June 20, 2007
Iraqi Labor Leaders Blame US for Bloodshed in Iraq and Say `Get Out!'
Don’t tell Faleh Abood Umara or Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein that you want the U.S. to quit Iraq, but that you’re worried about a resulting civil war.
The two Iraqi labor leaders, currently in Philadelphia as part of a U.S. tour sponsored by a coalition of American labor unions called U.S. Labor Against the War, say the U.S. is the cause of all the violence in Iraq, and argue that the sooner U.S. forces leave their country, the sooner things will start to get better.
“Did the occupier find us fighting each other when they came to Iraq?” asks Hashmeya, who is president of the Electric Utility Workers Union of Iraq. “No. The fighting among Iraqis started two and a half years after the Americans came.”
Faleh, general secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union based in Basra, agrees, saying that while the U.S. claims to be trying to quell the violence, “actually, since the U.S. has come into Iraq, they have done everything they could to encourage sectarian strife.” He asks, if Iraqis are just a bunch of sectarian fanatics, “How did we manage to get along in the past?”
Faleh, whose own brother was killed in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, accuses the U.S. of adopting policies that encourage divisions in Iraq, and of working covertly to foster more domestic violence.
Hashmeya, who regularly faces death threats, and threats to kidnap her seven-year-old son, for her part accuses not just the U.S, but also Britain, Israel, “and Iraq’s neighbors” of all working covertly to encourage the violence in Iraq. “They all have an interest in destroying the country,” she says angrily. A frequent international traveler, she notes that Iraqi and U.S. border control authorities make people leaving the country go through five or six checks, but that entering the country requires just one perfunctory showing of a passport. “They make it very easy for people to come into the country,” she says.
At the same time that they blame the U.S. for the chaos in their country, Faleh and Hashmeya also say that the situation is being misrepresented in the U.S. media, which focuses on the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. Of an average 1000 attacks in Iraq each week, only about 30 are by Iraqis against other Iraqis. The rest are attacks on American and British forces.
“We were happy to be rid of Saddam,” says Faleh, “but now the U.S. should get out of our country. Iraq’s number one problem now is the U.S. presence there.”
The two union leaders, who both worked in the banned Iraqi labor movement under Saddam Hussein before the U.S. invasion in 2003, note that the U.S. conquest of their country did nothing to improve the position of workers. Under the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by L. Paul Bremer, a Saddam-era ban on labor unions was left on the books, and continues to be in effect today. U.S. forces have fired on and killed workers demonstrating for their rights, while a decree in 2005 authorized the seizing of all union property.
Despite the ban on union activity in Iraq, and the hostility of both U.S. occupation forces and the current Iraqi government, Iraq’s union movement has grown, and oil workers have had some success in preventing the wholesale privatization of the country’s oil industry and its handover to foreign corporate control. Faleh says his union recently won a victory when its members struck in Basra in opposition to the oil privatization plan. “The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the workers surrounded, and ordered the army to attack and arrest the strikers,” he says, “but the commander of the Basra region refused and said he would “not arrest anyone who loves Iraq.” At the commander’s urging, the government agreed to put off action on an oil industry law until October, and to sit down and negotiate with the union. Faleh called the action a “big victory” for the union movement.
Asked about talk in the U.S. of an attack on Iran, and about how such an expansion of the war would impact the situation in Iraq, Faleh said, “I don’t think the U.S. will attack Iran. We think that they have mutual interests in Iraq.” Faleh added that the Iraqi union movement has good relations with the Iranian labor movement.
He said a U.S. attack on Iran would have terrible consequences in Iraq, because Iran would act to turn its backers in Iraq against U.S. forces, leading to a huge increase in the violence in Iraq.
“We have come to America to ask you to work for withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq,” Hashmeya told the over 100 assembled union and peace activists at their event in the Friends Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening. “People have the right to choose their own destiny. We are asking the U.S. to leave Iraq to its own people.”
--------------
Media Note: The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has paid to send its columnist Trudy Rubin all the way to Baghdad to interview Gen. David Petraeus (her column claiming the so-called Bush "surge" has a "chance to work" ran in today's paper)--didn't bother to send a reporter a couple blocks downtown to cover the Iraqi union leaders' talk. Nor did the Inquirer's sister paper, the Daily News, send a reporter. Philadelphians were left with the one-sided view that the U.S. is trying to stem the violence in Iraq.
======================
June 18, 2007
Democrats in Congress: The Wheels are Coming Off
The wheels are coming off the Democratic machine, with angry voters starting to lose patience with the Party’s chronic inability to act decisively on any of the key issues of public concern.
In a Reuters dispatch on June 18, Democratic leaders in Congress concede that voters are angry with them for not doing enough to end the Iraq War. They might have added that voters are also angry at them for not impeaching the president or even for moving on Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney (H Res. 333).
“I understand their disappointment. We raised the bar too high,” bleats Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
No Harry. You didn’t raise the bar too high. You ducked under the bar, when it came time to act to defund the war.
Last month, instead of cutting off funding for Bush’s war in Iraq, Congress passed a measure providing him with over $100 billion to fund it, attaching no strings to the measure—not even any deadlines for starting to withdraw troops. This after running a 2006 campaign on ending the war.
No wonder Democrats and the independents and, yes, even Republicans who voted Democrats into control of Congress last November are furious.
“We can only do so much,” whines House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
No, Nancy. The problem is that you have done so little. Next to nothing really. Of the vaunted list of progressive measures you came into office as Speaker promising to push, only one—the minimum wage bill—passed, and you managed that only by making it “blood money”—that is, by tying it to the Iraq War funding bill so that the president wouldn’t veto it. That was a sick deal—making the same poor Americans who disproportionately carry the burden of fighting an insane, criminal and brutal war in Iraq also earn their raise by funding that war with their hard-earned tax dollars. And besides, it’s a pathetic measure anyway, offering workers only a minor raise for the first year, and ultimately, after a year and a half, bringing them to a wage--$7.80 per hour—that most workers in the country already receive, or will be receiving by July, thanks to state laws.
Thanks a lot!
Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi, who cannot stand up to a criminal president, has continued to stand in the way of any effort by her own party colleagues to call the administration to account for the crimes it has committed against the nation and the Constitution. Sure, Congress is holding hearings, but the president and vice president are, quite predictably, stonewalling those hearings, refusing to allow key aides to testify, refusing to provide documents, and threatening to refuse subpoenas.
What Americans want is impeachment hearings on both men.
Let’s at least start with Kucinich’s Cheney impeachment bill. It has seven co-sponsors. That should be plenty to indicate that it’s a serious measure. So let’s push it forward and start hearings on it.
Meanwhile, if Pelosi wants Americans to start thinking better of her party, she should lift the shackles from her minions and let Democratic House members freely file bills of impeachment against President Bush. She should let John Conyers (D-MI), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, start holding hearings on impeachment.
Too divisive?
Listen, Nancy and Harry, we Americans want a little divisiveness. Americans thrive on political conflict.
Besides, we’re sick of this war, and of the men who tricked us into it. We’re sick of seeing our cherished rights trashed. We’re sick of being told that we in this country are a bunch of whimpering wusses ready to surrender our rights in the fear that some third world bomb-thrower might attack the local Wendy’s.
Americans expected, and still want, the Democrats in Congress to stand up to the White House, not to cave in to it, or to try and “work with” it.
Pelosi and Reid, and the idiots at the party’s helm, think that by continuing to do nothing, all the while whining about their own impotence, they stand to gain mightily in November 2008.
They’re in for a big surprise.
If they continue the way they’re going, they’ll lose not only the independents and Republicans who voted for Democratic candidates in 2006, they’ll lose the Democrats too.
============================
June 14, 2007
Cheney Impeachment Watch: Now There Are 8
It’s getting almost entertaining to watch how long it will take for the corporate media to finally admit to the American public that there is a serious move underway in Congress to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Almost two months ago, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) submitted a bill of impeachment (H. Res. 333) against the vice president, charging him with lying about the reasons for invading Iraq, and for illegally threatening to invade Iran—something we know that Cheney is still doing with a vengeance. Almost no major media outlet reported on the Kucinich bill. The New York Times only grudgingly mentioned it in passing while reporting on the first Democratic presidential debate, and then only because candidate Kucinich was asked about it.
` The well-trained corporate media press corps in Washington has also politely refrained from asking House Speaker Nancy “Impeachment is off the table” Pelosi about the Kucinich bill. They haven’t pressed House Judiciary Chair John Conyers either (though I suspect his wife, Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers, who rammed through a council resolution calling on the House to initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, does probably ask him every morning at breakfast when he’s going to act on his own professed convictions).
This polite silence is as incredible as it is shameful and unprofessional—the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a country with a state-controlled media like China, or in a quasi-police state like Russia, but not in a nation which boasts of its “free” press.
Meanwhile, over the past few weeks, members of a cowed, Pelosi-whipped Democratic congressional caucus have slowly been coming around to support Rep. Kucinich’s bill. One by one, progressive legislators have signed onto the bill as co-sponsors. The most recent co-sponsor is Rep. Maxine Waters, a popular black congresswoman from Los Angeles who heads the House Out of Iraq Caucus and who has openly talked of impeachment of both Bush and Cheney in the past.
While six earlier co-sponsors signed on to H Res. 333 quietly, Waters announced her support for the Cheney impeachment bill on June 13 in a joint press conference with Kucinich. Her decision to support Cheney’s impeachment will certainly embolden other members of Congress to sign on too.
Still, the Waters-Kucinich press conference received almost no mainstream press coverage. The right-wing Moonie paper the Washington Times was the only daily to report on the event.
One wonders how many members of Congress will have to become co-sponsors of the Cheney impeachment drive before the corporate media will finally treat it seriously as a news story. A companion question is how many members will have to add their names to the bill before the House leadership will feel compelled to bring the matter up in the House Judiciary Committee.
House Democratic leaders, along with their counterparts in the Senate, are recognizing that the American public is fast losing patience with their inaction and ineffectiveness since taking power after the November election that handed them control of the Congress. Fifteen state Democratic Parties have now passed resolutions calling for impeachment, along with over 70 towns and cities and one state senate (Vermont). The public clearly wants an end to the Iraq War, and polls make it clear they also want action on impeachment. Yet the leadership remains enamored of a disastrous strategy of do-nothingism, hoping that the Bush administration and the Republican Party will simply self-destruct, if Democrats just keep their heads low.
The American public knows better. They know that the Bush administration is capable of anything, and that it is hell-bent on war and more war. And they are sick of this administration, with polls showing support for Bush falling still further, into the 20s (Cheney has been in single digits for some time now).
It has become a waiting game. Watch as the number of Kucinich impeachment bill co-sponsors rise.
At some point, a somnolent press corps will have to react and announce that impeachment is happening.
At some point, Pelosi will have to start setting the table for impeachment hearings.
------------------
Current list of H Res 333 cosponsors:
Albert Wynn (D-MD), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), William Lacy Clay (D-MO), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Maxine Waters (D-CA). Congresswomen Lee and Woolsey are co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the Democratic Party. Rep. Schakowsky is the third ranked member of the House Leadership, with the title of Chief Deputy Whip, and is also a member of the Progressive Caucus.
==========================
June 12, 2007
Congressional Failure and the Democrats' Last Chance
The Senate Democrats’ failure to push through a simple vote of no-confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, following on the heels of the Democratic Congress’s abject surrender on the issue of continued funding of the Iraq War and occupation, make it clear that the only appropriate course of action for the balance of 110th Congress is impeachment.
The vaunted hearings that incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised when they took control of Congress after the November election have come to nothing, as the president and his cabinet officers stonewall and ignore subpoenas. Moreover, it has been amply demonstrated that nothing of consequence in the way of progressive legislation can be passed by Democrats with the narrow majorities they have in the House and especially in the Senate. Even the raising of the minimum wage—one of Pelosi’s and Reid’s key goals for this congressional session—could only be achieved by attaching that measure to the obscene Iraq funding bill, reducing it nothing but blood money.
Such a tactic—attaching Democratic bills to offensive bills that Congressional Republicans will support and that can avoid a presidential veto or signing statement--is too high a price to pay for such small “victories.”
Congressional Democrats need to forget about passing symbolic bills that can never become law, and need to stop talking compromise and comity. The public made it clear anyhow in the 2006 election that they don’t want comity; they want a genuine opposition party in Congress.
So far, what they’ve gotten instead is a cardboard cutout of an opposition in the Capitol.
We are dealing with a criminal administration, and the only way to get to the bottom of that administration’s criminality and abuse of authority is via impeachment hearings.
And the only way to get those hearings going is massive pressure from the public—a public that polls have demonstrated wants impeachment to begin.
For starters, every Democrat, and every patriotic American who cares about the survival of democratic government and the Bill of Rights, not to mention the safe return of all the men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan, needs to contact their elected representatives and say that supporting impeachment is a bottom-line issue. Do it or lose our support!
Second, every one of us needs to contact our newspaper and television editors to demand that they start reporting on the grassroots impeachment movement, and on the crimes of this administration. It is simply unacceptable for an organization that calls itself a news program or a newspaper to ignore the fact that there is, right now, a bill in Congress, with seven co-sponsors, calling for the impeachment of the vice president. It is simply unacceptable that not one of the many books (my own included) laying out the case for impeachment, a number of them by major publishers, has been reviewed by the mainstream media. It is simply unacceptable that the key so-called alternative news programs, like NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Talk of the Nation,” have been refusing to interview impeachment experts like Dennis Loo, Elizabeth de la Vega and myself. It is simply unacceptable that no news reporters in the national media have bothered to call up House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers to ask how his book, The Constitution in Crisis, published last year, can call for impeachment, and include a foreword by former representative Elizabeth Holtzman saying, "This pattern of immunity for presidents must stop. Impeaching President Bush for lying to get us into a war will not only protect us from him, but also send an unmistakable message to future presidents: never again,” while Conyers himself, as Judiciary Committee chair, simply sits today on Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s Cheney impeachment bill (H Res. 333), and has said nothing about impeaching the president. It is simply unacceptable that no mainstream reporter has asked Speaker Pelosi how she can insist that impeachment is “off the table” in this Congress, when we’re talking about a president who has been declared a serial felon by a federal district court, and when we’re talking about a president who openly claims the right to ignore laws passed by this very Congress.
We know the situation: Pelosi, Reid and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership have concluded that the Bush administration, wildly unpopular and clearly inept and tangled in a losing and hugely unpopular war, is going to lose badly in 2008, and that if they don’t do anything controversial, they stand to reap gains a the polls in November, 2008. That’s why they are down there in Washington pretending to be legislators and pretending to be an opposition, but are avoiding doing anything seriously confrontational.
We, the American public, need to let these cynical Democratic leaders know that their scheme for 2008 is going to fail. We need to let them know that this time we aren’t buying their minimalist politics. If they can’t take a stand for the Constitution when it’s in crisis, and if they can’t take a stand to end a war that has been an unmitigated disaster for the nation and the world, we’re going to let them go down.
The Democratic Party has one last chance to rescue itself from an oblivion it richly deserves. If Congressional Democrats would start the impeachment process rolling, as the public wants, they would find themselves going into the 2008 presidential election on a wave of support not seen since the 1936 New Deal campaign of FDR.
If they don’t do it, they may find themselves actually losing the presidential race, and perhaps the Senate too.
And it will be time to say good riddance.
========================
June 11, 2007
Things Your Media Mama Didn't Tell You
The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common sense of the citizens of this nation.
It sure isn’t thanks to the quality of the news we’re getting here in America!
Here are ten of the things you don’t know if you just depend on the corporate media for your information:
1. Most Americans would like to see this president and vice president impeached and removed from office. Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that 51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally haven’t met a poll they won’t publish, didn’t publicize this one. And now, when the numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can’t even pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who favor impeachment still think they’re odd ducks.
2. There is a bill, filed in the House of Representatives on April 24 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. Since it was filed, it has gained six co-sponsors, including a member of the House Democratic leadership, Rep. Janice Shakowsky (D-IL). Most major media have ignored this important story completely. Most Americans also don’t know that the Vermont State Senate voted overwhelmingly this spring to call on Congress to impeach the president.
3. The president has been declared a felon in federal court. Yet even after Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last August that President Bush and the National Security Agency were committing serial Class A felonies and were violating both the First and Fourth Amendments by spying on Americans’ communications without first obtaining warrants, Bush continued ordering the NSA to continue the patently illegal program for at least half a year. In reports on the spying program, the corporate media never mention that it has been declared a felonious activity by the federal court.
