strong words would, I imagine, have brought broad smiles to the faces of those who crafted the Constitution – despite the irony that, in that sad time of racial exclusion, they would not have thought to include Judge Taylor in “We, the people.”
With resolutions and proclamations, left-leaning cities and counties across the United States have started a drumbeat calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.