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by Allen L. Roland

Libby and his mentor Paul Wolfowitz laid out the case for the illegal invasion of Iraq just one week after the Twin Towers fell in 2001 ~ and both reported to Dick Cheney.

Guy Dinsmore, Financial Times UK, profiled Libby and writes;

” Together with the vice-president, Mr. Libby launched the push to invade Iraq …. And, together with Cheney, Libby has “worked hard to block signs of engagement with Iran, resist direct talks with North Korea, and undermine U.S. legislation prohibiting torture and degrading treatment of detainees.”

As such, Libby was Cheney’s disciple and hit man and was obviously chosen to out Valerie Plame by Darth Vader himself ~ Dick Cheney.

Expect a Bush pardon and eventually a medal if Libby is found guilty. Loyalty to the chief outweighs everything in this den of thieves.

However, the last thing Cheney wants is now happening ~ Fitzgerald digging deeper into Cheney’s secret government and other more flagrant crimes against peace.

Read More at OpEdNews.com

Activists Call for Cheney’s Impeachment

by Allison Brophy Champion

Two political activists from Leesburg set up outside the Culpeper post office Tuesday afternoon to hand out literature and call for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Impeach Satan first,” said a poster hanging from their table, and at its center was a photo of Cheney with devil horns and a pitchfork. “Go with Larouche.”

“We’re out here to make sure everybody knows Dick Cheney is at the end of his rope,” said Gene Schenk, 52. “That we’ve got to stop Cheney from going to war with Iran.”

Both Schenk and co-activist, Leslie Vaughan, represented the political action committee of 84-year-old Lyndon LaRouche, a controversial political figure who has run, unsuccessfully, for president in every election since 1976. Vaughan declined to elaborate on her reasons for coming to Culpeper, saying, “Cheney is not a very nice man.”

Read More at the StarExponent

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Impeachment Strategy, Constitutional Crisis, Local Action, GOP, Iraq War Crimes, Cover Up, Oversight/Investigations, Neocon Madness
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by Mick Youther

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.

How do you oversee a torture program? How do you oversee “extraordinary renditions” and secret prisons? How do you oversee the destruction of the U.S. Constitution? What is Congress going to do when Bush starts bombing Iran–watch closely?

You don’t oversee these kinds of things. You stop them. That is why the Founding Fathers wrote impeachment into our Constitution.

The power of impeachment was one of the first proposals presented to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers felt it was important enough to mention it six times in the Constitution and once more in an amendment. They believed the new government needed a strong executive, but having just thrown off the rule of one King, they did not want another one–even an elected one.

Read More at OpEdNews.com

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy, Constitutional Crisis, Facts: Breaking the Law, Founding Fathers
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by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

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 defense planning guidance – written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney by then-Pentagon staffers I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, World Bank Chief Paul Wolfowitz, and ambassador-nominee to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad – Cheney’s aides called for the United States to assume the position of lone superpower and act preemptively to prevent the emergence of even regional competitors. The draft document was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and caused an uproar among Democrats and many in George H. W. Bush’s Administration.

In September 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) issued a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which espoused similar positions to the 1992 draft and became the basis for the Bush-Cheney Administration’s foreign policy. Libby and Wolfowitz were among the participants in this new report; Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent figures in the Bush administration were PNAC members.

Read More at The Raw Story

More Coverage:

Raw Story’s Iran Timetable

DOWNLOAD: Rebuilding America’s Defenses

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Facts: Breaking the Law, Iraq War Crimes, Neocon Madness
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By Nathanael

Impeachment is only a political act with limited consequences that bear one’s ability to retain or hold elected office. The convicted Party (such as the President or Judge or Congressperson) of an Impeachment is still liable and subject to Indictment and prosecution for any criminal acts according to Law.

There is no language in the Constitution or the US Code that requires an impeachment proceeding to come before a criminal indictment or prosecution. Any Constitutional Scholar, retired Assistant US Attorney, Supreme Court Justice, Attorney General, Congressperson or any Court stating such prior constraint is in violation of the Constitution and the Law. No one is above the law, not even the President. The Constitution cannot be altered by statute, a legislative act, a bill passed by Congress and signed by the President or an Executive Order. A valid Article V procedure must be accomplished before the Constitution is lawfully modified.

(more…)

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy, Constitutional Crisis, Facts: Breaking the Law, Research/Resources, Iraq War Crimes
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source: Mother Jones

The first drafts of history are fragmentary. Important revelations arrive late, and out of order. In this timeline, we’ve assembled the history of the Iraq War to create a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them? This is the first installment in our Iraq War timeline project.

View Timeline at MotherJones.com

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Must Read
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By Byron York

There’s a word you won’t find in the text of Democratic Rep. John Conyers’s new “investigative report” on the Bush administration, “ The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance.” And the word is…impeachment. Yet the 350-page “Constitution in Crisis,” released last week, is, more than anything else, a detailed road map for the impeachment of George W. Bush, ready for use should Democrats win control of the House of Representatives this November. And Conyers, who would become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — the panel that would initiate any impeachment proceedings — is the man who could make it happen.