4. Fifteen Democratic state party organizations have passed impeachment resolutions calling on Democrats in Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president. The most recent of these, the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, passed its resolution at the party’s annual convention on May 19. Other Democratic Party conventions, in states from Nevada and California to Massachusetts and North Carolina, have passed similar resolutions. Most have been ignored by the corporate media even in their own states.
5. Bush’s so-called “coalition of the willing” is not so willing and is not really much of a coalition either. When’s the last time you’ve heard how many countries are on board with the US in the war and occupation of Iraq? The reality? Britain, the only significant contributor of combat troops besides the U.S., is pulling out, as Italy and Spain did earlier, and many other countries, like Denmark, Lithuania and others, plan to be out of Iraq by August or at the latest December. One indication of the seriousness of situation: the Pentagon no longer lists the countries that are members of the “coalition.” The only mainstream report I’ve seen laying out this collapse in international support for Bush’s war was in USA Today last February.
6. The Homeland Security Department last year awarded Halliburton $385 million in a no-bid contract to construct prison camps designed to hold tens of thousands of unspecified prisoners in the event of domestic unrest. Meanwhile, President Bush has signed a bill altering the insurrection act so that he can declare martial rule and order active duty troops to take charge anywhere in the domestic US in the event of “public disorder.” No one in the corporate media has reported on these developments or asked the White House to explain what it’s all about.
7. There is evidence that Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a patron of the Washington Madam whose client book of high-class call-girls is causing many in Washington political circles--mostly Republicans it appears, who apparently need to pay for their sex--to sweat. So far no mention of the Cheney angle in the corporate media, though they’ve been having fun with the broader story of a political sex scandal. No mention either of how a brave West Point cadet a few weeks ago refused to shake Cheney’s hand on stage when the vice president was handing out this year’s diplomas at the military’s premiere officer academy.
8. Among the “worst of the worst” of the “evildoers” captured and held as “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo were children, some of them preteens and kids who were under 15 when captured and brought to the island of Cuba--so many in fact that the military had to set up a special facility, called Camp Iguana, just for adolescent and pre-pubescent “fighters.” The corporate media have barely reported on this atrocity (the New York Times ran only one article mentioning child captives, in June 2005). The only wider coverage of this outrage came recently when the government tried to prosecute one such alleged child “terrorist”--Omar Khadr--only to have the military judge in charge toss his case out because the government had misclassified him. Khadr, we learned, was captured in 2001 in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 15, making him one of the older child captives brought to and interrogated at Guantanamo. Under international law, the U.S. was supposed to treat this and other child soldiers as victims, not as war criminals. Khadr, a Canadian by birth, instead has spent five years doing hard time in US captivity.
9. Well-researched reports on the rampant theft of both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and on Republican plans for theft of the 2008 election, such as Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again, have gone unmentioned in the corporate media. Books on the subject, like Miller’s and like Greg Palast’s best selling Armed Madhouse, have never been reviewed.
10. And of course, there’s my own book. The Case for Impeachment, despite its having sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover, and despite its having now come out in a mass-market paperback edition, in both cases printed by a mainstream publisher, St. Martin’s Press, has not received a single review in the corporate media. In this, my co-author Barbara Olshansky and I are not alone. None of the books on the impeachable crimes of this administration, including one by Nixon-era impeachment panelist and former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, and one by Judiciary Chair Rep. John Conyers, has been reviewed by a mainstream media outlet.
What we’re talking about here is nothing less than a media blackout of important stories and news.
Thanks to the internet and to the grapevine, and thanks to their basic native intelligence, most Americans seem to understand that we’re being lied to and cheated. What the media blackout of important news does manage to do, however, is keep us all thinking that we are in a minority in opposing things like illegal wars, a trampled Constitution, and stolen elections.
In fact, however, we’re actually the majority. Once we realize this, maybe we will have a movement, instead of a just nation of isolated cynics and complainers.
=============================
June 8, 2007
Impeachment on a Roll
Down the shore yesterday, as we say in Philly, I was body surfing in the Atlantic and it got me to thinking.
On the East Coast, where the prevailing winds are offshore, the surf tends to be pretty tame, and Thursday was no exception, with the biggest waves cresting at perhaps three feet. Nonetheless, these little combers were able to send my prone body racing 100 feet toward the beach at a good clip.
There’s a lot of energy packed in even a small wave.
Just so with impeachment, where a wave is slowly building for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Since Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) filed his impeachment bill against Cheney back April 24, five other members of the House have signed on as co-sponsors, most recently Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She joins Reps. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL and chief deputy whip of the House), William Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Albert Wynn (D-MD) as co-sponsors of H. Res. 333.
------------------
Flash Update! Just to make the point about how this wave is building, shortly after I filed this piece, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), another co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus, signed on as a co-sponsor of H.Res. 333. Cheney has to be starting to sweat...
----------------------
Kucinich’s bill is narrowly focused on Cheney’s criminal role in lying the nation into an illegal invasion of Iraq, and on his illegal threat to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran.
The wave that is building in the House for impeachment of this criminal administration may seem small, but it is definitely building. As each new representative signs on to H. Res. 333 as a co-sponsor, others gain courage and find it easier to buck the “leadership” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al.
It seems likely that as the magnitude of that wave grows, some members will add to the list of Cheney’s crimes with their own additional impeachment bills. After all, Cheney was clearly behind the illegal outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, was involved in the politicization of the Justice Department, and is now known to have been involved in the illegal, warrantless wiretapping and internet monitoring of American citizens by the National Security Agency.
At some point, there will surely be a second wave, which will begin with a member impeachment bill against President Bush.
Evidence that Pelosi is losing her footing is coming in many forms.
There’s the impeachment resolution passed late last month by the Detroit City Council. Now there have been nearly 100 such resolutions passed around the country, but this one stands out because it was introduced by Council President Monica Conyers, who happens to be the wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which would be where any impeachment hearing would be conducted. Conyers was once a leading advocate of the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, but buckled when Pelosi threatened to deny him the coveted chair of the Judiciary Committee. Clearly, his wife thinks he shouldn’t have caved, and Conyers is showing signs of wanting action on impeachment. He has lately taken to encouraging the actions of impeachment activists.
There are also the many resolutions calling for impeachment of Bush and Cheney which have been passed, often overwhelmingly, by state Democratic Parties, including those in California, Massachusetts and North Carolina.
Finally, there are the statements from Democratic politicians, who are looking increasingly ridiculous in their efforts to avoid talking impeachment. Take Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY). Nadler, back in 2006, was a member of the group of 39 House members in the 109th Congress who signed on to Rep. Conyers’ then bill calling for a select committee to investigate impeachable crimes by the administration (that bill died with the end of the 109th Congress). Recently, Nadler, who sat on the impeachment panel during the Clinton impeachment farce, and who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, declared in a recent radio interview that “there’s a prima facie case” that the president and the attorney general “engaged in a criminal conspiracy.” He went on to say that when the executive branch is “contemptuous of the power of Congress” and breaks or ignores the law, then “you have to use whatever weapons the Constitution gives Congress.”
Now Nadler is no dummy. He knows that the main “tool” that the Constitution gives to Congress to combat such presidential lawlessness and abuse of power is impeachment.
Nadler’s constituency in Manhattan isn’t stupid either. They know that the president has been committing impeachable crimes, and that the remedy is impeachment. The same is true of Rep. Conyers’ constituents.
It seems only a matter of time before these leaders, and others like them, are going to have to take a stand and buck Pelosi and the sell-out Democratic leadership that is trying to adopt a do-nothing strategy ahead of the 2008 elections.
One thing you can say about waves--even small ones--and that is that they are pretty much unstoppable. Another thing you can say is that they wear down resistance--especially when the resistance is insubstantial. A third thing is that they are never alone. They keep on coming, one after another after another.
I’m betting that we’re going to see Pelosi and her anti-impeachment position swamped by the power of public pressure, and by the actions of those members of Congress who take the views of their constituents seriously.
Surf’s up!
===============================
June 6, 2007
Author (Yours Truly) Makes Case for Impeaching Bush
From the Charleston, W. Va. Gazette:
By Rick Steelhammer, staff writer
There might not be enough impeachment votes in Congress to remove President Bush from office, but author and journalist Dave Lindorff believes the impeachment process would bring to light enough abuses of presidential power to derail his second term.
"Once his crimes are laid out on national television, he’ll be thrown overboard by his own party, or, like Nixon, he’ll strike a deal to leave office,” predicted Lindorff, who was in the Charleston area Monday to speak at West Virginia State University.
Lindorff, a former Los Angeles Daily News reporter and the former China correspondent for Businessweek, has written for The Nation, Rolling Stone, Forbes and Salon, in addition to producing an online column at www.thiscantbehappening.net [1]. Last year, the two-time Fulbright scholar co-authored The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush, produced by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
In an interview preceding his appearance at State, Lindorff said he considers himself generally pessimistic about the odds of a Bush impeachment trial taking place, given the hands-off stance taken by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders.
“The congressional leadership is moving very slow at this point,” he said. “But things tend to move fast in Congress once they do move, so I can’t say, no, it won’t happen. Eleven states are considering impeachment resolutions now, and a Newsweek poll last October showed that 51 percent of the American public favor impeachment.”
Despite growing grassroots support for impeachment, “Nancy Pelosi and the leading Democrats are following a very cynical strategy,” Lindorff said. “Their position is that since this administration is screwing up so badly, and since the Democrats can’t pass anything of consequence with the narrow margin they now have, they’ll win a bigger margin in both houses next election by doing nothing.”
To continue, click here
========================
June 2, 2007
Iraq (and Iran) Rag
To the tune of "Fixin' to Die Rag" (Words by Dave Lindorff, with apologies to Country Joe MacDonald)
Come on all you fine women and men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
Bush has run us all off the track
Out in a place they call Iraq
So forget that job and pick up a gun
We’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.
Chorus:
And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me I don’t give a heck
Next stop is Iraq.
And it’s five, six, seven open up the pearly gates
Ain’t no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We’re all bound to die!
All you folks in the National Guard
You won't be defending your own backyard.
We may have floods and earthquakes here
But you'll be dodging bullets in the desert air.
If that's not what you signed up for
We'll send you there a few times more.
Chorus
Come on generals, dive right in
Your big chance has come again
The VC whupped you back in ’74
But now you can show them A-Rabs what for
And maybe even earn you a medal or three
While sitting at a desk in D.C.
Chorus
Come on Wall Street, here’s the deal:
Iraqi oil is yours to steal
American blood, Iraqis’ too,
Is being spilled now just for you.
And you can charge us as much as you dare
'Cause Bush and Cheney don’t care!
Chorus
Come on mothers, don’t hold back
Send your sons off to Iraq
Come on fathers, don’t feel bad.
Your daughters too can go to Baghdad.
If they die there they come home free
And nobody has to see.
Chorus
Bush and Cheney, you’ve done your best
You’ve made the Middle East into one big mess.
But that’s okay. You’ve got a plan:
To divert attention, just bomb Iran!
If people start saying they want to impeach
Just pack ‘em off to Gitmo Beach!
Chorus
==============================
May 31, 2007
Conyers is my Constitutional Hero
When it comes to defending the Constitution from the saboteurs of freedom and democracy in the Bush administration, my hero is Conyers.
Not Congressman Conyers. He had a shot at the title during 2005, when he was holding informal hearings on the administration’s impeachable crimes, and in 2006, when he published a book laying out the case for impeachment, but he lost his chance when he buckled under pressure from then minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who about a year ago began insisting that should the Democrats take over Congress, impeachment would be “off the table.”
Rep. Conyers, who as chairman of the judiciary committee of the House would be in charge of impeachment hearings, has made it clear that he believes the president should be impeached, but he has not stood up to Speaker Pelosi, or challenged her absurd position on impeachment.
No, I’m referring to Conyers’ wife, Monica.
As president pro tempore of the Detroit City Council and a political leader in her own right, Monica Conyers clearly isn’t swayed by Pelosi. Indeed, last week she sponsored a resolution in the Detroit City Council which passed unanimously. That resolution doesn’t mince words. It calls for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney for defrauding the public to justify launching a war of aggression against Iraq. It also calls for their impeachment for ordering illegal spying on Americans, for ordering torture, and for doing away with habeas corpus.
Here is the full text of the resolution, which was drawn up by the Detroit chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and which was endorsed by the Gray Panthers, Veterans for Peace, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Latinos Unidos and Michigan Impeach.org:
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired with others to defraud the United States of America by intentionally misleading Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war in violation of Title 18 United States Code, Section 371; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush has admitted to ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of American civilians without seeking warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, duly constituted by Congress in 1978, in violation of Title 50 United States Code, Section 1805; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired to commit the torture of prisoners in violation of the “Federal Torture Act” Title 18 United States Code, Section 113C, the UN Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention, which under Article VI of the Constitution are part of the “supreme Law of the Land”; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney acted to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights by ordering indefinite detention without access to legal counsel, without charge and without the opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation by the President of a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant”, all in subversion of law; and
WHEREAS, In all of this George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have acted in a manner contrary to their trust as President and Vice President, subversive of constitutional government to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the City of Detroit and of the United States of America; and
WHEREAS, Petitions from the country at large may be presented by the Speaker of the House according to Clause 3 of House Rule XII;
Be it resolved that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, warrant impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.
The city council resolution is to be presented to Congress as a petition.
I hope it is also put “on the table” at the Conyers household, where I suspect Monica Conyers will be exerting considerable pressure on her significant other to do something about it.
After all, just a year ago, he was saying those same things himself.
It must be galling to Monica Conyers that her husband lately has been paying more attention to that “other woman” in Washington than to her own wise counsel. Let’s hope that the Detroit city council resolution was not just a political act, but also a shot across the bow in Conyers family domestic relations—one that will convince John Conyers that he needs to stand up for his own principles and beliefs, not just buckle under political pressure.
=======================
May 29, 2007
Whatever Happened to Signing Statements?
Perhaps the best indication of the toothlessness and complicity of the new Democratic Congress is that President Bush, who between September 2001 and December 2006 used so-called “signing statements” and a bogus claim of extra-constitutional executive authority as commander in chief in time of war to invalidate 1200 laws or parts of laws passed by Congress, hasn’t issued a single one since January.
As for vetoes, there was just one, for the first Iraq War supplemental funding bill—the one that actually contained a deadline of sorts for ending the conflict.
The truth is, this Congress, elected by a public that made it clear it was sick and tired of the Iraq War, has really done little or nothing to challenge the president—not on global warming, not on the Iraq War, and not on his unilateral gutting of traditional and Constitutionally protected civil liberties.
The truth is, there has been little for this president to object to coming out of this supposedly oppositional Congress.
On Memorial Day, as close to 150,000 US troops risk death and create mayhem in Iraq, as 3500 soldiers’ graves at home get fresh flowers, as 26,000 gravely injured Iraq War veterans nurse their wounds with little help from an over-stretched and underfunded Veterans Administration medical system, we Americans have to face the fact that we have lost control of our government to a trillion-dollar war machine that moves of its own accord.
A criminal president and vice president have succeeded in tricking us into a war that had no justification, and that can have no good end. And what once was an opposition party has succumbed, though a combination of greed and cowardice, to become an accomplice in crime.
The president, now surely among the least popular leaders in the nation’s long history, has no need of signing statements any longer because he faces no organized opposition in Washington.
The amazing thing is that most Americans seem to understand what has happened. A few years ago, it took a certain amount of fortitude to wear a peace button, or to put an anti-war bumper sticker on one’s car. It took a certain amount of courage to hold a sign calling for the president’s impeachment. Today, do any of those things, and you’re far more likely to get a thumbs up sign, or a wry smile of agreement anywhere you go in the country.
Americans everywhere know we’ve been lied to, misled and sold a bill of goods with Iraq and the so-called War on Terror. But we also are coming to understand that there is little we can do about it with the Congress we’ve got.
We elected people who vowed to stand up and put a stop to the crimes, and after we voted them into office, they have failed us.
We’ve all learned this without the help of the mainstream media, which goes on about its devious business of pretending that everything is as it was, with two combative and ideologically opposed parties.
The public knows better.
Maybe now we can really start to tackle the problem.
Some progressive Democrats like Progressive Democrats of America and Democrats.com are calling for candidates to mount primary challenges against the sell-out Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who are making president Bush’s job so easy.
That’s great. With luck, the voters will realize this is their chance to revivify the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, and maybe some of those leaders will be dumped.
The next step will be what we, the voters, do in the next general election. Will we revert to form and vote yet again for what used to be called the “lesser evil,” but which is now revealed as just another face of the same evil? Or will we abandon the frauds and withhold our vote from those who promise much and then betray us?
