WASHINGTON, Aug 17: The United States made it known on Sunday that it was not considering any proposal to grant political asylum to President Pervez Musharraf.
The announcement came from a person no less than the secretary of state who has the final say in such matters.
“That’s not an issue on the table,” said Condoleezza Rice when asked if the Bush administration was considering any proposal to grant political asylum to the embattled Pakistani leader.
“And I just want to keep our focus on what we must do with the democratic government of Pakistan,” she told Fox News on Sunday.
Asked if it would be in the best interest of Pakistan to have Gen (retd) Musharraf resign, Ms Rice said: “This is a matter for the Pakistanis to resolve.”
Her statement makes it obvious that the United States is no longer interested in a person who only recently was called an “indispensable ally” in the war on terror. The question of seeking a ‘safe haven’ for Mr Musharraf was raised by the US media after they concluded, almost unanimously, that his days were numbered and that his departure was only a matter of days, not weeks.
While discussing Mr Musharraf’s future, a leading American scholar of South Asian affairs noted that the Pakistani leader had “one redeeming feature.”
Unlike previous US-backed strongmen, such as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or the Shah of Iran, he was not a rich man, said Michael Krepon, a founding president of Washington’s Stimson Institute.
“Musharraf doesn’t have an estate in Hawaii or a mansion in Los Angeles. This complicates any potential exile,” he added. But even this “redeeming feature” does not endear Mr Musharraf to Washington where he is no longer seen as an “indispensable ally”, as Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte called him on Nov 7.
He is now seen as a “serious liability,” as a Western think-tank --- International Crisis Group --- pointed out recently.
In other words, thanks a lot, and good-bye. Message: stay out of the Bushes. When they're done with you, they're done with you.
Meanwhile, the Guardian runs down the key players in Musharraf's downfall.
And inquiring minds want to know: if Pakistani's sometime democracy can manage to reassert constitutional norms by impeaching its overreaching president, why can't WE?
Okay, maybe I'm making the number of impeachable offenses up, but this? This you can't make up:
President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims.
The charge is made in “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, released today.
Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.
Suskind talked to CIA agents who agree that former CIA director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet was in on the scam:
“It was a dark day for the CIA,” Suskind told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Tuesday. “It was the kind of thing where [the CIA] said, ‘Look, this is not our charge. We’re not here to carry forth a political mandate — which is clearly what this was — to solve a political problem in America.’ And it was a cause of great grievance inside of the agency.”
The author writes that Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and suggests it is a crime of greater impact than Watergate. But the White House is denying the allegations, calling the book “absurd” and charging that Suskind practices “gutter journalism.”
Former CIA director George Tenet also released a statement in which he ridicules the credibility of Suskind’s sources and calls the White House’s supposed directive to forge the document as “a complete fabrication.”
But Suskind stands by his work. “It’s not off the record,” he says. “It’s on the record. It’s in the book and people can read it for themselves.”
A bit more from the interview:
Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” Suskind wrote, meaning the White House. Suskind says that Bush’s reaction to the report was: “Why don’t they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?”
Suskind quotes Rob Richer, the CIA’s Near East division head, as saying that the White House simply ignored the Habbush report and informed British intelligence that they no longer wanted Habbush as an informant.
“Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office. Nothing was going to stop that,” Richer is quoted in the book.
Suskind also writes that Habbush was “resettled” in Jordan with help from the CIA and was paid $5 million in hush money.
Suskind is a more than credible journalist, including his possession of Pullitzer prize. If he is correct, than Bush and Tenet committed a crime equivalent to mass homicide, committing more than 4,000 American lives to a task based on lies to Congress and the American people, and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and forcing more than 2 million into refugee status.) By the way, the charges in Suskind's book are of a piece with those in other books, including Vincent Bugliosi's "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" (which I'm reading now.)
This case is becoming harder and harder to disprove, and it makes Nancy Pelosi and company's refusal to act on the evidence before them all the more ahameful.
If the 109th Congress will go down in history as boot-licking hand maidens to a criminal White House, the 110th will go down as the most cowardly, utterly useless opposition body in U.S. history -- the polar opposite of the body that faced down Richard Nixon, and the wimp-ridden antidote to the scheming, partisan body that tried to undo the election of William Clinton.
