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by Dave Lindorff
The largely unstated word at the massive anti-war demonstration and march in Washington on Saturday was “impeachment.” Not that it wasn’t on demonstrators’ lips and signs, but it wasn’t coming from the podium.
The march, organized by United for Peace and Justice, was instead deliberately focused narrowly on the issue of ending the war in Iraq and preventing an invasion of Iran. But clearly, behind that was the sense that the US government is in the hands of a cabal of warmongers and anti-democratic usurpers who are intent on broadening the war in the Middle East, not ending it , and that the Democrats in the 110th Congress haven’t got the spine to stop them (a group from Seattle actually addressed this with a giant white spine float emblazoned with the words “investigate, impeach, indict”).
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the new head of the House Judiciary Committee, was a late addition to the roster of speakers at the rally on the National Mall. He told the cheering throng that while Bush may have been “firing the generals who tell him that we’re losing the war in Iraq,” he “can’t fire you.” Then he added, in a none-too-veiled hint that impeachment may be coming, “But we can fire him!”
The crowd went wild, with chants of “Impeach him!”
The stage has been set.
Filed under: Blog, In the News, Video, Impeachment Strategy, Democrats' New Power, Iraq War Crimes, Oversight/Investigations
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by John Nichols
The news from former vice presidential chief of staff “Scooter” Libby’s trial on charges of obstructing a federal investigation — particularly the revelation that Vice President Dick Cheney wrote a memo that effectively confirms his intimate involvement in strategizing about how to counter the inquiry into the Bush administration’s politically-motivated outing of CIA operative Valarie Plame — should slowly but surely edge the prospect of impeachment back onto the table from which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi removed it.
Cheney is expected to testify in the Libby trial and, if a federal jury rejects his testimony as less than credible, that would seem to create an appropriate opening for members of the House who take seriously their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution to entertain a discussion of impeaching the vice president.
Intriguingly, Cheney almost found himself in the middle of the discussion this week.
Prior to CNN personality Wolf Blitzer’s testy-if-not-particularly substantive interview with the vice president on Wednesday, the network’s resident rabble rouser, commentator Jack Cafferty, presented a reasonably favorable feature on a move by New Mexico state Senators Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, and John Grubesic, D-Santa Fe, to get that state’s legislature to petition Congress to impeach both Cheney and Bush.
VIDEO:
More Coverage:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have taken impeachment “off the table,” but House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI) is about to put it back on the menu.
Conyers may have been blocked by a timid Pelosi from initiating impeachment hearings immediately into President Bush’s crimes against the Constitution, but he’s taken the first step anyway, with the anouncement of plans to hold hearings into what is surely the President’s gravest abuse of power.
The congressman, a veteran of the Nixon impeachment hearings who recently published a book on Bush’s crimes, today announced plans to have his Judiciary Committee hold hearings on Bush’s rampant use of so-called “signing statements.” These are the documents the president has claimed give him the power, as a commander-in-chief, to ignore laws duly passed by the Congress.
Bush has used this bogus claim to ignore all or parts of some 1,200 laws
passed by Congress. He has done it willfully, and he has done it
deceptively, often adding the signing statement saying he will be ignoring a law after having first hosted a friendly photo-op signing session at which he offer no indication that he had any problem with a measure.The first Judiciary Committee hearing is set for January 31.
Hopefully this will be followed by more Judiciary hearings into the president’s other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Readers should encourage Conyers in his efforts, and urge him to follow through, by sending messages of support to John Conyers.
source: BuzzFlash.com
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Sen. Jim Webb handles the response to Bush’s State of the Union Address. “The (American) Middle Class … is losing its place at the table ….”
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by David Edwards and Mike Sheehan
On CNN’s ‘Situation Room,’ Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who has joined key Democratic senators on a resolution to stop the Iraq troop ’surge’ being pushed by the Bush administration, tells host Wolf Blitzer that “a bipartisan consensus” was needed for Iraq policy to succeed. The bill he co-sponsored was called a “slap at the president” by Blitzer.
“The best interests of our country” are not served by American escalation in Iraq, Hagel explained. He said that America cannot just pull out, and “a few more years” would be required before the US withdrew. But he added that more Americans must not be “thrown in” to Iraq, and the Iraqis should deal with the problem themselves.
He also sought to remind the president that the Congress is a co-equal branch of government, “this is not a monarchy,” and that on “November 7th, the people changed the management” in Congress. The bill Hagel was now getting behind “is just the beginning,” the Vietnam Veteran senator pledged.
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source: Democracy Now
The veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers spoke on Friday before 3,500 at the opening of the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis. He announced his return to the airwaves and outlined his vision of media reform. “As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people.”
Thirty five hundred activists, journalists and concerned citizens gathered in Memphis, Tennessee this weekend for the third National Conference on Media Reform. Speakers called for the preservation of a free and open Internet, the end of media consolidation and a more democratic and diverse media system.
Read More at Melbourne Indymedia
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by Joe Stinebaker (AP)
HOUSTON — Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic, nine-term lawmaker from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward a second, quixotic presidential bid _ this time as a Republican.
Paul filed papers in Texas to create a presidential exploratory committee that will allow him to raise money. In 1988, Paul was the Libertarian nominee for president and received more than 400,000 votes.
Kent Snyder, the chairman of Paul’s exploratory committee and a former staffer on Paul’s Libertarian campaign, said the congressman knows he’s a long shot.
“There’s no question that it’s an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog,” Snyder said. “But we think it’s well worth doing and we’ll let the voters decide.”
Paul limits his view of the role of the federal government to those duties laid out in the Constitution. As a result, he sometimes casts votes at odds with his constituents and other Republicans.
