A Call For Impeachment Of Bush

Truthdig

No One Should Be Above the Law

Posted on Apr 25, 2007

Editor’s note: Veteran journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., gave the following speech calling for impeachment.

George Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law.  He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law in the treatment of detainees.  Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public.

This president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the “crime of aggression.” And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.  For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others.  This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. 

We must not allow international laws and treaties—ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences—to be discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny.  And the consequences of George Bush’s violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow us along with those outside our gates, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

George Bush—we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo—fabricated a legal pretext for war.  He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.  He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution.  And so he and his advisers manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public.  In short, he lied to us and to the rest of the world.  There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in Iraq because of a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law.  The grief visited on American and Iraqi families demands that we as citizens begin the process to restore the rule of law.  The murderous rampages in Iraq demand this.  The torture done in our name demands this.  The empowerment of states that will act on our lawless example if we do not impeach George Bush and return to a world of standards demands this.  Simple human decency demands this. 

A rule-based world matters.  The creation of these international bodies and rules, as well as the use of our influence over the last half-century to see they were followed, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation—one that respects and defends the rule of law.  If we demolish the fragile and delicate international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are worthless, if we allow these international legal systems to unravel, we will see our moral and political authority plummet.  We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies, and see visited upon us the evils we visit on others.

     Let us not forget the fact that if we do not put a stop to Resident Bush and Cheney, these United States of America will become the same as a  Soviet communist state. We are better than half way there already.

   I don't know about you, but I kind of like the freedoms that I have, what's left of them. I'd like to have my other ones back!

                      IMPEACH! INDICT! IMPRISON!

Tags: George Bush Dick Cheney impeachment America

Republicans Setting Democrats Up For Iraq War Loss?

The "Stab in the Back" Trap
    By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
    TruthOut| Guest Contributors

    Friday 27 April 2007

    The Democrats and the peace movement are walking into a trap.

    The Republicans are preparing with Rovian cunning to focus the mind of the public on the question: Who lost Iraq?

    And they are already giving the answer: The Democrats and the peace movement.

    Republicans are preparing to dominate future decades of American politics by blaming the failure of the Iraq war on those who "sent a signal" that the US would not "stay the course" whatever the cost. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have already begun to project such a "stab in the back" myth. At a recent Republican luncheon, Cheney told senators that "What's most troubling" about Sen. Harry Reid's recent comment that the war is lost "is his defeatism."

    It's a weak reed right now. But it will be much more serious when Americans are forced to face the chaos and humiliation that will come with recognition not only that America is failing, but that it has failed.

    At the moment, a combination of war weariness and President Bush's unpopularity prevent such an argument from gaining much traction. As long as people are eager for the war to end, they will think of the Republican argument primarily as an obstacle to getting out.

    But that will no longer protect the Democrats or the peace movement once the US occupation is ended and the subsequent regional conflagration and defeat of American surrogates has begun. The Swiftboating machine will go into high gear to blame each new outrage on those in the US who didn't give 100 percent support to the war.

    Democrats in Congress instinctively recognize this danger. Many respond by promoting mild policies like benchmarks and non-binding timetables, notwithstanding their constituents' demand for withdrawal. But the Republican strategy will cleverly ensnare even those who endorse such tepid measures, because it will blame defeat not only on an actual failure to provide material support for the troops, but on any "defeatist" who "sends a message to our enemies" that American domination will not be there forever.

    The crucial problem is that most Democrats seem to be calling for withdrawal or "redeployment" not because the war is wrong, but merely because it is failing. By framing the war as lost because of mismanagement, poor planning or being bogged down in a civil war, Democrats cede the argument that the war itself was a "noble cause." But if the war is right - if, as Bush maintains, it is necessary to prevent horrendous consequences - then the public will predictably blame those consequences on the "defeatists" who made America "cut and run."