How useless is the current Congress? Let me count the ways...
They can't compel Karl Rove or Josh Bolten to testify before them, and their constant threats of "contempt!" fall by the wayside...
They can't out-maneuver Republicans, who stop bills cold on the House and Senate floor.
They capitulated in cowardly fashion on FISA, giving Bush everything he wanted on domestic surveillance and telecom immunity, junking the Fourth Amendment in the process (and they've got more coming, from the still-enforced PATRIOT Act to complete surveillance of the Internet.) ***NOTE: read this post on the Bushies' database of some 8 million Americans whom they could surveil and detain at will in the event of "an emergency" if you really want to feel sick to your stomach.***
They continue to give Bush everything his heart desires on Iraq, backing down time and again on the issue of a timetable for orderly withdrawal, and forking over all the cash Dubya's Pentagon can stuff into a sideways appropriation.
They cannot reign in a recalcitrant attorney general who is thumbing his nose at them as surely as his predecessor did.
They cannot pass meaningful legislation outside of a housing bill that even Bush wasn't dumb enough to veto in an election year.
And their only concern, from Pelosi on down, appears to be getting re-elected.
Worst of all, they refuse to hold accountable, through the only means the Constitution allows: impeachment; a president that many of them -- or really any of them who have an iota of understanding of the Constitution -- know committed clearly impeachable offenses (many of these guys are lawyers.) Instead, the Democratic-controlled 110th Congress, like their GOP-led predecessors, are spending their time "saving the president's chestnuts" and scheming among themselves to hold sham "impeachment-like" hearings that are unworthy of press coverage (which is why they aren't getting any,) while promising the White House that nothing will come of them. Even Dennis Kucinich, the author of the "hearings," capitulated, allowing the House leadership to let him make a fool of himself and his colleagues, while wasting the valuable time of dozens of earnest witnesses (not to mention bloggers, who thankfully have lots of time on their hands...)
What then, is the purpose of our current Congress? A useless bunch, almost all of them, particularly in the House, where most of the rotten, Bush-petting legislation and cowardice orginates, but also in the Senate, where Harry Reid and company continue to quizzle and cower under the outright treachery of one Joseph Lieberman.
With all of the lack of spine, one wonders whether the administration's domestic wiretapping extended into the Congressional office building. That might at least explain why they continue to do the bidding of a lame duck president and his criminal gang. Next, I expect them to approve offshore oil drilling and pass a law declaring torture to be the law of the land. What more damage can they do to the constitution and the Republic at this point, having declared, in essence, that there are no impeachable offenses -- that a president can break the law with impunity, and that he and his cabinet; hell, his FORMER cabinet members -- can feel free to ignore Congress altogether, with Congress's blessing. They have squandered their constitutional prerogatives, made a mockery of their own authority, and allowed that man, that idiot in the White House, to humiliate them and blacken our country's honor, not to mention killing more than 4,000 of our bravest citizens in furtherance of a fundamentally un-American neoconservative cause.
Now the Debbie Wasserman Schultz's of the world might explain that I simply don't understand how politics works -- the Congress has to "get the people's business done," and the people want lower gas bills, not impeachment. Well when members of Congress take the oath of office, they, like the president, swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. The pork for their districts comes later. And because the Constitution is so fundamental to our freedoms, to our ability to live free in a country that still belongs to us, and not the president, impeachment of a criminal administration IS the people's business. Getting re-elected, well, that's YOUR business, Debbie. Besides, what exactly has Congress gotten done "for us" in the last two years? Hm? Not much.
Checks and balances are endangered when Congress refuses to perform its oversight role and hold members of the executive branch accountable for their actions. The Intelligence Committee decision is just the latest in a series of caves to the White House by this Republican-led Congress. Congress caved when it reauthorized the PATRIOT Act, which includes provisions that deprive Americans of civil liberties. Congress has failed to fulfill its oversight responsibility for a wide variety of executive agencies, including the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which has reportedly reduced some fines for safety violations and failed to collect others at all.2 Congress has refused to investigate the Bush administration’s attempt to hide the true estimated cost of its Medicare prescription drug benefit, the White House’s disclosure of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity, and corporate special interests’ and oil lobbyists’ involvement in Vice President Cheney’s energy policy task force.