Read More at The National Review

Get Full Text of “Constitution in Crisis.”

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, Evidence Overview, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy, Facts: Breaking the Law
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You won’t find this kind of coverage in the American Mainstream Media:

Largely missed in all the coverage of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case was the establishment by the court majority that all Bush administration claims to the contrary, the Geneva Convention rules regarding captured prisoners apply to the captives taken not only in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the so-called War on Terror.

What has been largely missed is the clear point that the Supreme Court has thus now declared that for the past five years, Bush and his gang of war-mongers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, former Attorney General Donald Rumsfeld and current Attorney General and former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and many others in the administration, have been guilty of violating the Third Convention on treatment of prisoners of war. They are also, therefore, in violation of federal law, which back in 1996 adopted that convention as part of the U.S. criminal code.

In other words, the whole top administration, from Commander in Chief George W. Bush on down, is guilty of war crimes. The punishment for committing war crimes ranges from a lengthy jail sentence to, in the event the crimes in question caused the death of any prisoners being held, to death.

Read More at uruknet.info

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read
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By NewsMax.com Staff

Al Gore charges that President George Bush has “broken the law� and implies that Congress should have initiated impeachment proceedings against Bush for unspecified crimes.

In a fund-raising e-mail sent out under the banner of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee with the subject line “Unprecedented,� Gore declares:

“The evidence now makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that George Bush has repeatedly and insistently broken the law and the corrupt Republican Congress has shirked its constitutional duty to hold him to account.”

While Gore omitted using the “i” word, the consititutional remedy for a president who breaks the law is the House’s impeachment process followed by a trial before the Senate.

Read More at NewsMax.com

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Constitutional Crisis, Facts: Breaking the Law
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Despite months of describing the warrantless domestic spying program as “international” and “targeted to terrorists,” it has emerged that the government is illegally spying on tens of millions of Americans. USAToday has the scoop:

By Leslie Cauley, USAToday

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Read More at USAToday

President Bush responds with more (carefully-worded) lies

Political Trouble for Bush

Conservatives are “Outraged”

WaPo: Bush is “Lying”

Times/UK: Has Bush “Crossed the Line?”

More International Coverage

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Video
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By David Swanson

“Some people say that President Bush lied so that we would go to war with Iraq. Others say he was given faulty intelligence and did not intentionally mislead the nation.”
51.8% told the pollsters that they agreed with “Those who say Bush lied.”
44.8% agreed with “Those who say he did not intentionally mislead the nation.”

Read More at OpEdNews.com

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Source: CBS 60 Minutes

(Former top CIA officer Tyler Drumheller) tells (60 Minutes) correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president’s determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.

Drumheller “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.”

Read More at CBS News

Watch Video Clip

Read More Proof of Lies and Deceptions

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By Joby Warrick

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

Read More at The Washington Post

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By Don Van Natta

(B)ehind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”

Read More at the New York Times 

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions
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By Lawrence Albright

It is too soon to tell whether the Bush administration’s flagrant disregard of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution will result in his censure or impeachment. The Republican majority in Congress, as well as the historical fact that no President has been impeached during a time of active military engagement, would seem to make either course a difficult proposition politically.

Still, the importance of a movement to censure or impeach will carry heavy, symbolic weight even if unsuccessful. It would represent a rejection of the Bush administration’s contempt for civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.

Read More at Political Affairs 

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Bush On Iraq is a website that contains a collection of misleading and inaccurate public statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq.

The Iraq on the Record Report (pdf), prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, is a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Information on this website comes from this report. This website identifies 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by these five officials in 125 public appearances in the time leading up to and after the commencement of hostilities in Iraq.

The Special Investigations Division compiled a database of statements about Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. All of the statements in the database were drawn from speeches, press conferences and briefings, interviews, written statements, and testimony by the five officials.

Sample of lies from Bush

Sample of lies from Cheney

Sample of lies from Powell

Sample of lies from Rumsfeld

Sample of lies from Rice

DOWNLOAD: Iraq on the Record Report

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, Facts: Lies and Deceptions
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Eric Alterman from The Nation writes in November 2002:

President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush’s statements represented “embroidering key assertions” and were clearly “dubious, if not wrong.” The President’s “rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,” he has “taken some liberties,” “omitted qualifiers” and “simply outpace[d] the facts.” But “Bush lied”? Never.

Have we come any further?

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The FBI testified clearly that Al-Qeada had specific goals. “One of the primary goals of Sunni extremists is the removal of U.S. military forces from the Persian gulf area, most notably Saudi Arabia.” - The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States The FBI made it clear that the terrorism was done “in order to overthrow all governments[in Muslim lands, check what Osama and Richard Reid have actually said] which are not ruled by Sharia (conservative Islamic) law.” That is what the FBI has said the motives are.

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