===============
May 25, 2007
Democratic Blood Money
The Democrats, fresh from selling out the soldiers and marines in Iraq by handing the mad George Bush $120 billion to continue funding his war, are claiming victory.
Oh, they can’t hide the fact that they gave up on the war issue. But they’re quick to brag that they won a big one by cleverly including in the war funding supplemental bill a hike in the minimum wage, bringing the federal rate from the current $5.15/hour to $7.25.
But America’s long-suffering working poor better hold the champagne.
This bold stroke on their behalf by Congressional Democrats won’t happen right away. Although America’s lowest paid workers have been slaving away at $5.15 an hour since last September 1, they won’t get the first part of the new pay increase until the end of this summer, when it will go up a whopping 13 percent to $5.85 per hour (to put that in perspective, that’s $28/week more, less taxes, for someone working a 40-hour week). They’ll have to wait until around this time next year before they get another boost to $6.55 an hour, and they won’t get that full $7.25 an hour that the Democrats are hooting about until 2009.
And remember, we’re talking about blood money here.
This was a raise paid for in the blood of American servicepeople, and the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them innocent children—something to think about this Memorial Day weekend.
Besides, that whole raise of 40 percent over two years will actually look a whole lot less by the time they get it, thanks to the actions of Bush and the Democratic Congress.
Figure that the Iraq War, which is costing the nation, at this point, over $300 billion a year in cold cash, and probably double that if you factor in the credit on the debt (the whole thing is being paid for on credit), is a major reason the dollar is sinking against major currencies. That means higher prices for most imported goods, which means just about everything that working stiffs have to buy. It also means higher than necessary interest rates, because keeping interest rates high relative to other countries is the only way the U.S. has left to keep the dollar from crashing totally to the level of a third world currency. Those higher interest rates mean higher mortgage costs and higher credit card interest payments to working people. And don’t forget gas prices. The oil companies will tell you that the doubling of gas prices since Bush took office is all a matter of “market forces,” but the truth is it’s mostly been the war and threats to Middle East supplies that have bid up the per-barrel price and allowed the gouging to happen.
So netting it all out, it’s likely that the higher minimum wage the Democrats just bought at the price of giving Bush his war money will simply vanish by the time people get it.
Besides, the federal minimum wage increase is much less of a deal than it might even appear, since many states have already raised the minimum wage for their workers. In California, workers earn at least $7.50/hour, and that goes to $8.00/hour next January. In New York, the minimum wage is $7.15. It’s also $7.15/hour in Alaska, and will be on July 1 in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Illinois workers, currently earning $6.95/hour, will see their minimum go to $7.50 on July 1. Many other states have minimum wages close to or above $7.00/hour already.
Some deal those Democrats made with Bush!
Boy, they really stood tough with a president who was bargaining from a 28 percent approval rating in the polls. Kind of makes you proud you voted them into control of Congress last November doesn’t it?
Spend it well!
===========================
May 24, 2007
Kerrycrats All, and a Democratic War
The defining moment of the disastrous and laughable presidential campaign of John Kerry for president came when he tried to explain his vacillating and spineless position on the Iraq War, saying, of an earlier war funding appropriations bill "I voted for the bill before I voted against it."
That sleazy, two-faced, slippery effort to have it both ways, to give himself the ability to tell some voters he was "supporting the troops" while telling others he was "against the war," sank his candidacy faster than any swiftboat cannonfire could have hoped to.
Now Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and a whole slew of so-called Congressional progressives, are trying the same gambit. Pelosi and Reid, too timid to seriously confront President Bush and call a halt to the disastrous war on Iraq by simply refusing to fund it, have orchestrated a bill that provides the president full funding to carry on with the killing for the rest of his term, while allowing those of them who have to confront anti-war voters to claim they voted against their own measure.
"I will vote against this bill," says Pelosi, who personally crafted this cave-in to Bush and Cheney.
The whole Democratic Party caucus in Congress has morphed horribly into John Kerry clones.
They will be voting against the war funding bill that they engineered, knowing that with Republican support, the bill will pass and go to the president with no strings attached.
The Iraq War is now fully a Democratic War. The hand-off is complete, just as the handoff of the Democratic Vietnam War was handed off to Richard Nixon and the Republicans in 1968.
One can only hope that the Kerrycrats, including Pelosi, Reid, and the rest, will suffer the same fate as did presidential candidate John Kerry, in the coming primaries and the 2008 general election.
Voters remember: It's not what candidates say; it's what they actually do, or don't do.
=====================
May 24, 2007
Verdict Nullification?
(This article of mine appeared May 24 in the Philadelphia City Paper)
When the name Mumia Abu-Jamal comes up in local conversation, the debate immediately begins over whether he is guilty of a murder that has kept him on Pennsylvania's death row for 25 years. Rarely does it address the underlying question of whether he had a fair trial or appeal process.
Now, three 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges are mulling key elements that pertain to that very crucial question. They are also considering whether to uphold a 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn that overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence for the Dec. 9, 1981, murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
The key claim argued before the three-judge panel during a two-and-a-half-hour hearing last Thursday (May 17) in the packed Ceremonial Courtroom of the federal courthouse was whether the prosecutor at the 1982 trial, Joseph McGill, improperly removed potential qualified jurors because of race.
For the rest of the story, go to: Verdict Nullification? [2]
======================
May 21, 2007
Widening Chasm Between House Democrats and Democratic Voters
The divide between Democratic leaders contemplating their re-election prospects in 2008 and rank-and-file Democrats is becoming a chasm--one so wide that Congressional Democrats may soon find it hard to straddle it.
The issue is impeachment.
So far, Democrats in Congress and at the top of the party hierarchy, out of touch with public sentiment and worried that impeachment could hurt them with "independents"--whom they mistakenly consider to stand somehow "in between" Democrats and Republicans--have been following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vow that for the 110th Congress, "impeachment is off the table." They've been doing more than that: they have been actively working to tamp down, and even to crush, impeachment campaigns in the states. For example, in the state of Washington, an effort to get the state to pass a joint legislative resolution which would have compelled the Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings was derailed after the Democratic leadership dispatched two of the state's leading federal elected officials, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee, to press legislative leaders to block a floor vote. Similar pressure doomed efforts that might have passed in the legislatures of New Mexico and Vermont (The Vermont Senate did pass the resolution).
Meanwhile, down at the state and local level, Democratic Party committee after Democratic Party committee is voting out resolutions calling for impeachment. The latest Democratic Party organization to call for impeachment of both Bush and Cheney is the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which at its state convention on Saturday, May 19, voted out a strong measure calling on the state’s elected representatives in Washington to investigate Bush and Cheney for misleading the nation into war, for authorizing torture, and for warrantless wiretapping. The message concludes: "If the investigation supports the charges, vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney as provided in the Constitution."
Massachusetts Democrats thus join California's huge Democratic Party, which passed a similar resolution less than a month ago at its annual convention, in what was widely perceived as a slap at Pelosi, who represents a district in San Francisco.
To date, 14 state Democratic Parties have now called for impeachment.
But that's only part of the story. Vermont's state senate has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for impeachment. Similar resolutions are being considered in the legislatures of 17 states. Over 80 cities, towns and counties have passed impeachment resolutions, as have at least that many town and county Democratic Party organizations, even in conservative areas such as Berkes and Chester County in Pennsylvania.
Many of these resolutions have been the work of the Progressive Democrats of America organization. Others have been promoted by ad hoc groups.
The impeachment resolutions, which have also been passed by Democratic Parties in so-called "red" states like Nevada and North Carolina, are a clear sign that impeachment is the will of the party's rank and file.
Polls have consistently shown that the broader public also wants the president and vice president impeached.
In October 2006, Newsweek published a scientific poll disclosing that 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment, half of them as a top priority.
That poll, of course, was taken before Democrats had gained control of the House and Senate, and also before Bush, ignoring the anti-war message of voters in November, decided to increase the number of US troops in his misbegotten and calamitous war in Iraq.
Another more recent poll, taken by a right-wing organization called InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion, found that 39 percent of respondents favored impeachment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney together. The percentage for impeachment would almost certainly have been significantly higher if impeaching the two men had been offered as separate options in the poll.
Recent news developments are only making impeachment more popular with the public at large. The worsening Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and the President’s intransigence and obsession with continuing the slaughter of innocents and the sacrifice of Americans, has driven his popularity down to 28 percent, and the vice president’s to below 9 percent. The prosecutors firing scandal is taking down the attorney general, while exposing the outlines of one aspect of a six-year-long White House-orchestrated campaign to undermine the democratic election process using control of the justice system. And it is now becoming clear that the president's illegal National Security Agency spying program has been so outrageous an assault on Americans’ civil liberties that even then Attorney General John Ashcroft, himself a walking threat to the Bill of Rights, refused to sign on, despite his being pressed to do so from a hospital bed.
At this point, the Congressional leadership, including Pelosi and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), really need to start worrying that they may start looking ridiculous. Indeed, the Detroit City Council a few days ago passed a resolution calling on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, and one of those voting for the resolution was Conyers’ own wife, herself a Detroit alderwoman!
Clearly the president has authorized an illegal spying campaign, and has already been declared to have committed a felony by a Detroit federal judge who tried the issue last summer. Clearly too, he has grossly abused his power by claiming to have “unitary executive power” as commander in chief in the war on terror, and that this power, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, gives him the authority to ignore and invalidate laws duly passed by the Congress. Finally, he clearly misled the Congress about the war, and clearly authorized the practice of torture against American captives.
Equally clearly, if the president is not impeached, Congress will be telegraphing that the next president, whomever that may be, can feel free to abuse the law and the Constitution in the same manner as the current president has been doing.
How can there not be impeachment proceedings!
None of Bush's and Cheney's grave crimes and abuses of power even require anything significant in the way of hearings. They could be submitted as bills of impeachment and voted on by the House Judiciary Committee and by the full Congress tomorrow, if there was the will to do so.
Instead, the Democratic leadership continues to dither, continues to permit the president to ignore subpoenas, continues to interfere with grassroots efforts to pass impeachment resolutions, and continues to ignore even the bill of impeachment against the vice president, House Resolution 333, submitted a month ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), even as it has now gained three co-sponsors.
The chasm is clearly widening between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the voters.
It may end up swallowing them up, come November 2008.
=======================
May 19, 2007
Mumia Case on Hold as Appellate Judges Deliberate
Momentous decisions are ahead in the 25-year-long case of Philadelphia death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, following a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia Thursday.
Burns, who has been the lead attorney for the Philadelphia DA on this case since at least 1995, and who heads the appeals unit, went up against San Francisco death penalty appellate attorney Robert R. Bryan, who assumed the role of lead attorney for Abu-Jamal in 2003.
Abu-Jamal, who was not present at the packed hearing in the ceremonial courtroom of the Federal Courthouse across from the Liberty Bell museum in Philadelphia, had three claims before the Appellate Court, all challenging his conviction for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Judith Ritter, Abu-Jamal’s local counsel, argued against a fourth claim by the District Attorney to overturn a 2001 decision by a lower federal court which threw out his death sentence. Christina Swarns, a counsel with the NAACP Legal defense Fund, argued in support of Abu-Jamal’s appeal as a “friend of the court.”
The two-and-a-half-hour hearing began with prosecutor Burns tryng to make the case that Federal District Judge William Yohn had erred in vacating Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. Judge Yohn had ruled in 2001 that an ambiguous and poorly worded jury verdict form, and an even more ambiguous instruction from the judge in the case, Albert Sabo, had left jurors believing, wrongly, that they had to all agree on any mitigating circumstances before weighing them in their decision as to the death penalty. In fact, any one juror can find a mitigating circumstance, while a death penalty decision must be unanimous. Burns claimed that Yohn’s basis for his ruling was flawed. But all three of the judges--Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowen, both Reagan appointees, and Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee--seemed to take a dim view of Burns’ arguments. Judging from their challenging questions to Burns, and their generally favorable questions to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys, it seemed likely that they would, in the end, uphold Yohn’s decision.
If they do, Abu-Jamal’s death sentence would be lifted once and for all. At that point, the DA would have 180 days to decide whether to seek a retrial on just his sentence (not guilt). Several years ago, in an interview with this reporter, Joseph McGill, the original prosecutor at Abu-Jamal’s trial, said the DA’s office had apparently not decided whether it would seek a retrial on the death penalty if Yohn was upheld on appeal, as this would require impaneling a new jury, and essentially retrying the case, since a new jury would not know the issues leading to conviction. The DA has to realize that a death sentence would be more difficult to win in today’s Philadelphia, where it would be much harder for the prosecution to obtain a jury of 10 whites and two blacks, as it managed to do for the trial in 1982. Also, in 1982, Jamal had an attorney who had never handled a death penalty case before, and he didn’t even attempt to bring in witnesses to offer mitigating evidence against a death sentence.
A definitive end to Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, even if his conviction remained in place or on appeal, would mean a major change in his status. For one thing, the DA’s office would no longer be able, as it has done since 2001, to pressure the courts into keeping him locked away in solitary confinement on the state’s super-max death row outside Pittsburgh.
On the conviction issues, the court and Abu-Jamal’s attorneys focused on a claim that his jury had been unconstitutionally purged of African Americans by a prosecutor who had a history of removing blacks from capital juries--a so-called Batson claim (after the US Supreme Court decision in 1986). The main presentation of the case by attorney Bryan was hampered by frequent questions from the judges, who kept asking for more evidence than just the undisputed fact that prosecutor McGill had used peremptory challenges to remove 10 otherwise qualified black jurors from the jury, compared with only five whites.
Bryan told the court that in the course of questioning potential jurors, McGill had asked different questions of black and white candidates for the jury, for example quizzing blacks in the jury pool on whether they had listened to Abu-Jamal on the radio. He also excused black jurors who were unemployed or who had been barred from a jury before, while allowing white jurors with the same experiences to serve. Bryan also pointed out that McGill had made his concerns about black jurors clear when, during the trial, he raised an alarm that a black judge had entered the courtroom and sat near Abu-Jamal’s supporters in the spectators’ gallery. Reading from the court transcript, Bryan noted that McGill had said, “If the court pleases, the two black jurors may know him.” (Of course, as Abu-Jamal's then attorney Anthony Jackson noted, there was an equal chance any of the white jurors might have known the judge, but McGill didn’t seem to care about them.) In his written brief to the court, Bryan also notes that McGill, over the course of six capital trials including Abu-Jamal’s, used peremptory challenges to strike 74 percent of qualified black jurors, compared to only 25 percent of white jurors. That brief also notes that over Ed Rendell’s two terms as Philadelphia district attorney, when the man who is now Pennsylvania's governor was McGill’s boss, the DA’s office struck black jurors in capital cases 58 percent of the time, compared to only 22 percent of the time for whites. (Indeed, in 1982, and until the high court’s Batson ruling in 1986, the Philadelphia DA actually followed a state supreme court decision called Henderson, which ruled that it was permissible for prosecutors to strike blacks from a jury if they thought they might tend to favor a defendant of the same race.)
DA prosecutor Burns, for his part, focused on an argument that Abu-Jamal’s jury bias claim had been forfeited on procedural grounds because he allegedly had not made it soon enough--either during his trial or in the early stages of his state court appeal. This argument was weakened by the fact that the Supreme Court only made race-based jury selection clearly illegal in 1986, well after Abu-Jamal’s trial, and by the fact that documentary scientific evidence of the Philadelphia prosecutor’s systematic rejection of black jurors did not come to light until after 1997, after Abu-Jamal’s state appeal had been exhausted.
At least one judge, Ambro, seemed clearly sympathetic with Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim. The other two judges were harder to read, as they asked tough questions of both Bryan and Burns. One judge, Cowen, on several occasions proposed the improbable possibility that since nobody knew the racial mix of the Abu-Jamal jury pool, it “might have been” majority African-American, “in which case the prosecutor’s peremptory challenges might be seen as having been biased against whites.” This view is clearly preposterous in a city where the court system had been--and to some extent still is--struggling to obtain an appropriate representation of African Americans on juries. Indeed, back in 1982, the city was still using only voter registration lists to call people to jury duty, and blacks at that time, while constituting 40 percent of the city's population, were notoriously under-represented on the voter rolls. Years later, following a federal lawsuit, the city has changed its method for compiling jury pools, but a lawyer long familiary with the issue says it would have been “almost inconceivable” for there to have been a majority black jury pool in 1982 under the old system.