It’s no wonder that, according to the Washington Post, “Government scholars and watchdog groups say the decline of congressional oversight in recent years has thrown off kilter the system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers created to keep no one branch of government from becoming too powerful.”iii
At this stage, I'm not even sure why they're there. We should throw off this false patina of multi-cameral government and simply install our president as king. He already has his puppet parliament.
If I had my way, our pathetic Congress would be turned out on their asses this fall, starting with Nancy, Harry and the hugely disappointing John Conyers, and with the exception of a small handful, including Jim Webb (because of his advocacy for our veterans), Russ Feingold, Dick Durbin, Henry Waxman and Robert Wexler. The rest of them can go to blazes. (Chuck Hagel is retiring, Barack Obama is running for president.)
Unfortunately, most of these clods' seats are perfectly safe.
And that might be the biggest shame of all.
I'll close with part of the testimony from Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, one of the other "good guys," at the faux-impeachment hearings yesterday:
"What this Congress does, or chooses not to do in furthering the investigation of the serious allegations against this administration - and if just cause is found, to hold them accountable - will impact the conduct of future presidents, perhaps for generations."
"Mr. Chairman," Baldwin continued, "there are those who would say that holding this hearing - examining whether or not the president and vice president broke the law - is frivolous. I not only reject this, I believe there is no task more important for this Congress than to seriously consider whether our nation's leaders have violated their oath of office. The American public expects no less. It is, after all, their Constitution. No president or congress has the authority to override that document, whereby 'We the People' conferred upon the branches of government limited and defined power, and provided for meaningful checks and balances."
There can be no question at this late date in the Bush presidency that the issue of whether the American system will be characterized by "meaningful checks and balances" is at stake - and that goes to the heart of the matter of why Friday's hearing ought not be the end of a process but a beginning.
Even after George Bush and Dick Cheney have left the White House, the definition of the presidency that they have crafted will remain.
"On January 20, 2009, the next president and vice president of the United States will stand before the American people and take an oath of office, swearing to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' This commitment and obligation is so fundamental to our democracy that our nation's founders prescribed that oath in our Constitution. They also provided for the removal of the president and vice president for, among other things, 'high crimes and misdemeanors,'" Baldwin explained to the committee. "Presidents and vice presidents do not take that oath in a vacuum. They are informed by the actions or inactions of past presidents and congresses, who establish precedents for the future."
It is in the power of the Congress to begin setting the precedent to which Baldwin addressed herself. That power was defined by the framers of the Constitution, as were the practices and procedures to be used in executing it.
... (The) American people have been forced to sit by while credible allegations of abuse of power mount:
And we continue to sit by, waiting for a Congress with the courage to act.
UPDATE: Check out Congress' latest capitulation, to big oil. |
President Bush's latest executive privilege claim, this time over FBI interviews of Dick Cheney and his staff regarding the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, drew contempt threats directed at the derelict Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, from Henry Waxman yesterday. Not only should Waxman follow through, Congress should junk the absurd handshake deal that's keeping them from exercising their right as a co-equal branch of government, to have their subpoenas honored (not only by Cheney and Bush, but also by Karl Rove,) or to file inherent contempt of congress charges against the intransigent. Mukasey should go first, as he has refused to carry out his duty as A.G., no less than did his predecessor, the squirlish Alberto Gonzales.
Last night, GOP hack Brad Blakeman asserted on Dan Abrams' show "Verdict" that Mukasey was, by refusing to enforce congressional subpoenas, simply serving his client, the president of the United States. Read the Constitution, Brad. The attorney general's client is the American people. It's the White House counsel who serves the POTUS. I'm surprised Abrams, a lawyer, failed to call Blakeman on that one.
(The Politico) Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) has introduced legislation calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle criminal contempt of Congress charges when Justice will not cooperate.
The Miller bill grows out of the dispute between House Democrats and the White House over subpoenas issued to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers.
The committee issued the subpoenas as part of its probe ino the 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys. Bolten and Miers, relying on an assertion of executive privilege by President Bush, refused to comply with the subpoenas. The House passed both criminal and civil contempt resolutions against Bolten and Miers, but the Justice Department, citing earlier legal opinions, declined to allow a federal prosecutor to bring the case before a grand jury. The Judiciary Committee has filed a civil lawsuit against the Justice Dept. seeking to enforce the subpoenas.