    What's necessary to evade this trap is to define the war itself - rather than just the fact that America is losing it - as wrong. It is wrong because we were lied into it by a rogue executive intent on launching an illegal war and occupation, in violation of national and international law, the US Constitution and the UN Charter. And it is wrong because it has imposed an illegal occupation that has systematically violated the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act.

    The means to define Bush's war for the American people are at hand in the power of Congress to investigate executive branch actions. We are seeing that power being flexed in the use of subpoenas for documents and testimony by committees investigating the firings of US attorneys. But, so far, investigation of illegal war, occupation, torture and rendition has been pusillanimous at best.

    What's become of the investigations of the origins and conduct of the war and occupation that Democrats promised when they took over Congress at the start of 2007? According to a Congressional aide quoted in the April 25 Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have assigned staff members to monitor "what fights we're picking and how we're picking them." If so, they've assiduously avoided picking any fights that might implicate the Bush administration's "war on terror" in violations of US and international law. (The first break in this complicity of Congressional Democrats in the Bush administration's cover-up may be the 21-to-10 vote of Rep. Henry Waxman's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to authorize a subpoena requiring Condoleezza Rice to testify about the yellowcake uranium fraud.)

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) told The New York Times soon after last year's election that "the first order of business" when Democrats take over would be to reinvigorate Congressional scrutiny of the executive branch, with a focus on Iraq. He told Bob Geiger, "We're going to find out how intelligence was manipulated, taking us to war. We have to look back to be able to look forward." Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) promised to complete the Senate Intelligence Committee's stalled investigation of the political misuse of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. What's happened to this "first order of business"?

    Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) said he planed to investigate "extraordinary rendition." In the meantime, European governments have produced extensive documentation on the subject, and CIA officers are currently being tried in absentia in Italy for a kidnapping on the streets of Milan. Why has no administration official been forced to testify and supply documents about extraordinary rendition?

    Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "The photographs and reports of prisoner abuse in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere that have emerged during the past two years depict an interrogation and detention system operating contrary to US law and the Geneva Conventions." The American people deserve "detailed and accurate information about the role of the Bush administration in developing the interrogation policies and practices that have engendered such deep criticism and concern at home and around the world." Where are the subpoenas for that information?

    The Democrats can safely discredit the Bush administration by investigating scandals that illustrate corruption while leaving a criminal "national security" policy and its institutions unscathed. This is highly reminiscent of their strategy in the Watergate impeachment, when crimes like burglary were prosecuted but charges for far greater crimes like the secret, illegal, and deadly bombing of Cambodia were blocked.

    In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, Democrats and the peace movement were smeared for "losing Vietnam." This campaign was largely successful because the public was never given a full picture of the real purposes of the war and the full machinations of those who fomented it. As a result, their anger could be turned against those blamed for losing it, rather than those responsible for starting and perpetuating it. That's why the lessons of Vietnam were never learned - and why simply blaming Bush for defeat in Iraq, rather than educating the public about the real meaning of the war, will lay the groundwork for more Iraq-type wars in the future.

    There's plenty of evidence for the criminal violation of national and international law and the US Constitution by the architects of the Iraq war. But so far this evidence is not being presented to the American people by their representatives. As long as the American people hear that the only thing wrong with the war is that we're losing it, Democrats and the peace movement will be vulnerable to the Rovian trap.

    Many progressive members of Congress head committees that can begin serious investigations of those crimes at any time, but they're being "monitored" by Pelosi and Reid. Fortunately, Democratic leaders in Congress are unusually eager right now to curry favor with the peace movement. They should be told loud and clear: Unleash your committees to reveal the truth about the war to the American people. Otherwise, you'll be shot because you were the messenger who brought the bad news of American defeat.

    ---------

Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org.

    Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books include Globalization From Below and, with Jeremy Brecher and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan). He is current co-director of Global Labor Strategies and UCLA Law School's Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun. Contact him at smithb28@gmail.com.

Tags: Democrats Republicans Iraq war Harry Reid