If at least two of the three judges on the Third Circuit panel were to find prima facie evidence of a Batson violation in Abu-Jamal’s trial, they would likely send the case back to the Federal District Court, where Judge Yohn would be ordered to hold a full evidentiary hearing on the issue. In general, courts have held that the threshold for proving a prima facie case of a Batson violation--and thus winning an evidentiary hearing--is fairly low, while proving an actual case of bias--and winning a new trial--can be much harder.
The second appeal claim by Abu-Jamal--that his trial had been unconstitutionally tainted by a summation statement to the jury by prosecutor McGill in which he told jurors their guilty verdict would “not be final” because Abu-Jamal would have “appeal after appeal,” was given relatively short shrift at the hearing, because of the time spent on the Batson issue. Nonetheless it won support from a surprising quarter.
Prosecutor Burns argued to the court that they should not even be considering the issue, since the US Supreme Court has never ruled that such clearly improper language by a prosecutor should undo a conviction--only a death sentence. But Judge Cowen, looking incredulous, asked Burns, “Isn’t saying that undermining a defendant’s right to a fair trial?”
If Cowen took his own question seriously--and feels that telling jurors that their judgment isn’t really final, could undermine the concept of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”--then he could be considering overturning the guilty verdict. If a second judge went along with his view, that would mean a new trial for Abu-Jamal--except for the fact that the DA would certainly appeal such a decision to the US Supreme Court, (which would be bound to consider it, because of such a ruling’s far-reaching implications).
There was no discussion of Abu-Jamal’s third claim, which was that his post-conviction hearing had been constitutionally flawed because of a pro-prosecution bias on the part of Judge Albert Sabo, the same judge who had presided over his trial. The fact that there was no argument on this claim by either side doesn’t matter much, since both sides have filed detail briefs with the court, as they also did on the other claims. Apparently, the three judges had no major questions for either side regarding their respective arguments.
There is no specific timetable for the court to decide on the four claims before it, though some attorneys predict a decision can probably be expected in one or two months.
Outside the courtroom, in the plaza in front of the courthouse, and along 6th Street, several hundred pro-Abu-Jamal demonstrators, many carrying “Free Mumia” signs, staged a spirited demonstration. Inside the courtroom, Abu-Jamal supporters filled most of the seats reserved for spectators. Near the front sat Officer Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, and several family members and supporters, who were allowed to enter the courtroom via a private entrance while other spectators had to go through security gates and line up at the courthouse’s main entrance.
Prosecutor McGill was also in attendance.
====================
May 15, 2007
Justice System on Trial as Mumia Case Reaches Climax
(This article was written by Dave Lindorff and by Linn Washington, a columnist with the Philadelphia Tribune.)
The case of death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, now a quarter of a century long, is heading to a climax this Thursday in a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. It is a hearing that could result in a new trial for the Philadelphia journalist and former Black Panther, or possibly in a new date with the executioner.
The wide range of possible outcomes of this hearing results from the fact that Abu-Jamal and the Philadelphia District Attorney have filed cross-appeals in the case. Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1982 for the 1981 slaying of white Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner during an arrest of Abu-Jamal’s younger brother William, is appealing his conviction. He is arguing that his jury was unconstitutionally purged of black jurors by the prosecutor, who used peremptory challenges to bar 10 or 11 black jurors from being seated, though all had said that they could vote for a death penalty. He is also appealing his conviction on the ground that the prosecutor, Joseph McGill, improperly diminished the jury’s sense of responsibility for their verdict by telling them that a guilty verdict would “not be final” since there would be “appeal after appeal.”
The DA’s office, meanwhile, has appealed a 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence—a ruling that if sustained, converts Abu-Jamal’s penalty to life in prison without possibility of parole.
It is impossible to second-guess what the three judges sitting on this appeal will decide on any of the claims before them, but looking at their prior decisions, all three of the judges, who include Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowen, both Reagan appointees, and Judge Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee have, during their time on the Third Circuit, overturned capital convictions based upon the same claim Abu-Jamal is making about race-based exclusion of jurors by the prosecution.
In his federal habeas appeal of his conviction—the so-called Batson claim regarding jury bias--Abu-Jamal’s attorneys noted that in a city that is 44 percent African-American, his jury initially had only three black members (one was removed before the start of the trial, under questionable circumstances also possibly relating to judicial bias, leaving only two).
Abu-Jamal further presented evidence that his mostly white jury was the result of a pattern of racism in the city’s justice system. Prosecutor McGill, who used 11 of his permitted 15 peremptory challenges (challenges to bar jurors for which no reason has to be provided), to remove black jurors otherwise qualified to sit, had a record over the course of six capital cases between 1977 and 1986, of striking 74 percent of potential black jurors while striking only 25 percent of white jurors. Furthermore, defense data show that over the same period, during which Ed Rendell was Philadelphia’s district attorney, prosecutors working under his direction collectively used their peremptory challenges to eliminate black jurors 58 percent of the time, compared to only 22 percent of the time for white jurors.
If the appellate court decides that this damning statistical evidence shows or suggests a pattern of racism in jury selection, it would be bound to either order a new trial, or to remand the case back to Judge Yohn for a full hearing on the jury bias issue.
This would appear to offer Abu-Jamal his best chance for a new trial. If the judges vote the way each of them has voted in other similar cases, it could happen.
A second possibility for a new trial would be McGill’s clearly inappropriate summation to the jury, in which he essentially told them to forget about “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” and which the judge, who still posthumously holds the national record for death penalty convictions (31), allowed to go unchallenged. Many a death sentence has been overturned for just such prosecutorial misconduct, but to date, neither the Third Circuit nor the US Supreme Court has overturned a conviction on the basis of such comments. Still, it remains a possible avenue for a reversal and a new trial.
A third avenue of federal appeal by Abu-Jamal argues that his initial appeal of his conviction, called a Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) hearing, was constitutionally flawed because the judge—the same Albert Sabo who tried him originally—was biased in favor of the prosecution. Local newspaper editorials made that observation during the hearing. But more importantly, the PCRA hearing transcript shows that Sabo refused to grant any subpoenas to the defense to compel witness testimony, and that the judge repeatedly cut off lines of questioning of witnesses by defense attorneys when it appeared they were about to undermine the case. One witness who told of being pressured to lie at the trial, found herself arrested in the courtroom immediately following her testimony, while she was still on the witness stand. She was led off in handcuffs with the judge’s blessing on a check-kiting charge, despite a pledge by her attorney to have her appear on the charge—normally a routine procedure. If the appellate panel rules in favor of this claim, Abu-Jamal would not get a new trial, but would get a reopened or a new PCRA, probably in federal instead of state court. At such a hearing, new evidence of innocence could be presented, and witnesses from the original trial and the earlier PCRA hearing could be further questioned and old testimony challenged.
Abu-Jamal, while still held in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s death row at the insistence of Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham, is at this moment not facing the death penalty. Federal District Judge Yohn ruled in 2001 that a poorly worded jury verdict form and equally poor instructions from Judge Sabo during the trial’s penalty phase left jurors thinking, incorrectly, that they could consider no mitigating circumstances in deciding on his sentence unless they all agreed on it. In fact, under current law, if any one juror finds a mitigating circumstance, it has to be weighed in their collective decision, which must itself be unanimous for a death penalty. While it is unlikely that the Third Circuit judges will overturn Judge Yohn’s revocation of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, which was well reasoned and based upon solid US Supreme Court precedent, the DA’s office is making the effort, claiming that the precedent doesn’t apply in his case.
In fact, over the course of Abu-Jamal’s more than two-decade-long appeals process, the courts have shown a willingness to create special exceptions that apply only to Abu-Jamal.
One example of what might be called “The Mumia Rule” occurred in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The state’s top judges in 1986 overturned a death sentence in 1986 where McGill, the same prosecutor in Abu-Jamal’s case, had made the same closing statement to jurors at the conclusion of a murder trial presided over by Judge Sabo, the same trial judge who presided in Abu-Jamal’s case. The state’s top court, declaring that the prosecutor’s language had “minimize[ed] the jury’s sense of responsibility for a verdict of death,” ordered a new trial. Three years later in 1989, despite this precedent, the Court reversed itself, though, upholding Abu-Jamal’s conviction. Eleven years later, Pennsylvania’s highest court reversed track again, barring such language by prosecutors “in all future trials.”
Another example of this judicial “special handling” where Abu-Jamal’s case is concerned, involves the right of allocution – the right of the convicted to make a statement without challenge before sentencing. One month before initially upholding Abu-Jamal’s conviction in March 1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a ruling stating the right of allocution is of “ancient origin” and any failure to permit a defendant to plead for mercy required reversal of sentence. Abu-Jamal’s appeal claimed Judge Sabo, by allowing the prosecutor to question Abu-Jamal on the stand after the convicted defendant had made such a statement to jurors, violated his allocution right during the ’82 trial. The state’s high court, however – for the first time in its history – ruled that the “right of allocution does not exist in the penalty phase of capital murder prosecution.”
This flip-flopping on allocution, acceptable language for prosecutors and other legal precedents led Amnesty International to conclude in its 2000 report on Abu-Jamal’s case that the state’s highest court improperly invents new standards of procedure “to apply it to one case only: that of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
Justice, that is to say, has not always been blind in this case, at least at the state court level.
Indeed, the Abu-Jamal case has always been as much about politics as it has been about law. During his sentencing hearing, Prosecutor McGill, over the strenuous objection of the defense, read from and questioned Abu-Jamal about a 12-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer article written about him when he had been just 15, in which he had quoted Mao Tse-tung as saying “power flows from the barrel of a gun.” Although Abu-Jamal made it clear in the actual article, and during questioning by the prosecutor, that he was using that line to refer to the power of the police in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, the prosecutor told jurors that the child’s words had referred to killing police.
Since the trial, the Fraternal Order of Police, the national police union, has openly lobbied hard for Abu-Jamal’s execution, endorsing judicial candidates who favor the death penalty, while opposing those who oppose it, and holding annual demonstrations supporting his death, and even working successfully to prevent Abu-Jamal from having his commentaries from prison broadcast on Philadelphia radio stations. On the other side, a movement condemning Abu-Jamal’s conviction and demanding his freedom or a new trial has spread around the globe.
Such political action has certainly played a role in the decisions made by Pennsylvania’s politicized judges, all of whom are elected and must periodically return to face voters. But the prevailing view among attorneys is that such political pressures play a lesser role in the federal court system, where judges are generally better qualified and are appointed for life, and particularly at the appellate level, where most judges remain until they retire or die.
One indication that the appellate court may not be so vulnerable to political pressure came in 1998, in a case brought by Abu-Jamal protesting the opening of his lawyer’s correspondence with him in prison. Prison authorities had opened his lawyers’ mail in 1995 and, learning of his defense strategy for an upcoming PCRA hearing, passed the news along to then Gov. Tom Ridge, who rushed through a death warrant. This meant Abu-Jamal was facing an execution date only weeks from the hearing—a situation Judge Sabo repeatedly used as an excuse for rushing the proceeding. The Third Circuit ruled that opening of inmates’ legal mail was illegal. The Third Circuit also ruled in Abu-Jamal’s favor in a case establishing his First Amendment right to write and publish from prison.
And so this case, which began one cold dark morning in December 1981, now moves to what could be the final confrontation.
However the three judge panel rules, history is likely to be made this Thursday in the legal showdown between Abu-Jamal’s attorney Robert R. Bryan and Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns, and by Third Circuit Judges Scirica, Ambro and Cowen.
======================
May 13, 2007
Bush and the Media: Playing Us for Fools
The idiot American media are giving Bush another free pass, running stories now that the U.S. is “willing” to talk with Iran, but only about how to calm down the Iraq conflict.
What a pathetic joke!
How can anybody take this claim from the White House that it is trying to negotiate with Iran about Iraq seriously, when the U.S. is simultaneously threatening Iran with a catastrophic attack?
While the State Department is claiming it wants to negotiate with Iran on the narrow issue of settling the Shia-Sunni conflict inside Iraq, Vice President Cheney stands on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Stennis in the Persian Gulf, F-18 Hornets arrayed carefully behind him for maximum belligerent effect, and threatens to attack Iran if it tries to obtain nuclear weapons or tries to close down shipping in the Persian Gulf.
This is not the way to get Iran to agree to accept a role as peacemaker in Iraq and to rescue America from a military disaster in that benighted country.
If the White House truly wanted to settle the conflict in Iraq, Bush would call for broad talks with Iran on settling differences between the two countries on a whole range of issues, from nuclear proliferation and nuclear power to trade and including a regional solution to the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But of course, the White House has no interest in any of that.
Bush and Cheney, indeed, have been pushing ahead with their goal of attacking Iran, which is basically their ace in the hole for defending a collapsing presidency from imploding entirely before the scheduled end of Bush’s second term of office. That’s why they’ve moved three powerful aircraft carrier battle groups into position in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea—an armada big enough to launch a massive air assault on Iran on a moment’s notice.
The last thing the Bush gang want to do is end the conflict in Iraq, which would mean surrendering to the insurgency. Better, from their perspective, to let American troops continue killing and dying until the January, 2009, when a new president will be left with the thankless job of cleaning up the mess.
Endless war has become the modus operandi of this administration.
But obvious as it all is, the complicit U.S. media won’t admit this. They play along instead with the fantasy that the administration is trying its best to bring it all to an end. They report on administration claims to be interested in narrow negotiations with Iran on Iraq, as though they are making serious efforts towards peace, when in fact it is all are nothing but propaganda meant for American consumption.
Nobody in the rest of the world takes this nonsense seriously.
Nobody in America should either.
=============================
May 11, 2007
Impeach Bush or Get Rid of the Impeachment Clause
What is it about impeachment that has the Democratic Party leadership so frightened?
Talking with members of Congress, one hears the same refrain: “I know Bush and Cheney have committed impeachable crimes, but impeachment is a bad idea.”
The rationales offered are many, but all are either specious or based upon flawed reasoning. Let’s consider them separately:
Excuse one, offered by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is that impeachment would be a diversion from Democrats’ main goals of ending the Iraq War, and passing important legislation. The reality, of course, is that many of the administration’s impeachable acts relate directly to the war, so hearings would only build support for ending it. Meanwhile, with the slim majorities in both houses, Democrats cannot pass any significant progressive legislation that could survive a veto (or a presidential signing statement) and the record shows it.
Excuse two is that impeachment is divisive. This seems the height of absurdity. When voters handed Congress to the Democrats, they knew they were setting the stage for divided government. That was the whole point. Moreover, divisiveness in Washington has largely emanated from the White House, not from Congress. Anyhow, given administration intransigence on all the issues that matter to Democrats, they have no alternative but to take a stand.
Excuse three is a claim that the public opposes impeachment. This is simply wrong. The few straightforward scientific polls done on impeachment, such as one published by Newsweek last October, show a majority of Americans to want it. Furthermore, if Bush has committed impeachable acts, it is inappropriate for House members, all of whom swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, not to act.
Excuse four is that old canard that impeaching Bush would mean making Cheney president—a deliberately scary prospect but one which any politician in Washington knows is garbage. Firstly, if Cheney were to become president because of a Bush impeachment or resignation, it would only be for a few months, and given his stunning lack of support among the public—currently about 9 percent and falling—he would be the lamest of lame ducks, unable to do anything. But more importantly, his own party would be certain to remove him before any removal of Bush, and for exactly that reason—they would not want to be going into the 2008 election with Cheney as party leader. This is exactly what happened to Spiro Agnew, whom a Republican attorney general managed to indict and remove before the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. The same thing can be expected to happen to Cheney, who would surely face either a sudden health crisis, or an indictment for corruption.
Finally, excuse five is that the president’s crimes and abuses of power need to be proven before any impeachment bill. This is completely backwards. An impeachment bill can be filed by any member of Congress who believes the president has violated the Constitution. At that point, it is up to the House Judiciary Committee to consider the bill’s merits and decide whether to ask the full House to authorize impeachment hearings. It is at an impeachment hearing where investigations should proceed. After all, only after the Judiciary Committee votes out an impeachment article can the full House consider whether to actually impeach. Calling for investigations before an impeachment hearing is like asking for an investigation before a grand jury investigation. It’s redundant, simply a dodge.
Besides, some of this president’s high crimes are self-evident. Take the case of Bush’s ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant. A federal judge has already labeled this violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a felony. There is no denying this felony occurred, or that Bush is responsible. The only question the House needs to vote on is whether the felony is a “high crime” warranting impeachment.