According to Miller's office, his new bill would allow a federal judge to "appoint an independent ;Special Advocate' to investigate and prosecute alleged Contempt of Congress charges passed by the House of Representatives against current and former executive branch employees, when the Justice Department fails to do so." The special prosecutor would technically work for attorney general, but in reality, would be "largely independent from both the executive and legislative branches and not subject to undue political influences."
“The law explicitly requires the Justice Department to present Contempt of Congress charges to the grand jury, but the Bush Administration claims Congress can not compel a U.S. attorney to prosecute contempt cases where the White House claims executive privilege,” Miller said in a statement. “Other presidents have made bodacious claims about their powers, but always compromised in the end. No president, not even Nixon, has gone this far before.”
Good idea, Congressman. And while you're at it, how about proposing legislation requiring Nancy Pelosi and the other Bush cuckolds running the House of Representatives to use their constitutional authority, rather than ducking and running from the president, including -- no especially -- on the subject of impeachment, about which Miss Nancy is allowing only Potemkin hearings. As Johnathan Turley (who yesterday called such hearings little more than a "fancy dress ball") has said repeatedly (echoed by John Dean) there is more than enough reason to believe that crimes have been committed by this White House, such that impeachment is the only constitutional option. If the House won't even consider it, than divided government is dead, and the 110th Congress risks going down in ignominy, just like the 109th. |
It's interesting to see Rep. Robert Wexler and fellow Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on such polarized opposite sides of an issue, but such a thing is impeachment, that it deeply divides Democrats, more so than it does Republicans.
Wexler, who is on the pro-hearings side of things, has started his own site, wexlerwantshearings.com, to dramatize his call for an impeachment inquiry against the vice president. Good for him. And he tells ThinkP that an op-ed he co-wrote with other members of Congress was roundly rejected by all of the major rags -- none of whom take the notion of impeaching this president seriously.
These are the same papers that ran rabid with stories ginning up impeachment against one William Jefferson Clinton, not for lying to Congress to get us into a war, not for possibly secreting evidence of crimes against U.S. laws banning torture, not for illegally surveilling the American people with the help of private companies, not for defying Congress and junking the Constitution by using signing statements to make and discard laws ... but for having sex with some chick in a big old thong.
We laid out precisely why the House Judiciary Committee should open up hearings. … And we set out in an op-ed why we should do it, and none of the major newspapers in the country — the New York Times or the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times — they chose not to run it.
I thought it was a fairly significant statement by the mainstream media that when members of the House Judiciary Committee lay out a credible claim for why impeachment hearings should begin regarding the Vice President of the United States, and they refuse to run it, then we decided well we would start this website…and see what the feeling was in terms of mainstream America.
Percentage of Americans who want Congress to investigate the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration during and after the 9/11 attacks, according to a new Zogby poll. Also, according to the poll, more than 30 percent favor the immediate impeachment of the president and/or vice president.
FBI Director Robert Mueller's notes following the now infamous March 2004 visit to the bedside of then-ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft provide fresh contradictions between Mueller's and then-acting A.G. James Comey's accounts of the "Godfather"-esque attempt to strong arm a sick man into Okaying an illegal domestic wiretapping program, and the "recollection" of Alberto Gonzales. The Washington Post reports:
Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was "feeble," "barely articulate" and "stressed" moments after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday.
One of Mueller's entries in five pages of a daily log pertaining to the dispute also indicated that Ashcroft's deputy was so concerned about undue pressure by Gonzales and other White House aides for the attorney general to back the wiretapping program that the deputy asked Mueller to bar anyone other than relatives from later entering Ashcroft's hospital room.
Mueller's description of Ashcroft's physical condition that night contrasts with testimony last month from Gonzales, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ashcroft was "lucid" and "did most of the talking" during the brief visit. It also confirms an account of the episode by former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, who said Ashcroft told the two men he was not well enough to make decisions in the hospital.
"Saw AG," Mueller writes in his notes for 8:10 p.m. on March 10, 2004, only minutes after Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had visited Ashcroft. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG in chair; is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."
