Why Congress Must Investigate and Impeach President Bush

If one were to ask young people in America why they don't vote, all Americans for that matter, it is likely that the most common answer would be that they believe their voice will go unheard, and that no matter how they vote, it couldn't possibly have an impact. What else should we expect in an age when Americans of all age groups are systematically shut out of a government bought and owned by big business lobbyists, war profiteers and other interest groups? What further should we expect when it seems that no matter how blatantly government officials lie and obfuscate, they are too often not held accountable, and are still given the benefit of the doubt in the wake of disasters caused by their lies and/or incompetence. Surely, it is hard to think of a better example of this than the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

The remedy for this breakdown of the American system is surely not one that can work overnight--there is no magic potion that can cure these ills. However, there is a significant step that can be taken to restore some faith in the American system, and to at the very least, set a precedent that the office of the President of the United States is not to be treated as a tree house for unserious, dishonest, corrupt make believe Presidents, or used as a laboratory for radical anti-democratic ideology; as well as proving that the people's Congress is something to take stock in. In fact, the framers of the Constitution specifically provided the people a device designed to take action against such behavior, and it is called impeachment.

Often misunderstood and rarely used, impeachment is the indictment of a government official designed to remove that official from office. The first step would be investigations and the drafting of Articles of Impeachment by the House of Representatives, in this case President Bush. The Articles of Impeachment then are passed on to the US Senate, where the President would be under trial presided over by the Chief Justice of the United States. A two thirds majority is then required to convict and remove the President from office. Impeachable offenses as described in the Constitution include "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors".

The first President to be impeached is Andrew Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act, and he was acquitted by the Senate. Unfortunately, the last time impeachment was sought by Congress, it was done under ridiculously partisan conditions, and for causes which were at best questionable, especially when compared to the transgressions of the Bush administration. The Republican controlled, anti-Clinton House of Representatives also burdened the Clinton administration and the American people with costly and time consuming investigations into equally questionable scandals, which till this day have produced no indictments. In contrast, the Republican dominated Congress under the Bush administration has provided virtually no oversight, and has conducted scant investigation of much more serious allegations and scandals, preferring instead to spend its time investigating "Diploma mills", steroid use in sports, and holding hearings about Janet Jackson's bare breast at the Super Bowl.

In fact, the Republican's during Clinton's presidency spent 140 hours investigating whether or not Clinton used the White House Christmas list to identify Democratic donors, compared to only 12 hours spent by the current Congress investigating the horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Republican House during Clinton received 2 million pages of documents and interviewed 44 Clinton administration officials. In all, the White House staff spent 55,000 hours responding to 300 Congressional requests, according to the Government Accountability Office, as well as issuing 1,052 subpoenas related to Clinton and Democratic National Committee related investigations. During that time, only 11 were issued relating to Republican abuses of power.

In contrast, to this day, serious investigations into the Iraq war, its planning and the false warnings about Saddam's WMD, have yet to be investigated. Other impeachable offenses left unexplored by this Republican Congress are the very real possibility that the abuses at Abu Ghraib are not simply the work of out of control soldiers, but rather a result of purposeful Bush administration directives, ignoring the theat of Al Qaeda until 9/11, attaching more than 700 "signing statements" to bills passed by Congress, allowing war profiteers to bilk the American people, outing CIA operative Valerie Plame for clearly political purposes, the criminal use of domestic wiretapping in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law, violating and/or subverting international treaties, which are considered "the supreme law of the land" according to our Constitution, among many other examples.

Although a case can be made for all the crimes above, probably the best case for impeachment can be against the lies that led to the Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney's role in awarding "no-bid" contracts to Halliburton, warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the violation of the Geneva Conventions including torture and war crimes in Iraq. The following will explore these in more depth.

Lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Office of Special Plans & The Project for a New American Century

Although a case could be made for all of the previously mentioned examples, probably the most impeachable offenses have to do with the Iraq war and WMD. Despite the many denials and excuses posed by the Bush administration, its rubber stamp Congress and their defenders in the "liberal media", the bogus case made by Bush and his cohorts in regard to iraq's alleged possession and quest for WMD was not a result of bad intelligence, but in fact was a blatantly criminal campaign to mislead the Congress and the people of the United States.