The same applies Bush’s refusal to enact over 1200 laws or parts of laws duly passed by Congress. Bush doesn’t deny that he has usurped the power of the Congress, as laid down in Article I of the Constitution. Rather, he asserts—with no basis in the wording of that document—that as commander in chief in the war on terror, he has the “unitary executive” authority to ignore acts of Congress. Again, there is no need for an “investigation” to establish whether this happened. What Congress must do is decide whether this usurpation of its Constitutional role is an impeachable abuse of power.
Likewise the president’s authorization of kidnap and torture. We know the president okayed torture. We know too, that he used his “unitary executive” claim to refuse to accept a law passed overwhelmingly by the last Congress outlawing torture. Finally, we know the president did not, as required by US and international law, act to halt torture and punish those up the chain of command who oversaw systematic, widespread torture.
There are many impeachable crimes by this president (and vice president), such as obstruction of justice in the Valeria Plame outing case, conspiracy (or treason) in the Niger “yellowcake” document forgery scandal, conspiracy to engage in election fraud, lying to Congress, criminal negligence in responding to the Katrina disaster, bribery and war profiteering, etc., which would require Judiciary Committee investigations.
In the meantime, though, Democrats need to step up to their responsibility.
If this president is not to be impeached, Congress may as well the Constitution to remove the impeachment clause. It will, in that case, have become as much an anachronism as prohibition.
--------------------
FLASH! Kucinich's Cheney Impeachment Bill Gets a Fourth Sponsor
Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney (H Res. 333) has gained another co-sponsor, Rep. Albert Russell Wynn (D-MD). This brings to four the number of sponsors of a bill that the mainstream media has yet to acknowledge.
Rep. Wynn joins Kucinich (D-OH), and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and co-sponsors Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the Democrats' chief deputy whip (D-IL) and Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) in calling for Cheney's impeachment for lying about Iraq WMDs, lying about a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda, and for illegally threatening to invade Iran.
Readers of this site should contact Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and demand that he schedule hearings on the Kucinich bill. You should also contact your own representatives, and tell them to become co-sponsors of H Res. 333. There is no reason to hold off on impeaching Cheney--probably the least loved person in Washington, and the architect of most of the Bush administrations crimes. (The main number for the House switchboard is 202-225-3121.)
While you're at it, call your local news outlets and demand to know why they have been blacking out the news about Kucinich's impeachment bill.
=======================
May 9, 2007
Pelosi's Toothless Threat to Sue Bush Imperils the Constitution
The bankruptcy of the Democratic Party leadership’s position in Congress on impeachment was revealed in stark terms yesterday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would sue the president in court if he resorted to a signing statement to kill the next version of Congress’s Iraq funding bill.
Suing Bush over a signing statement, given the number of Federalist judges that this administration has named to the federal district and appellate courts, and to the US Supreme Court, is not just an exercise in futility; it is a dangerous tactic which could backfire disastrously by leading to a ruling that it’s perfectly constitutional for a president to ignore laws passed by the Congress. Does Pelosi really want to risk such a catastrophe?
The only solution is to impeach the president over his signing statements, and there is no need to wait for the next one to take action. Bush has invalidated more than 1200 laws or parts of laws passed by Congress since 2001 using what are called “signing statements.”
Republican apologists for the president have noted that other presidents, including Clinton, also issued signing statements, which is true. But they fail to mention that other presidents did not use those signing statements to then ignore or invalidate laws passed by Congress. They merely used them to register their view that a law, or a part of a law, was unconstitutional.
Bush has made a wholly different argument. For the past six years, he has been claiming that because he is commander in chief in a time of war, by which he means the so-called “war” on terror, he has had what he calls “unitary executive” authority. By this he means that legislative and judicial power, as well as executive power, are all in his hands for as long as the threat of terrorism is with us. Since this “war” on terror never really ends, what he is claiming is that separation of powers no longer exists in America. Indeed, the Constitution itself is set aside. The president is a dictator during his term of office, and Congress is just a debating club.
At this point, it should be clear to anyone, including Speaker Pelosi, that the only remedy for this gross abuse of power by the president is impeachment. (Just as an aside: if Pelosi thinks Bush is breaking the law and exceeding his authority by using signing statements to ignore laws passed by Congress, why wouldn't seen use the Congressional remedy for such transgressions: impeachment?) Her resort to the courts implies an almost irrational belief that the system is still functional.)
Unfortunately for America and the Constitution, Pelosi is still hamstrung by her foolish insistence that “impeachment is off the table.”
As long as she continues to refuse to allow impeachment of President Bush, she cannot hope to stop the war, restore habeas corpus, undo the Military Commissions Act, stop illegal spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, or win passage of any significant legislation to deal with global warming. She cannot really do anything, because Bush will simply issue signing statements and use his claim of “unitary executive authority” to invalidate any legislation passed by Congress.
Pelosi needs to be told by her colleagues and by all Americans who care about the survival of the Constitution that this is not an issue for the courts. It is an issue that demands impeachment.
The Founding Fathers were clear that where abuse of power occurs, it is Congress, not the Courts, that must have the responsibility to take corrective action. Abuse of power is not a violation of the law, and so it is not something that the courts are likely to handle properly even under the best of circumstances. Abuse of power is a so-called “political crime,” which requires a political response, which is precisely why the Founders included an impeachment clause in the Constitution.
Pelosi has ducked this issue for long enough, and now she’s about to do serious damage to the nation because of her political cowardice.
Basta! Enough!
If the American republic is to survive, it is time to impeach this president on a charge of abuse of power.
=======================
May 8, 2007
Time for MoveOn to Make a MoveOn Impeachment
For several years now, MoveOn, one of the most effective grassroots organizers in the Democratic Party, has ducked the issue of impeachment.
Even though it is clear that most progressive Democrats want impeachment and are frustrated that the party's leaders are actively blocking efforts to get impeachment going, even though most of MoveOn's own members almost certainly favor impeachment, MoveOn, which claims to be a membership-driven organization, has refused to poll its own ranks to see if they want impeachment on the organization's agenda. This is true even though MoveOn polls its members all the time on other issues like war funding.
The time has come to call the question! MoveOn's three million active Democrats, if they all started demanding impeachment hearings, would be a powerful force compelling Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders to stop their unconscionable stonewalling and to start honoring their oaths of office and standing up in defense of our battered Constitution.
If you want MoveOn to stop ducking this important issue, join Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Swanson, Cynthia McKinney, Medea Benjamin, Tim Carpenter, Bob Fertik, Elizabeth Holtzman, and me and sign the call for MoveOn to open a dialogue with its membership on the importance of impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
====================
May 7, 2007
The Great Oil Robbery
In case you’re wondering why crude oil prices are down from last year, hanging around at about $60 a barrel, while gasoline prices have soared past $3.10/gallon nationwide, just check out the latest profit reports from the oil companies. They are at record levels.
The answer for this seeming contradiction is simple: Americans are being robbed blind by the oil industry.
Sure, the oil companies, and their PR and lobbying agency, the American Petroleum Institute, will give you all kinds of reasons for higher gasoline prices at a time of falling crude prices: problems at two refineries in Texas and Oklahoma, rising demand or whatever. But the real answer is that there is simply no competitive market in this industry.
As Tim Hamilton, a researcher and petroleum industry consultant with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, observes, the oil companies all store their crude oil and refined gasoline in the same tanks, and all know exactly how much inventory each other company has, so they don’t have to meet and collude on pricing in order to reap the huge rewards of deliberate supply constraints.
Says Hamilton, “Years ago, you had companies that would try to guess when the other companies were going to have supply shortfalls of gasoline in the summer. They’d ramp up their own gasoline refining and then supply the market at a lower price and eat their competitors’ lunches, the same way General Motors would do if Ford had a problem on its assembly line. But today, no oil company would do that. They all benefit by keeping the supplies tight.”
Hamilton says that the oil industry has in practice conspired to limit refining capacity, so that companies can keep pushing up the price of gas artificially—only they’ve done this without ever having to meet in secret and cut a deal, because they all have complete competitive information on each others’ inventories, internal pricing, and refinery capacity.
“There’s no correlation any longer between crude oil prices and gasoline prices,” he insists. “Crude could drop to $10/barrel, and you could still have gasoline go to $4/gallon. All the crude oil price does is set a floor on gasoline prices.”
As an indication of how much control the oil industry has over retail gasoline prices, Hamilton points to a study he did, looking at the price of gas approaching Election Day. His results are truly disturbing.
The oil industry has been a solid backer of Republicans for many years, giving 80-90 percent of its campaign contributions to GOP candidates—particularly during the two Bush terms. What Hamilton discovered is that this support hasn’t just been limited to campaign contributions. In fact, the oil industry appears to have clearly tried to minimize voter anger at Republicans late during the election cycle by pushing prices at the pump down just ahead of the voting. In the period 2000-2006, Hamilton found that each non-federal election year—2001, 2003 and 2005, gasoline prices didn’t decline during the month of October, but each of the election years—2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006—they fell, with the most dramatic drop coming in October 2006—a period when crude oil prices were rising sharply. Each time, gasoline prices rose again quickly right after the election was over.
“This is a set of coincidences you’d be hard-pressed to explain by anything but planning,” says Hamilton. (And incidentally, it would be interesting, when Congress gets those Karl Rove emails from the Republican Party and the White House mainframe computer, to see if there are any to the American Petroleum Institute.)
The whole situation makes a joke of Bush proposals for opening up the Alaskan North Slope to more oil exploration, or for Republican calls for an easing up on environmental regulations for new refinery construction. Says Hamilton, “The price of oil produced in Alaska will be set in Saudi Arabia, and any new supply of crude from Alaska won’t affect American gasoline prices in the slightest. And as for new refineries, why would any oil company want to spent $1 billon or more to add refinery capacity so they could get less money for the gasoline they’re selling? There isn’t enough money in the federal treasury to subsidize the building of new refinery capacity in America.”
The irony here is that it is higher prices for gasoline that might eventually convince Americans to use less gasoline, and to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses. But where those higher prices in Europe come in the form of taxes, which can then be used to subsidize public transportation or retirement and healthcare programs, in the U.S. the higher prices simply go to the bottom line of the oil companies, and into the pockets of oil company shareholders, leaving public transit, retirement and healthcare programs under funded, and leaving lower-income workers stuck with higher bills to get themselves to and from work in their cars.
Until the public recognizes that the illusion of competition carefully maintained by the oil industry and its backers in the government is just that—an illusion—this astounding rip-off will continue.
========================
May 4, 2007
Clinton and Byrd Are Calling for Revocation of the Wrong AUMF
If Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) really want to bring this Bush/Cheney administration to heel, they should be calling not for revocation of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), but for the revocation of the 2001 AUMF.
The 2002 AUMF is the resolution Congress passed, in a panicky moment of electoral fear in October 2002, essentially giving Bush support for his war plans against Iraq. It wasn’t really a war resolution, as it contained conditionals, such as getting the backing of the UN Security Council, which the president never obtained, but nonetheless, Bush has cited it as the “declaration of war” that justified his invasion of Iraq fully five months later (probably the longest gap between a war declaration and an actual war in the history of government and warfare).
Revoking this sorry AUMF might be a moral victory for a legislative body that has an oxymoronic relationship with the M word, and might provide some cover to cowardly politicians like Clinton, who chose to support the resolution despite clear evidence that the president was lying through his teeth about the alleged threat posed by Iraq. But it won’t end the war. With troops already in harm’s way in Iraq, the president doesn’t need an AUMF to keep them there. So it’s all symbolic.
The 2001 AUMF is something else altogether.
Passed on September 18, just a week after the 9-11 attacks, the 2001 AUMF was Congress’ authorization for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and to go after Al Qaeda.
Bush, however, has used that resolution as the justification for his whole global “War” on terror. He has claimed, with no real justification or grounding in the Constitution, that this AUMF, by supposedly making him a commander in chief in time of “war,” has also conferred on him “unitary executive” powers that he and his hack lawyers argue render the Constitution temporarily suspended. He cites this AUMF as giving him the right to violate at will federal laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the right to invalidate and ignore laws passed by the Congress, the right to ignore court orders, to erase the right of habeas corpus, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, and the right to torture and kidnap anyone he decides to declare an “enemy combatant” or “unlawful combatant.”
All these claims are bogus, of course. There is nothing in the Constitution about “unitary executive” powers. Moreover, the term “commander in chief” in Article II of the Constitution is specifically limited to making the president the top military officer in the land. It confers no powers over Congress or the Courts or over civilians. Indeed the Founding Fathers were clear in stating that it was precisely in wartime that they most feared the danger of a president becoming a tyrant. They saw war as the gravest threat to the survival of constitutional government, and presidents as the potential villains.
That said, it is clear that Congress should act to remove the basis for the president’s bogus claims, and for his six years of Constitutional rape and pillage. The 2001 AUMF should be rescinded.
There is, in any case, no longer any need for that resolution.
Presidents don’t need an AUMF to combat terrorism. Terrorism has, after all, always been with us. Did President Clinton need an AUMF when the Murrah Building was bombed? Of course not. And as for the war in Afghanistan—it’s over. The Taliban government was overthrown in weeks and by 2002, that country had a new government, which has invited NATO forces—not the US military—to defend it against any resurgence of the old regime. America doesn’t need an AUMF to send its forces into police actions under NATO command.
All that revocation of the 2001 AUMF would do is put an end to the president’s bogus claim that he has dictatorial powers.
So why is nobody in Congress calling for revoking the 2001 AUMF? It should have been the first thing the Democrats did on opening day of the 110th Congress.
Could it be that the Democrats are so confident of winning the White House in 2008 that they want to keep this anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional legislation in place so a Democratic president, too, can ignore Congress and the courts and run roughshod over the rights of American citizens?
We should all--Republicans, Democrats and independents--be very troubled by the Democrats’ unconscionable inaction on this issue, five full months into their assumption of control of the Congress.
Every Democratic legislator in Washington DC should be deluged with constituent calls demanding that they revoke the 2001 AUMF, and every Democratic presidential aspirant should be compelled to demand its revocation, and to disavow the validity of Bush’s “unitary executive” claims.
If Congress wants to revoke the 2002 AUMF too, that’s fine, but let’s start with the real danger: the 2001 AUMF.
=========================
May 2, 2007
They Think They Can, They Think They Can
The impeachment train is starting to roll.
Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), started things off by filing a three-article bill of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. Initially largely ignored by the mainstream media, and even ridiculed by some leading Democrats in Congress, that bill, H Res 333, today garnered two co-sponsors, Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL).
The two co-sponsors signing on to the bill (both veteran members of Congress, and one, Schakowsky, a chief deputy whip and member of the Democratic Congressional leadership team), give it a much stronger chance of being taken seriously in the House Judiciary Committee headed by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), and follow a week of intense impeachment activities across the country.
A week ago, dozens of impeachment activists gathered on the steps of the main entrance to the Cannon House Office Building in a group press conference calling on Congress to back Kucinich’s impeachment bill, and to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush.
That same week, delegates to the annual convention of the California Democratic Party, the largest state chapter of the Democratic Party, overwhelmingly passed a detailed resolution calling for the impeachment of the president and vice president. The resolution received the highest vote total of all the resolutions offered at that convention, and was a powerful message to California’s top Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents a district in San Francisco, that her own party wants action on impeachment, not a political dodge.
A few days later, on Saturday, April 28, impeachment groups across the nation held demonstrations, many of which featured protesters assembling to form giant letters spelling out the word “Impeach.” While the mainstream media largely ignored those protests, the message was not lost on House Democrats. The following day, Rep. John Murtha, a leader of the Democrats’ campaign to end the Iraq War, speaking on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” declared that impeachment was one of the tools Congress has to influence the president. Lest his statement be misconstrued as a slip of the tongue, Murtha, who is known to be a close political ally of Pelosi, repeated the statement on NPR the following day, this time saying pointedly that impeachment was “on the table” in Congress.
His choice of words was particularly significant, since Pelosi has been insisting for almost a year that under a Democratic Congress, impeachment of the president would be “off the table.”
It remains to be seen whether more members of the House will sign on to Kucinich’s bill, or whether other representatives will add new bills of impeachment of their own against the vice president. Kucinich’s bill is narrow in scope, only citing three impeachable offenses: lying about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, lying about an alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and illegally threatening war against Iran, a country that poses no imminent threat to the U.S. Certainly there are plenty of other grounds for impeaching Cheney, ranging from conspiracy to commit kidnapping and illegal torture of prisoner of war detainees and war profiteering to lying to Congress and orchestrating the theft of national elections.