The typewritten notes, heavily censored before being turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, provide further insight into a tumultuous but secret legal battle that gripped the Justice Department and the White House in March 2004, after Justice lawyers determined that parts of the warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency were illegal.
Although Mueller did not directly witness the exchange between Ashcroft, Gonzales and Card, his notes recounted Comey's personal statement that Ashcroft at the outset said that "he was in no condition to decide issues." Ashcroft also told the two men he supported his deputy's position on the secret program, Mueller said Comey told him.
Comey had precipitated the confrontation by informing the White House days earlier that the Justice Department would not approve the wiretapping program's continuation in its present form. Gonzales and Card then decided to see if they could get Ashcroft to sign a certification that it was legal.
After the meeting concluded without success, the Bush administration decided to proceed with the program anyway. But Comey, Mueller and half a dozen or so other Justice Department officials threatened to resign if it was not changed. The standoff was averted after President Bush agreed to make changes, Mueller and others have testified, but the changes have never been described.
In his notes, Mueller recounts Comey's statement that Ashcroft complained to Gonzales and Card at the hospital about being "barred" from obtaining "the advice he needed" about the NSA program because of "strict compartmentalization rules" set by the White House. Although Ashcroft, as attorney general, had been fully briefed about the program, many of his senior legal advisers were not allowed to know about it, officials said.
Gonzales was White House counsel at the time of the hospital visit and replaced Ashcroft as attorney general in 2005. "We never had any intent to ask anything of him if we did not feel that he was competent," Gonzales testified, adding later: "Mr. Ashcroft talked about the legal issues in a lucid form, as I've heard him talk about legal issues in the White House."...
Drip ... drip ... drip ... can anyone argue with any credibility that we have a functioning office of attorney general at the moment, while it's being helmed by a perjurer?
Gonzo gets the Isikoff treatment in the latest explication of his midnight ride to push John Ashcroft to sign onto warrantless wiretapping through the fog of medication.
Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Late on the afternoon of March 10, 2004, eight congressional leaders filed into the White House Situation Room for an urgent briefing on one of the Bush administration's top secrets: a classified surveillance program that involved monitoring Americans' e-mails and phone calls without court warrants. Vice President Dick Cheney did most of the briefing. But as he explained the National Security Agency program, the lawmakers weren't fully grasping the dimensions of what he was saying. Tom Daschle, then the Senate minority leader, tells NEWSWEEK that Cheney "talked like it was something routine. We really had no idea what it was all about." Still, as Daschle recalls, there were "a lot of concerns" expressed by some Democrats in the room when Cheney asked for their approval to continue the program. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, recalls that she "made clear my disagreement with what the White House was asking."
Last week, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a different account of the briefing, provoking yet another controversy in his tenure as the country's top law-enforcement officer. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, who participated in the briefing as the White House counsel, said the legislators were told the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey, had raised objections to the program. Gonzales said there was "consensus" that the program, aimed at catching terrorists, was needed. "The congressional leadership ... told us, 'Continue going forward with this very important intelligence activity'," Gonzales testified.
It was only after getting that go-ahead, Gonzales said, that he and then White House chief of staff Andrew Card visited the hospital room of John Ashcroft, the gravely ill attorney general recovering from surgery. Gonzales tried, unsuccessfully, to get the heavily medicated Ashcroft to overrule Comey—a pivotal moment in one of the fiercest behind-the-scenes clashes of the Bush presidency. ...
Another interesting bit:
Congressional Democrats plan to step up the heat in coming weeks, pressing for Justice memos and other documents. They also plan to call a potentially crucial witness: Jack L. Goldsmith, the former chief of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. It was Goldsmith who wrote a key opinion concluding the eavesdropping program was illegal. A conservative lawyer now at Harvard, Goldsmith, who declined to comment, will have every incentive to talk. He is due to publish a new book this fall called "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration." According to its Amazon.com listing, the book will chronicle how the president's "apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency." On the cover are pictures of Bush, Cheney—and Gonzales.
