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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by Jorge Hirsch

However, Congress could pass a law making a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear nation in the absence of Congressional authorization illegal. In so doing, Congress would effectively be preventing Bush from launching any attack against Iran without its authorization, thus reclaiming its broader constitutionally assigned duties. Because Bush will not dare putting 150,000 American lives in Iraq at risk of Iranian retaliation without having the nuclear option on the table. By removing the nuclear option from the Bush toolkit, Congress would be forcefully imposing its will and that of the American people on an administration gone mad.

If Congress chooses not to face the fact that US military action against Iran is likely to lead to the first US use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki, each one of its members will share responsibility for the nefarious chain of events that is likely to follow, and should be preparing to face his/her very own nuclear Nuremberg trial.

Read More at antiwar.com 

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy, Constitutional Crisis, Democrats' New Power, Opinion, GOP, Iraq War Crimes
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By Frank J. Ranelli

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.

Enter David Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky and their book, The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office. Mr. Lindorff is a thirty-year veteran of journalism and Ms. Olshansky, an attorney, is the Director Counsel for The Center for Constitutional Rights. Together they achieve what few other books can on this subject can, mainly a lucid argument for removing the Bush cartel without boring the reader to death or burying them in lawyer lingo. Blending a mixture of just enough pragmatic history, clear-cut evidence and easy-to-understand legal language, the authors present a damaging case that clocks in under 275 pages, including the index and ample supporting documents.

Read More at OpEd News

See the Authors on C-Span

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, Evidence Overview, In the News, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy
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Senate Passes Detainee Bill

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated.

The vote, 65-to-34, came after more than 10 hours of often impassioned debate touching on the Constitution, the horrors of Sept. 11 and the nation’s role in the world, but it was also underscored by a measure of politics as Congress prepares to break for the final month of campaigning before closely fought midterm elections.

The legislation sets up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to prosecute high-level terrorists including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime.

Read More at The New York Times

DOWNLOAD: Bill Number H.R.6166 for the 109th Congress

Bush Faces Wave of Challenges to Terror Law

The Bush administration yesterday faced a raft of legal challenges to a sweeping new regime for Guantánamo that would deny court oversight to detainees in the war on terror, and would bar prosecution of US personnel for war crimes.

Mr Bush is expected to move within days to sign into law proposals for the treatment and trial before military tribunals of the detainees. The legislation, approved by the senate on Thursday, is a victory for the White House over senate Republicans, who had resisted attempts to relax standards on the treatment of detainees, and depart from standard rules of evidence in their trials.

Read More at Guardian Unlimited, UK

FACT

Subsection 4(b) (26) of section 950v. of HR 6166 - Crimes triable by military commissions - includes the following definition.

“Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct.” (emphasis added)

Response from The Center for Constitutional Rights

“Under this legislation, our clients at Guantánamo and hundreds of others detained by the U.S. around the world may remain locked up for the rest of their lives without ever having a chance to prove their innocence. Congress will be forfeiting one of the founding principles of the democratic tradition, and one of the most basic checks on executive power.

Congress gives the president the power to lock up almost anyone he thinks is a terror threat.

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, “The compromise legislation….authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”

Read “The White House Warden” at the Los Angeles Times

More coverage:

Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children (Prison Planet)

Legal Residents’ Rights Curbed in Detainee Bill (Boston Globe)

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Must Read, Constitutional Crisis, Facts: Breaking the Law
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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 David Lindorff

For the second time in two months, a federal court has ruled that the president is in violation of the Constitution. This time it’s a federal court in Detroit that has ruled that President Bush has violated the Fourth Amendment against illegal search and seizure for his order to the National Security Agency to monitor the phone and Internet messages of Americans without bothering to obtain a court order based upon probable cause.

The first time, it was the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in late June that the president had violated the Constitution by asserting he had the power to ignore the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War–a treaty formally signed into law by the U.S. and made an integral part of the U.S. Criminal Code.
The important thing about these two rulings–and it is a point that the squeamish mainstream media have shied away from mentioning–is that they both are declaring the president to be a criminal. That is, he has been found in the first case to be in criminal violation of the Constitution, as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and in the second, he has been found to be in violation of U.S. and International Law.

Note that when someone has committed a felony–say a bank robbery or a case of assault and battery or of murder–and when a court has found that person to be guilty of the crime in question, that person is from that moment hence considered a criminal. The case may be appealed to a higher court, but in the meantime, judgment has been rendered, and a penalty assigned.

Read More at the Baltimore Chronicle

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Constitutional Crisis
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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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By Ron Jacobs

If George Bush were to be impeached, would it make any difference? Whenever I receive emails or mass mailings that bring up the topic of Bush’s impeachment, that is the question I asked. So, it was with some curiosity that I began reading the book A Case for Impeachment, by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky (Thomas Dunne Books 2006). The process of impeachment has always interested me, at least when it comes to our nation’s presidents and, if any president deserved to face some kind of consequences for what he and his cronies have done to this country, George Bush is certainly first in line.

The complicity of the Congress and the courts proves that the attack on the Constitution is being waged from all three divisions of the US government. Impeaching Bush and Cheney would not end the assault, but it would strike a mighty blow. Like the Hydra of Herculean legend, the beast of despotism has but one essential head and, when that head is destroyed, the Hydra will be, too. The White House is that essential head.