Thirty-nine members of the House in the last Congress were co-sponsors of a bill submitted in late 2005 by Rep. Conyers that called for an investigation into impeachable crimes by the president and vice president, and impeachment activists are now lobbying those members--nearly all of whom were returned to office last November--to join as co-sponsors of HR 333. Both Reps. Clay and Shakowsky had been co-sponsors of the earlier Conyers bill, signing on in January 2006.
With frustration with President Bush’s insistence on endless war in Iraq, and with grassroots pressure for impeachment building, it is going to be harder and harder for the mainstream media to keep ignoring the impeachment story. It is also going to be harder and harder for Democratic Party leaders to deter their more progressive members in the House from filing impeachment bills.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To contact members of Congress and make your views on impeachment known, dial 202-225-3121 and ask for the member you want to reach. Speaker Pelosi's number is 202-225-0100.
==============================
May 1, 2007
Four Years After May 1, 2003: Are We Winning Yet?
It's been four years now since President Bush pulled his stunt of landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which his staff had ordered to circle around outside of San Diego for the purpose, and which they had decked out with a huge banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" for a backdrop.
On its face, it's been a wasted four years, a wasted $500 billion (or $2 trillion, if you count the debt and futre veterans' care), a wasted 3400 American lives (or 55000 American lives if you count all the physically maimed and injured, or 250,000 if you add in the psychologically damaged), a wasted 650,000 Iraqi lives (most of them innocent women and children and the elderly), and indeed a wasted country, since Iraq will never again be the nation and society it was before the US invasion.
Congratulations Bush! Congratulations too, to the hundreds of cowards in Congress, Republican and Democrat, who allowed you to turn this nation into just another war-mongering outlaw state.
"Mission Accomplished" indeed! We just didn't realize what the "mission" was when Bush made that seemingly preposterous assertion.
The war in Iraq had actually only just begun on May 1, 2003, but then, that was never the mission, was it? The real mission all along, laid out by Dick Cheney and other neo-conservative conspirators in the Project for a New American Century document and set in motion even while the Florida election was still in the process of being stolen in late 2000, was to destroy the Constitution, and to establish the presidency as an all-powerful tyranny, usurping the legislative powers of the Congress and the judicial authority of the courts. The real mission was to gut the Bill of Rights, to emasculate the political opposition, and to reduce the American citizenry to quivering and servile subjects. The real mission was to scrap the rule of law at home and to scrap international treaties and laws.
And to a remarkable extent, Bush was right when he spoke on the deck of the Lincoln. It has been a case of "mission accomplished"--almost.
Certainly the America today is not the America we knew in 2000.
Bush's America in 2007 is a nation that officially tortures, that jails its own citizens indefinitely without charge, that threatens other, weaker, countries with nuclear attack, that allows its own cities to drown in floods, that lets poor babies die for lack of medical care, that systematically ships millions of jobs overseas, providing tax subsidies to the companies that fire American workers, and that lets its own returned soldiers rot in rat-infested wards, or denies them treatment altogether, all the while granting tax break after tax break to the rich and super-rich.
It is pretty much true that six-plus years into his presidency, Bush and his backers have largely accomplished their mission of destroying America.
But they haven't won yet.
There is a resistance building. There is, abroad among the American people, an increasingly clear understanding that we've been had. People across the political spectrum know that they have never been told the truth about what happened on 9-11. Most people recognize by now that the Iraq War was a disaster and a fraud from the outset. People recognize that the whole presidency too has been a fraud. That's why support for the president is now reported at an abyssmal 28 percent, while support for Vice President Dick Cheney is less than a third of even that low figure.
It is easy to fall victim to despair, but it is becoming clear that the kind of slow-motion coup d'etat that has been in the works is not easy to pull off, nor is the result a foregone conclusion.
Not everything is going the administration's way. A war that was supposed to be an easy win and a political triumph has become a disaster, a potemkin presidency that was supposed to look like a shining model of corporate competency has been exposed as a cheap Enron-style ripoff scheme. Schools are crumbling, poverty is rising, cities are dying, and people are getting angry.
Now comes the hard part. Taking the country back.
The real "mission accomplished" will come when Bush and Cheney have been hounded from office, and find themselves on trial for treason, bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and crimes against humanity.
===========================
Rep. Murtha Puts Impeachment Front and Center Impeachment is moving inexorably into the mainstream. On Saturday, April 28, people across the nation rallied to spell out the word "Impeach" with their bodies, from coast to coast. Most of their efforts went unreported in the nation’s complicit, propaganda-organ-like corporate media, but the effects of the effort were still felt. Earlier in the week, the Democratic Party convention in California (the largest state Democratic party organization in the nation) voted overwhelmingly to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Also that week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), filed a bill of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. A day after the national demonstrations, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), speaking on the CBS News program Face the Nation, told host Bob Schieffer that impeachment is “one of the ways Congress has to influence the president.” The comment so shocked Schieffer, that he immediately homed in on it asking, "Are you seriously talking about contemplating an impeachment of this president?" Murtha did not back off, and responded, "I'm just saying that's one way to influence the president." As Bob Fertik, a leader of the national impeachment movement, observes, “It is no accident that Murtha used the `I' word: he wanted to send a shot across Bush's bow that he’d better start negotiating (on Iraq troop funding) -- or else.” Fertik adds, “And Murtha must have cleared his comments with Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi before his appearance, so one can safely conclude that impeachment is back `on the table' where it belongs." In fact, today, Murtha was going further, again mentioning impeachment as one tool in Congress' arsenel against a criminal president. This time, in an interview on NPR, he actually says that it is "one of the options Congress has on the table." It really doesn't get much clearer than that! For too long, Congressional Democratic leaders have been blocking impeachment, beginning with Pelosi’s pre-election vow that if Democrats took control of Congress impeachment would be "off the table.” The public explanations for this position have never made any sense, and indeed have been specious: the claim that impeaching Bush would mean Cheney would become president is ludicrous (what Republican would want to have the monumentally unpopular Cheney at the head of the GOP heading into the 2008 elections?); the claim that Democrats had an important agenda of bills to pass is preposterous, given their slim margins of control in both houses, the promise of presidential vetoes, and the president’s hyperactive use of “signing statements” to illegally kill laws enacted by Congress; and finally the claim that impeachment would be “divisive” is bogus, because it is the administration and the Republicans in Congress who have been divisive for the past six years. In fact, the real reason the Democratic leadership has been running away from impeachment is that party leaders think they are better off letting this increasingly unpopular administration continue to foul up domestically and especially in Iraq. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), a dop party leader, actually at one point publicly stated that it would be “good” for Democrats if the Iraq War continued into November 2008. This heartless Machiavellian thinking may or may not be strategically valid (I suspect it's not correct), but it is certainly a betrayal of the American people who voted Democrats into control last November, and is certainly also a betrayal of the troops who are fighting and dying in Iraq every day. It appears, from Murtha’s comment about impeachment, that leading Democrats in Congress are starting to realize that the public is way ahead of them, and is growing frustrated and angry at Democratic pussyfooting. Americans don’t want symbolic action by Democrats on ending the war. They want the troops brought home--now. They don’t want tangential investigations by Congress into the political firing of federal prosecutors, or into the faked documents alleging that Iraq was buying uranium ore from Niger, They want impeachment bills filed against President Bush, and the convening of impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee to defend a Constitution that has been vitiated by six years of Bush administration crimes, abuses of power and blatant undermining of the Bill of Rights. They want Pelosi to remove the handcuffs from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Murtha should be swamped with phone calls congratulating him for recognizing this, and for putting impeachment back on the agenda (the number to call is 202-225-2065). For those who don't have the money to pay for a long-distance call, here are free numbers that reach the Capitol switchboard: (800) 828 - 0498 (800) 459 - 1887 (800) 614 - 2803 (866) 340 - 9281 (866) 338 - 1015 (877) 851 - 6437 The impeachment movement, which is just getting going, needs to keep the pressure on Congress and the media. As reported here yesterday, last week at the annual convention of the largest state Democratic Party, in California, party delegates (with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in attendance), passed a resolution calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. The measure had been put forward by the Progressive Democrats organization in the state, and is reported on at length at Progressive Democrats. No mention of this remarkable endorsement of impeachment and slap at the state's leading Democratic politician, who has insisted for almost a year that impeachment is "off the table," was made in the nation's major media, including The New York Times, allegedly the nation's "paper of record." This lapse of journalistic judgement (or is it simply outright political censorship?) was made all the more egregious when the Times on Monday ran a major news article reporting on the California Democratic convention. The whole focuse of that article, by hack Timesman Adam Nagorney, was the delegates' reactions to addresses by the so-called "top-tier" Democratic presidential candidates, and especially John Edwards, who he said won kudos for his criticism of the Iraq War. One would think that Nagorney would have used the occasion to at least mention somewhere in his article that the convention had overwhelmingly passed an impeachment resolution, but no. That bit of news was left out. It didn't happen, for the readers of the Times. Just further evidence of the death of American mainstream journalism... April 29, 2007 Mainstream American Journalism: An Obituary Watching Bill Moyers’ special marking his return to PBS, Buying the War, I was struck by the stark contrast it demonstrated between the yeoman work of then Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and everybody else in what used to be called the journalism profession. It does no disservice to Landay and Strobel to say that there was nothing particularly astounding about the work they did in exposing the Bush/Cheney administration's lies and deceptions in the two-year campaign to put the country at war against Iraq. As they explain to Moyers, they simply did what any real reporter was supposed to do, going to sources they'd developed in the military and intelligence community in Washington, talking on and off the record with sources willing to tell the truth about what was going on, digging up and actually critically reading documents like the UN inspectors’ reports on Iraq WMD inspections, and finally confronting the lying warmongers in Congress and the administration for comment. The amazing and disheartening thing revealed so clearly in Moyers' excellent program is that almost nobody else was doing that kind of nuts-and-bolts reporting in Washington or New York. The vaunted (and grossly over-rated) Washington Post and New York Times, as Moyers explains, did have a few reporters who did their jobs right, but they were sidelined by editors who were afraid to let their stories get any attention, preferring instead to reserve their front pages for the propaganda pieces churned out by the likes of Judith Miller and Bob Woodward. Television, which was more of a focus in the Moyers program, came off even worse. As CBS reporter Bob Simon told him, senior management was actually afraid to run stories that exposed the administration's lies for what they were. At MSNBC, we learn that senior management, which was happy to put government apologists on air with no balance, required that any administration or war critic be "balanced" with at least two government shills. All this was bad enough, but making it worse was the knowledge that nothing has changed. The media have really not improved at all even after the catastrophic results of their ethical and professional surrender during 2001-3--a four-year war that has cost over $1 trillion and that has killed over half a million people, and a government that no longer can be called constitutional-- have become evident. There has been almost no honest reporting about the administration efforts to gin up a new war against Iran. There has been little or no coverage of the solid evidence of administration-directed efforts to steal not just one but five national elections. There has been a virtual blackout in the mainstream media on evidence suggesting administration foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks. There is almost no reporting on the actual impeachable crimes of Bush and Cheney, or on the extraordinary grassroots campaign to impeach these two constitutional criminals. (How many Americans, for example, are aware that a federal district judge, in a case that pitted the ACLU against the US Justice Department, ruled that the president had committed a felony in ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans' private communications without court warrants in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or that the president has invalidated and refused to enact all or part of 1200 laws passed by the Congress?) Just on this last point, consider Rep. Dennis Kucinich's filing, last Tuesday, of a bill of impeachment against Dick Cheney in the House of Representatives. Clearly a historic event--the first concrete step towards impeachment in the House in the new Democratic-led Congress--the bill, which charges Cheney with lying about Iraq having WMDs, lying about a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and illegally threatening Iran with an invasion (a crime under international, and US, law), went unreported in the New York Times, supposedly the nation’s “newspaper of record.” As for the Washington Post, the next day all it had was a sophomoric, pissy column by Dana Milbank, which spent most of its verbiage belittling Kucinich’s short stature and bad hairstyle. The nationwide demonstrations calling for impeachment held in over 150 different cities across the country on Saturday went unmentioned in Sunday's New York Times, though there was an article in the Washington Post about the event at the Washington Monument in the paper’s own city (it failed to mention that events, bigger and more successful, actually, were going on elsewhere, too.) When it comes to the mainstream corporate media, where the overwhelming number of Americans obtain their information about what it happening in the country and the world, journalism is dead. Its practitioners--my professional colleagues and, sorry to say, many of my own Columbia Journalism School classmates--have in effect become media zombies, going through the motions of reporting but producing nothing like what journalism was supposed to be. American journalism (1735-2001) RIP. April 26, 2007 No Bees? Not Just Strange, but Scarey From my April 26 column in the Philadelphia Inquirer: Where are the bees? As an unwilling and disgruntled suburbanite, I take great pride in my dandelion crop. Over the decade that I have owned my 2.3-acre lot in Maple Glen, just north of Philadelphia, I have watched as the dandelion population in my lawn has grown year on year. One reason I've enjoyed the display is that I know these bright-yellow-flowered plants, which bloom early and continue blooming well into fall, are popular with honeybees. Given all the problems the bees have been having with insecticides, destruction of natural habitat, and the like, I'm happy to give them some help. I remember that when I was a kid growing up in rural Connecticut, getting stung by a honeybee was almost a weekly occurrence that went along with going barefoot in the lawn. (My parents liked dandelions, too.) Today, though, you could walk all day barefoot around my yard and never get stung. There's not a honeybee to be seen. For the rest, go to No Bees [3] April 25, 2007 Dropping the First Shoe Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has dropped the first impeachment shoe, filing a bill calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Kucinich, defying the leadership of the Democratic Party, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who have been struggling mightily to prevent impeachment from occurring during the waning years of the Bush presidency, on Tuesday filed three articles of impeachment, claiming that Cheney violated his oath of office and the Constitution, for deceiving Congress and the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about alleged but nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and finally for making threats to invade Iran. The bill now goes to the House Judiciary Committee, where Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and the rest of the committee's members will have to decide whether go hold formal hearings on the charges. Under Thomas Jefferson's Manual for the Rules of the House, under which the US House of Representatives has operated for over 200 years, such a resolution would require the House to take up the impeachment issue, just as would a member's bill of impeachment. The speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives, Lynn Symington, had strenuously opposed the resolution, and has been keeping it bottled up in the House Judiciary Committee, but following passage of the resolution in the state Senate, and a massive grassroots campaign by Vermont impeachment activists, she has been forced to relent and let the measure go forward. Passage is not a sure thing, however. Similar measures are being pushed in at least 10 other state legislatures, while two such efforts, in New Mexico and Washington state, were killed thanks to pressure from the national Democratic Party leadership. On April 28, demonstrations are planned in Washington, DC and all around the nation, calling for impeachment to begin against both Bush and Cheney. To find the location nearest you, click on the Impeachment banner to the right of this article. The mainstream corporate media, which has so far been largely ignoring the issue of impeachment, will have to go to extra lengths of censorship to block out the popular movement now, with a bill on the floor of the House, and with impeachment resolutions passing in the Vermont state legislature. It will be interesting to see how the nation's news gatekeepers handle the story now that it is breaking out into the open so forcefully. April 20, 2007 Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont SR16 Senate resolution urging Vermont's Representative in the United States House of Representatives to introduce, and Vermont's United States Senators to support, a resolution requiring the United States House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President and the Vice President of the United States. The impeachment movement, which has been building steam since the November election, got a big boost this morning when the Vermont Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the US Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The 16-9 vote, which saw the Senate’s six Republicans joined by only three Democrats on the losing side, will make it difficult for Vermont House Speaker Gaye Symington, a Democrat who has opposed the impeachment resolution drive, to keep the measure from being voted on the House floor. Symington has been arguing against such a resolution, claiming it would be “divisive.” The vote in the state senate was a huge victory for grassroots Democratic activists, who had been forced over recent months to overcome opposition to impeachment from the national Democratic Party leadership, and from their own state’s Democratic Congressional Delegation. Leading Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), have been arguing that impeachment could hurt Democratic prospects among independent voters in the November 2008 elections. But impeachment activists have countered that the president and vice president have violated the law and undermined the Constitution, and that it is inappropriate to let strategic and tactical interests of the Democratic Party enter into the decision on whether to impeach. To get around opposition from leading Democrats, Vermont’s impeachment activists organized a statewide grassroots campaign to have as many towns as possible endorse impeachment in resolutions introduced at the annual town meetings that are the primary form of governance in most of the state’s municipalities. In the end, 39 towns voted for impeachment resolutions in their annual meetings in February. This sent a strong message to state legislators about the mood of the voters in the state. In the end, that message trumped pressure from Washington. "This gives an immeasurable boost to the national push for impeachment, and the timing could not be better, “ said David Swanson, a leader of the national impeachment movement who runs a website at AfterDowningStreet.org. Swanson noted that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, is preparing to introduce a bill of impeachment against the Vice President Cheney next Wednesday. And adds that impeachment groups are planning coordinated events all over the country on April 28th http://www.a28.org [4] He said, “What