Russ Feingold appeared on MTP this weekend, offering a coherent case for censuring the president, the vice president, and the attorney general of the United States. His case would be even stronger, in my opinion, if he were calling for the impeachment of all three -- since, as I've said before, I think that step is necessary in order to restore the Constitutional balance of power in this country, and in order to restore the proper meaning of impeachment, after the idiotic impeachment of President Clinton for failing to call oral sex "intercourse." That said, at least Feingold is trying. Here's the audio:
So what does the Senate leader have to say about that? Not much, unfortunately:
REID: I’m sure Russ Feingold will try to find a way to offer that amendment. The Republicans won’t let us vote on it. They’ll block it.
SCHIEFFER: So would you go along with it if they let you vote on it?
REID: Bob, frankly, we have so many other things to do. The president already has the mark of the American people that he’s the worst president we’ve ever had, and I don’t think we need a censure resolution in the Senate to prove that. We have to do…
SCHIEFFER: So you’re not going along with it?
REID: Well, at this stage, Russ is going to have to make his case as to why we should do that rather than do our appropriation bills, finish the defense authorization bill, Homeland Security appropriation bill.
SCHIEFFER: OK.
REID: We have a lot of work to do.
What's that, Harry? Bush has been punished enough by the polls? The polls??? Is that how you measure the balance of the power of the Senate versus the power of the president? A president is diminished by the polls, whether or not he is held accountable by the only body capable of doing so ... the Congress? Impeachment, censure, etc. are tools in the arsenal of Congress in order to rebalance power. Taking them off the table, as Reid and Pelosi have done, has the effect of emasculating Congress, and handing the president the ultimate victory: allowing his interpretation of his power under the Constitution, not to mention his affronts against that Constitution and against a co-equal branch of government, to stand, unchallenged. Mr. Reid's comments are not intellectually serious. The American people are demanding, not that their opinions be heard by Congress, but that they be acted upon. By outright refusing to do so, the Senate majority leader is flouting the will of the American people, subordinating himself to the president, and defying his employers, namely, us. Maybe it's time to censure him, and Mother Pelosi, too...
"The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. ...
... Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." -- Article II, Section I, United States Constitution
Article II of the U.S. Constitution contains four sections, just 13 paragraphs, describing the manner of election, and the duties of the president of the United States. (Unlike Article I, which describes the same for Congress in some 54 paragraphs and 9 sections...) The duties are simple -- only appearing in Section 2, eight paragraphs inso the Article: the president commands the armed forces, as well as the state militas in times of war; he can require written opinions from each Cabinet head within the executive branch; he can make treaties, but only with the assent of two-thirds of Congress; he can appoint ambassadors, consular officials and judges, including Supreme Court Justices, subject to Senate approval, and he can make recess appointments to certain government and judicial posts when the Senate is not in session. And of course, he can grant pardons and commutations.
[Nowhere in the Article, the Constitution, or in the oath of office, by the way, does the president pledge to protect the American people. That is the collective responsibility of the American government, and it rests equally with the three branches.]
The Congress, on the other hand, has the power to borrow and even coin money, and then to determine its value, to borrow money on the credit of the United States, to establish immigration and bankruptcy rules, establish post offices and toll roads, to collect taxes, punish crimes committed on the high seas, to create tribunals below the level of the Supreme Court, to raise and support armies and to declare war, among other things.
And that's where we pick it up with President George W. Bush, and the case that is to be made for his impeachment.
Count 1: Violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Article II, Section 9, paragraph 2 of the Constitution states that: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." President Bush violated that article when he ordered U.S. citizens to be held incommunicado, and without trial, wrongs which were ultimately righted by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case, but which were made more egregious by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, signed by the president, which calls for any person, including U.S. citizens, who is found, by the president, to have consorted with enemies of the United States, will bypass the courts and the writ of habeas corpus, and be tried by a military commission.
Count II: Engaging the United States in violations of international law:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The past five years have seen the USA engage in systematic violations of international law, with a distressing impact on thousands of detainees and their families. Human rights violations have included:
Secret detention Enforced disappearance Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment Outrages upon personal dignity, including humiliating treatment Denial and restriction of habeas corpus Indefinite detention without charge or trial Prolonged incommunicado detention Arbitrary detention Unfair trial procedures
The specific violations here, are of the United Nations Charter, and of the Geneva Conventions, something this administration and its attorney general have characterized as "quaint," but both of which constitute the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution. In addition, the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody both in Guantanamo Bay, and at secret CIA prisons around the world, may have violated U.S. anti-torture laws.