The following are only a sample of the many false and misleading statements made by the Bush administration in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." ~ Dick Cheney 8/26/02

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."~ George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly 9/12/02

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." ~ Bush Radio address 10/5/02

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas." ~ George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio Speech 10/7/02

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly." ~ White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer 3/21/03

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." ~ George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio 10/7/02

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." ~ George W. Bush, State of the Union Address 1/28/03

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

~ George W. Bush, Address to the nation, 3/17/03

Virtually all of these statements were known to be false when they were uttered, and in fact were part of a deliberate attempt to scare the American people and Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq. In fact, the intelligence community had made no such determination that there was "no doubt" Saddam Hussein had WMD, as Cheney claimed in August 2002, or that there was "no question" of their existence, as Ari Fleischer claimed. The "aerial vehicles" proved to be nothing even close to the threat described by Bush, a fact known when he made the above claim. The famous claim about the British finding that Iraq sought Uranium from Niger was also known to be false when Bush made the statement in his January 2003 State of the Union Address, now known as the "16 words", and was kept out of previous speeches for this very reason. Similarly, there was no evidence whatsoever that we should fear a "mushroom cloud", as Bush said, because there was no consensus among the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was actively producing nuclear weapons, or any WMD for that matter. In fact, when presenting the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to Congress in the fall of 2002, an act which the Bush supporters use as proof that "the Democrats saw the same intelligence as Bush", the Bush administration purposely left out the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR) alternate determinations which stated, among other things, that the evidence was "inadequate" to make a case that Iraq was reconstituting nuclear weapons capability. They also stated that aluminum tubes pointed out by Bush and Condi Rice as only useful as parts for a nuclear centrifuge to create nuclear weapons, were "not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapons program", something known by Bush and Rice even before their public statements on the issue. In fact, National Security Advisor Rice was informed that the tubes were not intended for use in nuclear centrifuge prior to her appearance on CNN in September 2002 when she said that the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."

The Bush administration also ignored, and went out of their way to discredit the first hand knowledge and critical testimony of UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, and even Head UN inspector Hans Blix . Blix urged the White House to operate with "prudence" and "patience" in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and maintained that weapons being "unaccounted for" did not mean the weapons existed, a position he still holds today, although he has stated that he believes the weapons stockpiles were destroyed in 1991 or 1992 after the Gulf War. Nonetheless, although Saddam allowed UN inspectors back in to Iraq in the weeks prior to the invasion, President Bush informed the UN to pull out inspectors two days before the American forces began dropping bombs on Baghdad, and later lied in July 2003 saying "we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Scott Ritter was and is even more forthright in this assessment, claiming that the unaccounted for weapons were destroyed in the years following the Gulf War, but also that the Clinton and Bush administrations both knew as much and that they continued the "regime change" policy against Iraq because they couldn't back away politically from framing Saddam as a Hitler-like threat. Ritter also warned of the post invasion violence that has erupted and continues to take lives.

On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times of London published what has become known as the Downing Street Memo, which is the recorded minutes of a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior officials in July of 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq. The memo indicates that the decision to invade Iraq had in essence already been made, despite claims by Bush that he tried every possible means of resolving the Iraq issue diplomatically. The memo also displays the apparent willingness to provoke Saddam Hussein into confrontation to provide a pretext for invasion (this actually did occur as British and US aircraft constantly bombed Iraqi sites in the months before invasion without congressional approval).

Other damning information included in the memo's are the intent of the Bush administration to begin the campaign for war "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections", an indication that the Iraq invasion plans were used at least in part as political fodder. But, the most infamous and damning information contained in the Downing Street memo is that it "seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided", and that the"intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy", and that the "case was thin" against Saddam's regime. These lines state that there was an effort already underway to "fix" intelligence around the already decided upon policy of invasion, and calls into question Bush administration claims that every effort was made to avoid invasion, and their claims of faulty intelligence. Since the uncovering of the Downing Street Memo, more British documents have surfaced as proof of the ongoing effort to fabricate a pretext for invading Iraq.

The accomplices responsible for "fixing" the intelliegence to fit the already determined policy of invading Iraq, are the now infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP), a Pentagon aligned unit developed by Donald Rumsfeld and Under Secretary of Defense Policy Douglas Feith. The OSP was also closely alisned with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The reason for the creation of the OSP was to scrutinize the CIA's findings about Iraq's WMD programs and about any possible link to Al Qaeda, both of which were alleged to be major threats by the Pentagon, but not so much by the CIA. Seymour Hersh has written that, according to an unnamed Pentagon advisor, that the purpose of the OSP was to "'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see.".

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski writes in an article titled, The New Pentagon Papers, that while working in the Near East South Asia Policy Office, she "witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."

kwiatkowski goes on to write:

"While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand."