Impeachment will not solve the many problems besetting this too-comfortable nation, but it can begin the cure. For those who consider this to be a worthy project, Lindorff and Olshansky’s book is a necessary read.

Read More at CounterPunch

BUY THIS BOOK!

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, Evidence Overview, In the News, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Impeachment Strategy
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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 Farhad Manjoo

The success of the documentary “Loose Change” spotlights the thousands of online sleuths who believe the U.S. government was behind the terror attacks — to get gold, justify war, or serve Satan.

But these are days of amateur experts and self-made provocateurs, an era in which a young man with a laptop and a few far-out ideas can easily garner a huge audience in the self-referential online watering holes that dominate modern rhetoric. In the spring of 2005, (filmmaker Dylan) Avery released “Loose Change,” a feature-length documentary film that proposes that the terrorist attacks on America weren’t terrorist attacks at all, and were instead conceived, planned and executed by people at the highest levels of the government. Though it has not been distributed in theaters, Avery’s film — sold on DVD and available for free online — has emerged as the leading gateway drug for thousands, and possibly millions, of converts to the “9/11 truth movement,” the loose affiliation of skeptics who doubt the official story. The film has transformed Avery into one of world’s most influential proselytizers of the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job.”

Read More at Salon.com

VIDEO: See “Loose Change: Second Edition” (Google Video)

Official Site for “Loose Change”

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read, Video
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By Jesse Jackson

There they go again. The Republican National Committee, the right-wing noise machine and their spear carriers in the mainstream media, have been in attack mode over the last few weeks. This time their target is Rep. John Conyers, the distinguished senior Democrat who will become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win the House back this fall.

With the president and the DeLay Congress about as popular as big oil CEOs, the RNC is desperate to demonize Democrats. So they cooked up a campaign claiming that if Democrats win the House, Conyers is geared up to impeach the president. This threat, they suggest, will rouse the disaffected Republican base and bring them out to vote in large numbers.

The mainstream media fell for the bait. The ever-cooperative Tim Russert grilled Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, suggesting that Conyers should take down the Web site explaining his resolution providing for a bipartisan committee to investigate the administration and to recommend whether or not impeachment hearings should begin. (Pelosi, to her credit, didn’t fold. She said the Democrats would investigate the handling of intelligence leading up to the war, the corruption in the war and other administration misdeeds. She reminded Russert that checks and balances were the essence of the Constitution.)

But Democrats were spooked. Their excitable inside-the-Beltway strategists began worrying that the Democratic left would blow the election by alienating voters in swing districts. Pelosi then had her spokesperson announce that ‘’impeachment wasn’t in the cards'’ if Democrats took back the House.

It is hard to sort out which is more pathetic: the RNC for hyping this gambit, the press for falling for it or Democratic leaders for cowering at the first sign of a dustup.

Read More at Common Dreams

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read, 2006 Election News, Impeachment Strategy, Karl Rove
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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

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Lies and Deceptions, Must Read
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By Lewis H. Lapham

The Conyers report doesn’t lack for further instances of the administration’s misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President’s impeachment.

Read More at Harper’s Magazine

Also, AlterNet talks to Lapham about why he decided to write this controversial article.

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read
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Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on the myths and excuses that Democrats are using not to support Russ Feingold’s Censure resolution:

In order to generate further support for the Feingold Censure Resolution, numerous bloggers are encouraging everyone to pay an actual physical visit to their Senators’ local offices in order to urge support for censure. Anyone doing so is likely to encounter the two primary myths/excuses which have been concocted by Senators and others in order to justify their refusal to support the Resolution…

MYTH/EXCUSE NUMBER ONE: An investigation is needed before it can be known whether the President broke the law.

MYTH/EXCUSE NUMBER TWO: Republicans want this scandal to persist because it benefits them politically.

Read More at His Blog

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read, 2006 Election News
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By Carol Wolman

Impeachment is a legal, judicial process, the ultimate recourse of “we the people” against tyranny. It has been politicized, and the Republican majority in Congress refuses to let it go forward. “We the people” have the RESPONSIBILITY to vote them out of office in November, and to replace them with honest people who PLEDGE DURING THEIR CAMPAIGN that they will work to impeach Bush and Cheney as soon as they take office.

The only recourse we have is impeachment. This is available to us. it is legal, peaceful, and democratic.

If you are not working to ensure that the next Representative to be elected to Congress from your district is an outspoken advocate of impeachment, you are SHIRKING YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AS A US CITIZEN!

Read More at OpEdNews.com

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read
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Matthew Rothschild has written an excellent article that argues for impeachment in The Progressive.

George W. Bush and his Administration have been so brazen in violating the law and asserting monarchical powers that we, as American citizens, must use the tool that the Constitution provides to reassert our rights, to reset the system of checks and balances, and to reestablish our democracy. That tool is impeachment.

Read the Full Article at The Progressive

Filed under: Blog, Evidence, In the News, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Must Read
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by ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN

[from the January 30, 2006 issue]

Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush–not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.

Read the Full Story at The Nation

Filed under: Blog, In the News, Must Read
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