Count III: The outing of Valerie Plame, something unprecedented in the annals of U.S. history, and a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. And, the probably coverup of violations of that act by the vice president (also grounds for impeaching him.)
Count IV: Illegal domestic surveillance, wiretapping, syping on bank records and the seizure of the assets of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. These include probable violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Count V: Politicization of the office of attorney general, and suborning the possible perjury of Attorney General Gonzales before the Congress in the firings of U.S. Attorneys, and in Gonzales' fibs regarding his knowledge of FBI misuse of national security letters. The most egregious issue in the U.S. attorney scandal is that the misuse of the powers of the attorney general and U.S. attorneys may have been part of a widespread GOP attempt to violate the Voting Rights Act, by creating hindrances for African-Americans to vote.
And last but not least...
Count VI: Lying to Congress about the case for war against Iraq. This is the one most people seize on, but the plain truth is that there is ample evidence that the Bush administration knew, right up until the day they ordered the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad in March of 2003, that they had no case for war against Iraq. The CIA had made clear to the administration that Iraq was not, in fact, reconstituting its nuclear weapons -- or at least that there was no evidence that they were. Yet, Mr. Bush made just that case in his January 2003 State of the Union address. And there is also ample evidence that the case presented to the Congress, let alone to the American people, was false and misleading. A good book on the subject can be found here. And then of course, there is the Downing Street Memo, which told us that the British government knew that:
"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."
None of the above is new, but the fact that it has become such common knowledge makes the case for impeachment even stronger. And perhaps as important, Congress should impeach President Bush in order to restore the meaning and relevancy of impeachment, following the silly, politicized impeachment of President Clinton.
Lastly, there is the fact that a preponderance of the American people support impeachment, something that was not the case with President Clinton. Ultimately, impeachment is a political process, and the politics of the present time, when two thirds of Americans believe Mr. Bush's Iraq surge to be a failure, and nearly as many judging his presidency to be the same, demand that Congress stiffen its spine, stop whining about how bad they'd look (they wouldn't) and get on with it. Democrats are masters at misreading public sentiment. What a shame it would be if they did it again. Even if they couldn't win a conviction in the Senate, the impeachment of this president, (his vice presidnet, and his attorney general, while they're at it,) would send a message to future presidents that Congress will indeed guard its Constitutional primacy, and force the president to faithfully uphold this country's laws and founding document. Otherwise, they consign themselves to irrelevancy.
Hagel throws out the I-word again, this time, in an interview with Stephanopoulos (and he joins the growing number of GOP and Dem members of Congress saying that Gonzales is a lost cause. Said Hagel:
"Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed — if a president really believes that, then there are — what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that," said Hagel, who is considering a 2008 presidential run. ...
...On Sunday, Hagel said he was bothered by Bush's apparent disregard of congressional sentiment on Iraq, such as his decision to send additional troops. He said lawmakers now stood ready to stand up to the president when necessary.
In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who doesn't believe he's accountable to anyone. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends on how this goes," Hagel told the magazine.
Well it's about damned time the Hill started standing up to this out of control president...
GQ Magazine lays out the case for impeaching the vice president:
That in the buildup to war in Iraq, the vice president, lacking confidence in the true casus belli, conspired to invent additional ones, misrepresenting the available intelligence, crafting new “intelligence,” and then spreading these falsehoods to the public, perverting the democratic process that he is sworn to uphold.
That as the war devolved into occupation, the vice president again sabotaged the democratic system, developing back channels into the Coalition Provisional Authority, a body not under his purview, to remove some of the most effective staff and replace them with his own loyal supplicants—undercutting America’s best effort at war in order to expand his own power.
That in his domestic capacity, the vice president has been equally reckless with the trust of his office, converting the vice presidency into a de facto prime ministership, conducting secret meetings with secret policy boards to determine national policy and then refusing to share the details of those meetings with the other branches of government.
Finally, that the vice president has repeatedly promoted the interests of a corporation, Halliburton, over the interests of the nation, causing untold harm to American economic, military, and public health.
For these and other offenses against the nation, Vice President Cheney, clearly, is guilty of crimes against the state.
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