Why would the OSP so overtly undermine the intelligence gathering process? Well, the OSP was manned and coordinated by closely aligned neoconservative ideologues who's ideas had been public knowledge for years in the writings of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), notably, their letter urging President Clinton to invade Iraq, and a report written in 2000 titled Rebuilding America's Defenses, which describes many of the events that have eventually occurred under President George W. Bush's presidency. Rebuilding America's Defenses describes the desires of the neoconservatives to solidify a more "permanent role in Gulf regional security" and to transform the American military into a force for global domination. However, the report cites that the transformation "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor."---it seems that "catalyzing
event" came on September 11^th 2001, and the response by the PNAC signatories who advised Bush, was first to invade Afghanistan, but more importantly, the grand prize for the neoconservatives--Iraq and its massive oil reserves.

Given all this, it is clear that George W. Bush is either a liar, a clueless front man, or a grossly incompetent fool. But in any case, a US president who would allow such characters to gamble with American lives and security is not worthy of the office, and should be removed through impeachment.

Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney

Another scandal that could play a role in impeachment is the inapproriate relationship between Dick Cheney and Halliburton, a company which has benefitted greatly from the Iraq War in the form of "no-bid" contracts awarded them allegedly through the authority of the Vice Presidents office. If investigated, this aspect of the Bush/Cheney Iraq invasion & occupation could be straw that broke the camels back.

Halliburton, the company formerly run by Dick Cheney, has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts by the US Army Corps of Engineers for projects in Iraq. There was always suspicion of Halliburton's contracts, but when a Pentagon whistleblower named Bunnatine Greenhouse disclosed that a 7 billion dollar contract awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & root had not been put out to competitive bidding, the suspicions began to build.

Further scrutiny has developed around the Cheney/Halliburton relationship when emails uncovered in 2004 from an Army Corp of Engineers official to another official in the Pentagon said that contracts awarded to Halliburton were, "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w(ith) VP's office.". Other incriminating emails were released as well.

With Democrat Henry Waxman about to take chairmanship of the House Government Reform Committee in January, and John Conyers heading the Judiciary Committeee, there may be big trouble looming for Cheney, Halliburton and Bush. Waxman has been fervently pursuing the possiblity of inpropriaty in the Cheney/Halliburton relationship. when it is all sadi and done, Halliburton's no-bid contracts could actually end up being as impeachable as any other of teh Bush administration crimes.

Violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

The FISA laws came about as a result of senate Committees investigation into domestic intelligence practices. The law specifically requires oversight by the FISA court for any surveillance on citizens in the US. However, it has come to light that the Bush administration has been authorizing the National Security Ageny (NSA) to conduct such wiretapping without the required FISA court warrants as part of what they call the "terrorist surveillance program". President Bush has gone so far as to every forty-five days issue executive orders claiming that it is within his authority to ignore the FISA court.

Federal Judge Ann Diggs Taylor ruled against the "terrorist surveillance program" on August 17th 2006, and the program has also been blasted by long time conservatives, including Washington times columnist Bruce Fein, who is also a former associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration and scholar for the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Fein says that the surveillance program is "a flagrant violtaion of the Constitution, which I feel the citizens as well as the government have a duty to defend." Fein also testified before Congress saying that the president has been "seeking to cripple the Constitution's checks and balances", and that Bush's logic "would reduce Congress to an ink-blot in the permanent conflict with international terrorism. The President could pick and choose which statutes to obey in gathering foreign intelligence and employing battlefield tactics on the sidewalks of the United States." He went on to decry "President Bush's contempt for the rule of law and constitutional limitations."

Despite the legal slapdown and denouncments of the program from conservatives like Fein, and from across the political spectrum, the Bush administration maintains that having to obtain FISA court warrants for such surveillance would hinder their efforts to thwart terrorist threats, that it is an infringement upon executive power and that the authority to do such surveillance is implicitly given in the Congressional authorization to use military force after 9/11. However, the court issues warrants even 36 hours after surveillance has taken place and has rarely turned down a request, so obtaining warrants wouldn't at all hinder efforts against terrorist threats; and even Republicans in Congress have maintained that the authorization to use force after 9/11 doesn't provide the president the authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping operations.

Given these facts, such blatant and brazen violations of federal law, and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution by the Bush administration could by itself constitute a case for impeachment.

War Crimes, the Violation of Treaties and International Law

The Bush administration's overt violation of the Geneva Conventions is nothing less than a crime against humanity, not to mention the Constitution. Internal White House memos clearly illustrate the desire of Bush officials to subvert Geneva and insulate the President from the War Crimes Act of 1996. In these memos, then presidential attorney and current US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez advises the President to declare the war in Afghanistan and the detention of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters exempt from the Geneva Convention so as to avoid prosecution under the War Crimes Act, which states very clearly that whoever commits a war crime, "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death." Violations that fall under the acts jurisdiction include any actions:

(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;

(2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;

(3) which constitutes a violation of common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva, 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party and which deals with non-international armed conflict; or

(4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996),when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.