He was one of a handful of Republicans to vote in 2002 against giving President Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq, contending that only Congress had the power to declare war. At times, he has voted against funds for the military.
Paul bills himself as “The Taxpayers’ Best Friend,” and is routinely ranked either first or second in the House by the National Taxpayers Union, a national group advocating low taxes and limited government.
Read More at The Washington Post
UPDATE >> VIDEO: Ron Paul Warns of “False Flag” Terror Attack (01/16/2007)
VIDEO: Ron Paul Calls for Bush Impeachment
Congressional Website for Ron Paul
Ron Paul Exploratory Committee
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by John Nichols, The Nation
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, is today introducing legislation to uniquivocally “prohibit the use of funds for an escalation of United States forces in Iraq above the numbers existing as of January 9, 2007.”
Kennedy voted against authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq and he has been a consistent critic of the war. But this targeted piece of legislation specifically addresses the “surge” being proposed by the president.
Even more importantly, Kennedy’s bill reasserts the role of Congress in a time of war. The Constitution allows the president to serve as commander-in-chief and affords him reasonable war-making powers in that role. But it reserves for Congress the power of the purse, and the founders were clear in their believe that the House and Senate should use that power to constrain a president who is waging war without reason or sound strategies.
The Congress has frequently used the power of the purse to control presidential war-making. Kennedy points to examples from the Vietnam era, but there are also examples from just the past quarter century of the Congress specifically embracing troops caps in Lebanon, in the European NATO countries and in Colombia. Indeed, as the Center for American Progress notes in a detailed new report, “Congressional Limitations and Requirements for Military Deployments and Funding,” the Congress has a rich record of stepping in to prevent presidents from expanding U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
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Source: C-Span BookTV
The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office
By Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky
Watch it Now!
Description: Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky are co-authors of “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office. At a symposium held at Robin’s Bookstore in Philadelphia, the authors argue that President Bush’s administration threatens basic freedoms and the American system of checks and balances. The co-authors review several of what they consider impeachable actions by President Bush, including lying to Congress about the need to invade Iraq for possession of weapons of mass destruction, refusing to cooperate with the congressional 9/11 Commission probes, and obstructing justice in protecting the person responsible for revealing that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative. The authors suggest that impeachment should be a key issue this election year and impeachment legislation should be submitted to the next House Judiciary Committee.
VIDEO: Watch this program on C-Span BookTV
Filed under: Blog, Evidence, Evidence Overview, In the News, Facts: Independent Conclusions, Video, Impeachment Strategy
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By CHB Staff
Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University and a recognized expert on constitutional law, says the ruling Thursday by a federal judge in Detroit raises “serious implications for the Bush administration” and indicates that the President “could well have committed a federal crime at least 30 times.”
“This ruling is a bad situation that just got worse for the White House,” says Turley. “These crimes could constitute impeachable offenses.”
Read More at Capitol Hill Blue
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(Editor’s Note: Today, July 19, 2006, marks the first National Impeachment Day sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights to raise awareness about impeachment, offer citizens a strategy to impeachment and organize to stop the assault on the American people and her constitutions.)
By Dave Lindorff
Happy Impeachment Day!
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been playing a leading role in battling the Bush administration’s attacks on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and international law, has declared today to be Impeachment Day, with teach-ins scheduled around the country.
Seems like a great occasion to offer up 10 reasons for impeaching the president, as presented in Barbara Olshansky’s and my new book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.
The case for impeachment just grew much stronger, with the US Supreme Court’s powerful decision in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. In that decision, the justices didn’t simply say that the President was wrong and in violation of U.S. and the international law in arbitrarily claiming that the Guantanamo detainees were not subject to the Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War. The five-justice majority, which included conservative Anthony Kennedy, declared the President’s bogus claim to have “special powers” as commander in chief in “time of war” to be just that–bogus.
What has been missed in almost all the mainstream media coverage of this important ruling is that this slap-down of Bush’s justification for his Guantanamo decision also undermines his justification for many other of his constitutional violations.
TAKE ACTION: Join the fight at ArticlesOfImpeachment.net
See an excerpt from “How to Impeach a President” (3 mins.)
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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.”
VIDEO: See “Loose Change: Second Edition” (Google Video)
Official Site for “Loose Change”
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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.
President Bush responds with more (carefully-worded) lies
Times/UK: Has Bush “Crossed the Line?”
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Neil Young discusses his new “controversial” album “Living With War” with CNN’s Showbiz Tonight. Young’s new album has generated much-needed discussion about the impeachment of George W. Bush.
Or, watch Video at YouTube.com
Listen Here to the Entire Album, “Living With War”
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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 Proof of Lies and Deceptions
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In an exclusive interview on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called on the Senate to publicly admonish President Bush for approving domestic wiretaps on American citizens without first seeking a legally required court order.
WATCH VIDEO clip of Feingold on the Senate Floor at Crooks & Liars
WATCH VIDEO of Feingold’s Full Speech on the Senate Floor
Show your support by contacting Feingold here
DOWNLOAD: Draft Version of Feingold’s Resolution
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I wanted to let you all know that Harper’s Magazine is preparing a special issue that will focus on the case for impeachment in general, and my “Constitution in Crisis” Report in particular. This will be accompanied by a special forum in New York on Thursday, March 2 at 8 PM ET. For those unable to attend in person, it will be aired live on Air America’s Sam Seder Show. Harpers has the information on the forum, but the text of the issue is not yet up. This issue of Harpers and the forum will be an important benchmark in our drive for accountability. — Rep. John Conyers
UPDATED:
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