The decision by the Bush administration to exempt so-called "enemy combatants" captured during the "war on terror" paved their legal defense for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The abuses documented, and described by even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld as "blatantly sadistic", and by a Republican Senator as including "rape & murder", are nothing less than violations of the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 provisions against "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;", "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment".

Although the abuses at Abu Ghraib were written off as the work of rogue soldiers who went nuts, the truth is that the soldiers were acting under orders from interrogators to "soften up" prisoners for questioning. The Taguba report, conducted by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, on the abuses at Abu Ghraib cites multiple "incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib between October and December 2003. The report also concludes that guards at Abu Ghraib were urged to create "physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation". Furthermore, the report states that the tactics used at Abu Ghraib may have been incorporated from the Guantanamo Bay detention site, indicating a broad policy across US run detention facilities. The man in charge of Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, ran a study of interrogation procedures in Iraq in August of 2003 and concluded that guards at Iraq's prisons could be used to set favorable conditions for prisoner interrogations. Miller was later appointed to run US prisons in Iraq.

It is hard to imagine a scenario more worthy of vigorous investigation. The findings of the Taguba report, the Bush White House's desire to declare the "war on terror" exempt from Geneva, and the subsequent abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are too suspicious to devote, as the Republican led Congress did, only 12 hours of hearings. Furthermore, the Military Tribunal Bill, which recently passed through Congress, demonstrates even more desperate legal maneuvering by the White House to insulate them from prosecution, including a "clarification" of what constitutes torture. Under the bill, the president is given "interpretive" powers to determine what does and does not constitute torture and who and who does not represent an "enemy combatant". In other words it is up to the president to define torture and who is to be tortured, despite the fact that the Geneva Conventions clearly define what torture is.

In fact, the Military Commissions Act was erected by the White House as a response to the Supreme Courts stricking down the White House's classification of prisoners as outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions, and declared that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former aide of Osama Bin Laden, could not be tried under the Bush administrations military commissions, in which the accused has virtually no rights, and instead must be tried under regular military courts-martial. Justice John Paul Stevens majority opinion states that "
Legal analysis suggests that the Supreme Courts decision could have broad implications affecting White House decisions ranging from warrantless wiretapping to torture of detainees, hence the drafting of the Military Commissions Act in still another desperate attempt to shield the Bush administration from prosecution.

Other crimes President Bush and Cheney may be implicated in can be found in the 2004 assault on Falluja, which included war crimes such as the bombing of hospitals and other medical structures, the inhibition of ambulances, as well as the seizure of hospitals, among many other clear violations of the Geneva Conventions that occurred in Falluja.

Why There Must Be Impeachment

Sadly, the list of criminal violations doesn't end there and crosses a wide spectrum of issues. However, the very clear examples listed above of the Bush administrations efforts to subvert the law and the will of the American people, are more than enough to put into action the Congressional process of impeachment. This is especially true and necessary as we approach 3,000 dead American troops and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, as well as the ongoing attempts by Bush to subvert the Constitutional and its authority. The Republican led Congress hasn't had the integrity to hold the Bush administration to account, but with the Democratic Party having won power in both houses in dramatic fashion, there can be no better time than now to act.

Thus far, the Democratic leadership has expressed that impeachment is not a priority, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has even said it's "off the table". Moderates seem to be against impeachment as it will divide the country and will be useless, resulting mainly in government stagnation. Those on the right will frame it as a partisan undertaking. However, the most important result of impeachment far outweighs the temporary strife and government preoccupation created by the impeachment process, as it will make clear to future presidents, and the public, that lies and the unrestricted and undemocratic expansion of presidential power will not be tolerated.

Ultimately, it is hard to believe that the issue of impeachment will not be an issue for the incoming 110^th Congress. This has everything to do with the fact that long time respected Michigan Congressman John Conyers will be the head of the Judiciary Committee, which, under his leadership will undoubtedly launch numerous investigations into the various crimes of the Bush administration. Congressman Conyers has been a leading voice among the Democrats on this issue and will surely not pass up this monumental opportunity, especially after years of being ignored by the Republican rubber stamp majority. The dramatic Democratic victory this past November provides sufficient mandate for the Congress to act against the criminal activity of the Bush administration, and it is what they owe the American people. If such investigations compile and uncover enough necessary evidence, it is the responsibility of Congress to seek not only the impeachment of President Bush, but also the ouster of Vice President Cheney. There can be no better way to begin to heal this damaged nation.