just happened in Vermont went down exactly the way things should in a democracy. Citizens raised their voices, passed local resolutions, and demanded that their state senators act. The hard work of Dan DeWalt, Ellen Tenney, and so many other Vermonters is beginning to pay off. Vermont may be remembered as the state that saved the Republic." The mass movement for impeachment in Vermont has also had its impact on the local media there, which in turn may have pushed the state’s senators to act. On April 13, a week before the senate vote, the states third-ranked newspaper, the Brattleboro Reformer, ran an editorial headlined “Impeach Bush or Get Out of the Way.” The paper wrote: There will be a time when future generations will look at us and wonder why President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not removed from office. They will look at us and question why, when confronted by the most corrupt and incompetent administration ever witnessed in the United States, nothing was done to stop Bush and Cheney. They will look at the craven behavior of the Democrats, too afraid to take on the president when it mattered. They will look at the Republicans, so intoxicated with power that they backed their president to the hilt, even as he ran this country off a cliff. They will look at the press, and how too many journalists were cowed into parroting the words of the administration. They will look at the voters, and shake their heads in disbelief that a number of Americans voted for all this -- the electoral equivalent of the chickens voting Colonel Sanders president. And they will look at Vermont, and how a bottom-up impeachment effort with broad support ran into a brick wall of indifference in Montpelier as well as Washington. The editorial pointedly attacked House leader Symington and Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, saying: History will not look kindly on House Speaker Gaye Symington for her insistence that her chamber must focus on "important matters" and that the House "does not have the time" to deal with impeachment. History will not look kindly on Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, who has talked loudly about impeaching Bush and Cheney, but won't pursue the issue as long Symington says no. The grassroots and media pressure clearly worked on Shumlin, who had long insisted he supported impeachment, but that there “wasn’t time” for an impeachment resolution. Shumlin allowed the vote today, and it sailed through, belying concerns about time. Now the pressure shifts to Symington. The Vermont Senate vote carries enormous significance. If it is followed by a similar vote in the Vermont House, where a similar resolution has 20 sponsors, Vermont will be the first state in the nation to have a joint resolution calling for Congress to begin impeachment of the president. One newspaper, the Vermont Guardian, reports that House impeachment backers plan to spend the next few days collecting signatures from fellow representatives to introduce an identical resolution next Wednesday in their chamber. Says State Rep. Dave Zuckerman, “We will take the same language the Senate passed today and turn it in Tuesday afternoon, which gives people around the state time to call their representatives and ask them to sign it; we would then have it on the calendar for Wednesday and the speaker will either let it be voted on or have it sent to committee.” He added, “Many of us are quite pleased they took the vote, but it’s clear that it only happened because citizens got involved.” Under Thomas Jefferson’s Manual for Rules of the House, such a joint resolution, should it pass, is an alternative route to impeachment, and would require the House Judiciary Committee to initiate an impeachment hearing to determine whether grounds for impeachment of the president and vice president exist. It would no longer be possible, in other words, for Speaker Pelosi to continue blocking impeachment and intimidating representatives from filing impeachment bills. It would also be a strong signal that the American public wants impeachment. Finally, it would be impossible for the corporate media to continue to maintain, as it has done for over a year now, that impeachment is simply the desire of a group of fringe left-wing Democrats. Bush and Cheney are still a long way from being in the dock in Congress, but today’s vote in the Vermont Senate has to have sent a cold chill up the spine of both men, who now have to start contemplating about the fate of Richard Nixon. Certainly when the late Father Robert Drinan (D-MA) filed his initial impeachment bill against Richard Nixon, who had won re-election by a landslide, no one expected to see the president actually facing impeachment hearings and removal from office. But hearings, and more bills of impeachment, followed, Nixon’s crimes were laid bare on prime time TV, and in the end three articles of impeachment were voted out of the House Judiciary Committee, one of them unanimously. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace when it became clear he would be impeached in the House and removed by the Senate if he tried to stay on. Slowly, steadily, the public, grassroots movement to impeach this criminal president and vice president, and to restore the rule of law, and the Constitution, is building. Soon it will be the leaders of Congress, not of the Vermont legislature, who will be facing the wrath of angry voters demanding that they stop dithering and start honoring their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. As the Brattleboro Reformer put it, Congress is “shirking its responsibility” because when it comes to impeaching Bush and Cheney, “nothing is more important.” Update: In a joint statement issued in Washington, DC, Vermont's Congressional delegation, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch, responded to the state senate resolution by saying that "before we talk about impeachment," current investigations in the Congress need to be "allowed to run their course." Ignoring the fact that 39 towns in the state, including some it Vermont's larger municipalities, have voted out impeachment resolutions, the three, two Democrats and on an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, go on to say, "In our view, the people of Vermont want us to focus our attention on such issues as ending the war in Iraq, protecting the needs of our veterans, raising the minimum wage, addressing the crisis of global warming and providing health care to all of our citizens.” Never mind that the Democrats' narrow majorities in Congress mean that they cannot hope to deliver on any of those issues in the next two years. More importanbtly, if ever there was a case of elected officials ignoring the clearly expressed will of their constituents, this is it. Not even content to claim that they "know better" than the popular will and are acting on their own best impulses, but rather, claiming to somehow "know" what the people of the state want, Leahy, Sanders and Welch are demonstrating graphically just how divorced the Democratic Party in Congress and the DNC has become from the party's own rank-and-file. If a vote for the impeachment resolution passes in Vermont's House of Representatives next week, too, and that doesn't sway these three pompous solons into action, Vermonters will have their task cut out for them come November 2008. Welch in particular should be sent packing if he turns his back on his own state's legislature and voters. April 19, 2007 Impeaching Cheney First. Finally! Sources close to the office of Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) confirm that the progressive Democratic congressman and Democratic presidential aspirant intends to introduce a bill of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, April 25. The move will mark the second time that an impeachment bill has been submitted against a member of the Bush administration. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) filed a bill of impeachment against President Bush in December of last year, just as the 109th Congress was about to end, and as Rep. McKenney was about to leave office (she was defeated in last November's election). Kucinich's bill will go to the Judiciary Committee, where Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and the other members will have to decide whether to request subpoena powers and to begin a hearing into impeachable offenses by the vice president. Kucinich's action marks a major step forward for impeachment activists, who have been frustrated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has repeatedly stated that she has no interest in having the House hold impeachment hearings against president or vice president (and who has been leaning hard on Democratic caucus members in the House not to file impeachment bills). By bucking Pelosi and filing his bill, Kucinich may force the mainstream corporate media to start discussing the idea. There has been a virtual blackout on impeachment in the media, which has not even been asking the question in polls, since a year ago, when Pelosi made it clear she had no interest in impeachment. Kucinich's move comes as citizens across the country are bringing impeachment resolutions to town meetings, city councils, Democratic Party county and state committees, and even state legislatures--and getting them passed. The Democratic Party Establishment has been resisting impeachment, fearing that it could "turn off" independent voters, although the few polls that have been conducted suggest that a majority of Americans, and even not a few Republicans, favor impeaching the president. But as the administration's scandals have grown in number and seriousness, from financial chicanery to voter suppression to political firings of federal prosecutors to illegal spying on citizens, and as the president's War in Iraq has lurched from bad to catastrophic, public pressure is mounting for Democrats to take tougher action. Kucinich's bill may not in itself put Bush's impeachment back on the Congressional table, but it could whet the public's appetite for more substantial fare. April 18, 2007 Betraying Thomas Jefferson The enemies of the Constitution are growing in number and are to be found now, not just in the White House and the Congress, but also in state capitals, from Washington to Vermont. Not only do we have a president and vice president who are almost daily undermining and rending at the fabric of the Constitution. Not only do we have Democratic Party leaders actively barring the party’s elected representatives from standing up to the president by submitting bills of impeachment, as called for in the Constitution. We now have Democratic Party leaders in state legislatures betraying Founder Thomas Jefferson, by sabotaging grassroots efforts to get joint legislative resolutions passed demanding the start of impeachment proceedings in the House. Thomas Jefferson, a complex and personally deeply conflicted human being was, as a philosopher of government, incredibly prescient. Not only did he foresee the critical need for a section laying out the inalienable rights of man in the nation’s founding document. He also understood the concept of a “beltway bubble” long before there were even paved roads, much less interstate highway beltways. Jefferson understood that a monomaniacal and unprincipled president, particularly in time of war or national crisis, could intimidate members of Congress—particularly a weak Congress riven by political rivalries—and prevent that body from going forward with impeachment. He understood that members of Congress themselves, remote geographically and politically from their constituents, could eventually become so isolated they would fail to act in accordance with the wishes of the voters who sent them to Washington. That’s why Jefferson came up with an alternative way of initiating impeachment proceedings, in addition to the standard Constitutionally-prescribed method of having a House member submit an impeachment bill. His solution, laid out in his Manual of the Rules of the House, was to allow a joint resolution by any state’s legislature calling for impeachment to also require the House to initiate impeachment. Over the past year, there have been grassroots campaigns underway in at least 10 states to get such resolutions passed. Unfortunately, the Democratic leaders of a number of state legislatures, working in collusion with, or at the direction of even more craven Democratic Party leaders in Washington, are undermining Jefferson, and are sabotaging his carefully crafted mechanism for defending and protecting the Constitution and ensuring the survival of democratic freedoms. In New Mexico, Democratic leaders in the state senate, after earlier voting in favor of an impeachment resolution, suddenly turned around and defeated a procedural effort to bring an impeachment resolution to the floor for a vote, effectively killing the measure. A similar effort was made by party leaders in the Washington State Senate, though a second effort to get that bill, Senate 8016, to a floor vote will be made tomorrow (Friday). In Vermont, where 38 town meetings in March all voted out impeachment resolutions, and called on the state’s legislature to pass an impeachment resolution, the Democratic leaders of the state House and Senate are apparently blocking attempts to move a resolution to a floor vote (where it would likely pass). In each case, there is evidence that Congressional leaders in Washington, often with the assistance of members of each state’s own Congressional delegation, have been leaning on Democratic legislative leaders in the statehouses, to pressure them to kill the impeachment resolutions. This tactic represents a grotesque betrayal of Thomas Jefferson, who expressly saw the state legislative resolution route to impeachment as a way of letting the public, at the state level, send a message to Congress, not the other way around. By squelching such efforts from Washington, the Democratic Party is using top-down power to undermine the popular will. Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans, and an overwhelming majority of Democrats, want to see the president impeached and brought up on charges for lying to put the country into an illegal war, for illegally ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without a warrant, for abusing power by invalidating acts of Congress, for ordering torture, for covering up the outing of a CIA undercover agent, and for myriad other crimes. Yet the Democratic Party leadership has decided that it is in the Democratic Party’s short-term interest to ignore these dangerous assaults on the Republic and the Constitution. The thinking among party leaders is that by laying low and doing little, Democrats can reap gains in the 2008 national election. Maybe they’re right about that. Maybe they’re not. But impeachment in any case is not about partisan gain. It is a process mandated by the Constitution when freedom is under threat. Every member of Congress took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from attack by enemies foreign and domestic. We all know that the Bush administration is wrecking the Constitution, and that it is trying to turn the presidency into an all-powerful dictatorship. In the face of that assault, the national Democratic Party, far from standing up for the Constitution and for democracy, is proving to be an abettor in the crime. Now state party leaders are showing themselves to be just as craven and cowardly. April 17, 2007 Impeachment Talk: Doonesbury, Dennis and Dick Impeachment has finally made it into the mainstream press, but it’s taken a cartoonist to do it. Gary Trudeau, over the past few days, has been running talk of impeachment in his “Doonesbury” comic strip. Soon impeachment may reach the news pages, with word that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is planning to introduce a bill of impeachment in the House against Vice President Dick Cheney. (Of course, it wouldn’t be surprising if the mainstream media ignored that action, just as they’ve studiously ignored Kucinich’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.). There does, in these two moves, and in the ongoing campaign for impeachment resolutions in state houses and town halls across the country, seem to be a growing groundswell for impeachment. So far, aside from Kucinich, there is little evidence of this in Congress, where the word “impeachment” has the same effect upon Democratic Party leaders as a crucifix on a vampire. And yet… The Bush administration seems hell-bent on testing Congress’s limits: * The federal prosecutor firings, which would probably have disappeared as an issue by now had the administration simply dumped Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez a month ago, is mushrooming into a giant political scandal, replete with suspiciously deleted emails, lies, an admission of guilt by a Gonzales aide who has said she would “take the Fifth” if ordered to testify, and evidence that other prosecutors may have engaged in politically-motivated prosecutions in order to keep their jobs. This could easily turn into an impeachment bill against the president. * The president’s continued instransigence regarding continued funding for his splendid little war in Iraq is infuriating the American public, which in turn is pressuring a reluctant Congress to take an increasingly hard line on setting a deadline for withdrawal. Again, as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has opined, at some point Bush’s refusal to acknowledge that Americans have given up on the Iraq War and just want the troops home, could lead to impeachment as a remedy. * The president is seeking a rewriting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to grant him a freer hand in spying on domestic phone and internet use without the need to obtain a court order—all at a time that the public is growing increasingly uneasy about the erosion of civil liberties protections since 2001. Here’s an issue that unites left and right and that could lead to impeachment, particularly as a federal judge has already declared the president to be a felon for repeatedly violating FISA. There is certainly no shortage of reasons to impeach this president. All that is lacking is member of the House with enough sense of duty (members of Congress are all sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic) to submit a bill. Then the members of the House will have to stand and be counted on the crucial issue of whether they stand for the rule of law and the survival of the Constitution, or are just hack politicians trying to ride through the next election. With cartoonists and Dennis Kucinich leading the way, we may yet get to see that challenge laid down. We may yet see this president impeached. April 12, 2007 Bush's Gravest Impeachable Crime When my co-author Barbara Olshansky and I wrote The Case for Impeachment during the waning months of 2005 and early 2006, it seemed clear to us that the biggest impeachable crimes of the Bush regime involved the illegal war against Iraq, and the trashing of the rights and civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. Almost as an afterthought, we also included a proposed article of impeachment against the president for his insidious efforts to block any regulatory, Congressional or international action on confronting global warming. Now that the first two UN reports on the causes and magnitude of the threats posed by global warming have come out--albeit in watered down form, thanks in part to the administration’s continuing efforts to downplay the crisis--and now that independent scientific research is suggesting that the disaster facing life on earth, and human life and civilization in particular is of catastrophic proportions, it seems that perhaps we should turn things around. At this point, arguably, Bush’s greatest crime is not the Iraq War, terrible as that has been. Nor is it his revocation of habeas corpus or his authorization of torture. It is not the usurpation of the legislative power of the Congress. It is not the felonious violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or his obstruction of the investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. His biggest crime is a deliberate campaign of inaction and active obstruction in the face of a clear need for the United States to act decisively to stop or slow catastrophic climate change. This president has not simply denied the reality of global warming. He has actively lied to the American people about the dangers ahead, and has had his administration, through intimidation and post-hoc editing by political hacks, block the publication of government scientific reports on global warming. He has defunded projects that would help document the growing crisis, for example cutting funding for satellites that would measure the effects of climate change on the surface of the planet. He has pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol--the first global effort to confront the problem and try to limit production of greenhouse gasses. He even went back on a 2000 campaign promise to limit carbon emissions from power plants, and instead has given virtual carte blanche to power companies to build the most carbon-spewing coal-powered generating stations possible, complete with gratuitous tax breaks. He has threatened countries with trade sanctions for trying to take actions that would combat global warming, and has even had the US government go to court against state governments, like California’s and Vermont’s, to try to block them from acting to reduce carbon emissions on their own, by for example setting mileage standards for vehicles sold in-state. All of this has meant that for six critical years, when the U.S.--the source of 28 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions--could have been taking decisive action to start reducing the CO2 that the U.S. is spewing into the already carbon-soaked global atmosphere, America has done nothing. In fact, America’s contribution of carbon emissions to the global atmosphere has been rising, not falling, as average miles per gallon figures for American autos have worsened, as more dirty power plants have gone on line, and as overall energy use in the US has gone up. Stupidity, pig-headedness and yahooism are not impeachable offenses. The Founding Fathers pointedly rejected a proposal by George Washington that maladministration be included as grounds for impeachment. Rather, they stuck with "high crimes and misdemeanors," which they took to mean acts that threatened Constitutional government, or endangered the people or the nation. Well it seems crystal clear that the president’s actions and inaction on global warming easily fit that definition. As the coastal waters rise, as other cities join New Orleans in suffering disastrous flooding, as the Midwestern grain belt and California’s salad bowl become dust bowls, as forests burn and already threatened species of animals and plants go vanish forever, and as the throngs of refugees of climate change in Mexico and other harder hit lands surge across America’s borders seeking relief, this president will be remembered best, like Nero and his fiddle, for the two terms during which he dithered, interfered and actively obstructed efforts to stop this predictable disaster from happening. For that crime against our nation and our descendants, and indeed against the entire human race, Bush must be impeached. April 10, 2007 A Terrifying Truth It wasn’t too long ago that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed. What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes! We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth’s sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off. Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the likes of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions of years--the kind of killing heat that in the past has led to mass extinctions--it is ludicrous to talk about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage standards. We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other. There is no way that the world’s 6.5 billion people--and especially the 2 billion of them who live in wealthier societies--can continue to consume energy at even close to the level that we have been consuming it. There is no way we in the developed world can continue to live the way we have been living, in oversized houses, heated in winter and cooled in summer. There is no way in the northern hemisphere we can continue to have teakwood or mahogany-floored living rooms and eat strawberries in December. There is no way that we can continue to squander trillions of dollars on war and military spending every year. No way, that is, if we plan on leaving a livable world for our children and grandchildren. The so-called “green” politicians who talk about instituting carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles, about buying fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or themselves. None of this is going to save us. What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over. We either come up with a new way to organize society, in which production is based upon real needs, not upon manufactured needs, and in which scarce resources are made available to those who need them, not just to those who can afford them, or we will all be doomed--or at least our progeny. The peoples of the world--especially of the developed world, but really everywhere--need to recognize that unless our expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is curbed, unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to be on that extinction list. So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth? Where are the people who are willing to listen to, and reward that truthtelling? This is not an “inconvenient” truth we need to confront. It’s a terrifying truth. We need to change everything, and we need to do it quickly, too. Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for suburban sprawl. There should be no more federal or state funds for road building and road repair. If people want to live miles away from where they work, let them pave their own roads. That’s the only way to get people to realize they’re going to have to start supporting funding for mass transit, and to start thinking about living near where they work. We need to end subsidies for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated local agriculture to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast. Ridiculous! We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be outright banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them around causes. Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income families, so that people will stop heating and cooling large homes. As these things are done, there clearly will be massive dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona will no doubt decide they can’t afford to cool their homes, and will move north. People in cold regions may decide it’s too expensive to heat their homes and will move to more temperate zones. Companies like the Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink enormously. Power plants will be shut down. Oil companies will go bankrupt. That all has to happen, but it doesn’t mean people have to starve. We as a society need to demand a government that will help those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and to find new productive ways to earn a living. A huge government program of investment in alternative energy systems would be able to hire many of those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown of the carbon economy. A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous consumption, egoism and the so-called “American Dream” of having it all for one’s self and one’s family need to be replaced with a new—actually a very old—concept: communalism. Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and competitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as passengers on a boat that is sinking. If we all run for the lifeboats and life preservers and fight to see who can be saved, the life vests will be torn and ruined and the lifeboats will fall into the sea and sink. In the end, we’ll all go down. If, on the other hand, we change tack, recognize that we’re all in this together, and make orderly plans to save ourselves collectively, we may all be able to get away. To succeed, we need to acknowledge that everyone is at risk, everyone is contributing to the common goal of survival, and everyone will be taken care of. The same approach needs to be taken in the larger world. If the poorer nations believe that they are going to be abandoned to catastrophe and famine, they will do two things: continue to try and survive by the old strategies of wasteful energy use and environmental destruction, and of mass migration to safer havens. The first response--for example the continued destruction and burning down of rainforests for wood and cropland and ethanol feedstocks--will threaten us all with ever worsening global warming. The second will lead to overcrowding of more fortunately situated nations, and a drain on their resources. The only answer is again for all the wealthy nations, and those that are better situated by geography to survive climate change, to commit themselves to helping the more threatened nations and societies. This is not a matter of altruism; it is the simple logic of survival. But before we can start making the huge changes that are called for--really the dismantling of the whole capitalist system and the freemarket ethos--we need to start hearing, and demanding to hear, the truth--from scientists, from politicians, from business leaders, from the media, and ultimately from ourselves. For starters, let’s stop kidding ourselves that the latest UN report on climate change is the real story. That report, ominous as it sounds, doesn’t tell the half of it. The report was first watered down by the scientists who reviewed it, and then it was censored by the governments that feared its findings. For one thing, it didn’t even mention that all the projections for warming during this century don’t even take into consideration the role that hundreds of billions of tons of methane gas underlying the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost and trillions of tons of methane lying in the form of frozen hydrates deep under the ocean could play if that super global warming gas should start pouring out into the atmosphere. We are in a situation where it is wholly inappropriate to act on optimistic assumptions. Rather, we need to consider worst-case scenarios, and start planning and acting with those in mind. That means, for example, that to keep that methane fiasco from occurring, we don’t want the permafrost to go away in the polar regions, we don’t want the oceans to warm precipitously and we don’t want the ice caps to melt away. That means we have to act much more dramatically than just worrying about coastal erosion and lowered crop yields might lead us to do. This is a crisis that isn’t going away. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved with band-aids. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved by smooth talk. And it is a crisis that will get worse the longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the longer we take to face up to the revolution that needs to take place if we are to prevent it. And that is the truth. April 9, 2007 Rep. Davis to Constituents: "Make Me Impeach Bush" Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL), says that he firmly believes that President George Bush has committed serious impeachable crimes and abuses of power, but says that “at this time” he supports a decision by the House Democratic Caucus to put impeachment aside in the interest of helping to elect a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president in 2008. Although in late 2005, Rep. Davis was an enthusiastic co-sponsor of a bill by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) that called for an investigation into possible impeachable acts by the president, Davis now says, “The Democratic Caucus has decided that impeachment would not be in the best interests of the country and I’m following that decision.” At the same time, Rep. Davis, a former Chicago alderman, declares that his basic instinct is to follow the wishes of his constituents. “When I got elected to city council, I set up what I called the 29th Ward People’s Assembly. My pledge then was that on any issue of public policy, I would follow their position. If the group decided on a direction, I had to take it. And that approach has not changed.” Davis insists that if the people of his congressional district were to make it clear, through a letter-writing campaign or a petition campaign or some other means, that they felt impeachment were a priority for them, he would feel bound to act on their views. For now, though, he says he’s not convinced. “I know there’s a significant group of people in my district who want impeachment. But there is also a significant group that, when the issue is explained to them, say that while impeachment is important to them, it is not their number one priority.” As long as there are major divisions of opinion, he says, he’s going with the Democratic Caucus position that “impeachment is off the table.” Davis says he “may have said” at a district meeting that his attitude towards impeachment could be changed if he were to receive an impeachment petition from one percent of the voters in his district (roughly 6500 people), but he declined in an interview to commit himself to a fixed number of signatures. That said, he claimed he would be prepared to act by submitting a bill of impeachment if he were convinced that impeachment is what his district wants to happen. What this suggests is that at least some Democrats in the House, like Davis, might be convinced to honor their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution and impeach the president if there were enough of a groundswell for impeachment among their own constituents. Thus impeachment petition campaigns should shift from a national and a Washington focus to a carefully targeted focus on a few key districts like Davis’s, and others in the old “Gang of 39” that only a year and a half ago was backing Conyers’ impeachment hearings bill. Most of them likely agree with Davis that the president has committed impeachable crimes, but have, at least for now, bought into the self-serving position of the Democratic Party leadership that winning in ’08 trumps defending the Constitution. With the president and the administration continuing to show complete intransigence and antagonism towards the Democratic Congress, and a new report in the Los Angeles Times showing that to date Democrats have only passed 10 bills, most of them involving changing the names of buildings (and that no Democratic bill has even reached the president’s desk, much less been signed into law), it would make sense to begin such district campaigns as soon as possible. Voter frustration with governmental gridlock, continued war, and continued Bush crimes could lead to a much more favorable environment for impeachment bills in the not to distant future. April 8, 2007 Torture Blowback and Selective Outrage The alleged torture of British Navy personnel by Iraqi Revolutionary Guards was page one news in the New York Times and other US publications on Saturday, and the outrage in America and Britain was almost universal. According to the just released 15 captives, they were blindfolded, then forced to listen to guns being cocked, which led them to believe they might be executed. They were placed in isolation from one another, yelled at, and forced to confess to having trespassed in Iranian territorial waters. These abusive treatments are all awful, and no one would want to have to endure them, but let's be honest here: they pale in comparison to what American captives have been put through in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, and at various secret "black sites" around the world from Poland to Ethiopia. People held in captivity by American forces--military and CIA--are known to have faced mock executions, to have been beaten to the point of death, and to have endured repeated water-boarding sessions. They have been forced to stay in stress positions for so long that they have suffered permanent muscular and neurological damage. They have been subjected to total sensory deprivation, such as we saw was applied to American captive Jose Padilla, to the point that they went insane. They've suffered extended sleep deprivation, have been left staked to the ground in desert sun, or left wet and naked for days in front of blasting air-conditioners. They've been attacked by dogs, sexually humiliated, raped, and forced to watch the desecration of their Korans. There are also forms of torture applied which we don't even know about--the reason provided by federal authorities for blacking out the testimony of captives at military tribunals in Guantanamo, and the reason two convicted "terrorists," David Hicks and John Walker Lindh, had to sign gag agreements barring them from talking about the conditions of their captivity in public in return for reduced sentences. If anyone wanted to know why President Bush's authorization of torture by American forces was a criminal act, they should go talk to the freed British detainees. So far, no one has asked them what they think about countries that torture captives. My guess is that they'll say it's a horrible idea, whoever does it. So far, from what I've seen, none of the reports on the abusive treatment of British captives has made the connection to how American forces are torturing captives in their custody. This is shoddy journalism at its worst. So far, nobody in Congress, including Sen. John McCain, who once tried to pass a torture ban only to have it gutted by presidential signing statement, has said anything about this case-book example of blow-back of America's use of officially sanctioned torture of captives. April 6, 2007 Impeachment's Back in the News You’d have to call it progress when impeachment, which for almost a year has been a banned word in the corporate media and the halls of Congress, starts being discussed as a serious matter, even if it is only to say that it shouldn’t be done. In an April 5 article, the Washington Times interviewed several members of Congress, noting along the way that Congressional Democrats report that “constituents are clamoring” for impeachment of the president. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) is quoted as saying he gets “one call after another” calling on him to impeach the president, but he goes on to say impeachment would be “a very divisive thing…and at this point I don’t see that happening.” Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), one of the House’s most liberal members, reportedly calls impeachment pointless and a distraction from the presidential election. Diane Watson (D-CA), another of the most liberal members of Congress, says she gets calls for impeachment from every crowd she speaks to, and says that while she would support impeachment herself, it’s “not a strategy our new leadership would want to start with.” That comment, of course, really gets to the heart of it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), has for almost a year been hammering home her opposition to impeachment, saying repeatedly that it is “off the table” and (as she said again last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press”) that “Democrats are not about impeachment.” Pelosi has enforced her will on this issue by not so subtly threatening pro-impeachment members of the Democratic caucus with loss of desired committee assignments or even committee chair postings--likely the reason that a leading impeachment advocate in 2004-6, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), has for months retreated into an embarrassed silence on the issue. Lately, however, there are signs that even Conyers, whose obeisance got him the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee that should have been his by virtue of seniority alone, is chafing a bit at Pelosi’s strictures. Anthony St. Martin, founder of the website PledgetoImpeach.org, reports being told by Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL), and by staff members in the offices of both Rep. Watson and Rep. Conyers, that all three of those members of the House would be willing to push for impeachment if they received a petition from voters in their districts representing one percent of the district population (about 6500 signatures). If true, this may then be the strategy for moving things forward. If last fall’s Newsweek poll is correct that over 50 percent of the American public wants the president impeached--and that would be consistent with earlier polls taken before the election that showed similar support for impeachment--it should not be hard to come up with those kinds of numbers on impeachment petitions, especially in districts that elected people like Davis, Watson and Conyers. At the same time, efforts are underway now in at least eight states to push through impeachment resolutions in both houses of state legislatures. One attempt failed in New Mexico because of improper arm-twisting by top national Democrats, and a second was sidetracked in Washington state in the same way, but legislative campaigns continue to move ahead in Vermont, Texas, Wisconsin, Maryland and elsewhere. Should one of these states manage to pass a bi-cameral legislative petition calling on the House to initiate impeachment, under Thomas Jefferson’s “Manuel” for rules of the House, the House of Representatives in Washington would be obligated to hold a hearing on impeachment. Pelosi and other Democratic congressional leaders can be expected to plead that it’s “too late” in the president’s second term to begin impeachment hearings, but this is an absurd argument. Impeachment of the president on some grounds--most notably his willful violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and his abuse of signing statements to invalidate laws passed by the Congress--is so straightforward and the offenses are so self-evident that hearings would hardly be needed. The Judiciary Committee could draw up and vote out bills of impeachment in a flash. Besides, the counter-argument to the lateness dodge is that it would be important to impeach this president even if it were done after the November ’08 election, because not to impeach Bush for his many crimes and abuses of power would be to give them the stamp of Congressional approval, making them the standard of acceptable behavior for all future presidents. Pelosi never gets asked that question by reporters when she talks about impeachment being “off the table.” As for divisive--what does one call appointing an ambassador via a “recess appointment” who has been summarily rejected by the Senate? What does one call sending 25,000 more troops into the Iraq War killing fields after an election that showed the American people to want a quick end to that war? Clearly the Bush administration is divisive. Divisiveness already is the prevailing condition of government in Washington. Impeachment would, in any even, not be divisive; it would be a national cathartic that would bring a majority of Americans back together around the support of our founding charter. There are signs that at least some Democratic members of Congress, after years of acting like lower life forms, are beginning to evolve spines and a belated recognition that there is a need to respond to the views of the public, not just the party elite. If they do begin impeachment proceedings, they may even find some support among Republican members of Congress, who also are looking at facing the voters in 2008 with growing anxiety. Impeachment is coming back. April 3, 2007 158 Democrats Gone, and Counting (Take That You Weasels!) It's been only four days since I published a column on my website calling for Democrats to quit a party that is being led by calculating politicians who are willing to fund a war until the next election, and who are unwilling to impeach a criminal president, all in the interest of possibly winning the White House and a few more seats in Congress in 2008. And already, over 158 longtime Democrats have responded by sending a note, announcing that they are leaving in disgust, to the special address I've set up: I_Quit_This_Party. That's not bad. If each of those who quit do as they're supposed to and convince several friends to quit, we could have several hundred Democratic defectors by next week, and from there it could snowball quickly and, as Arlo Guthrie once powerfully sang, "become a movement." It is clear that no amount of street protesting alone is going to get the leadership of this corrupted party of Roosevelt to take a stand of principle. I'm convinced that the only thing that will drag them kicking and screaming to a genuinely progressive stance on the two key issues facing this nation--ending the war now and defending the Constitution by impeaching the president--is showing them that we progressives can no longer be taken for granted And the only way to show them that we won't be taken for granted is to quit the party. To those who say that you don't want to be frozen out of the primaries--local this spring and national next spring--I have to say you won't be missing anything. We've seen too many times how these same leaders will rig the system to make sure that the safe, approved DLC candidate ends up winning. Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer, respective campaign chairs for the Democratic House and Senate campaigns in 2006, managed to undermine a whole slew of good progressive candidates in the last congressional election by running their favored hacks against them in the primaries. If they hadn't engaged in that effort at sabotage, today's Congress would not be Democratic by a hair; it would be overwhelmingly Democratic, and a hell of a lot more progressive. If the Democratic leadership hadn't gone and arm-twisted state legislators in the state senates of New Mexico and Washington state last month, we'd already have two state legislatures passing impeachment resolutions demanding that the House of Representatives initiate impeachment hearings. Three really, because that same unconscionable pressure from the leadership has slowed down a similar effort to pass a bi-cameral resolution in the legislature of Vermont. So join this new "I Quit!" movement. It's easy. Just send a message to the above address, and send copies to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the DNC and your local Congressional representatives. Let them all know you're quitting until they initiate impeachment of President Bush and vote to cut off funding for the war. It is unacceptable for the Democrats to play for political advantage with the blood of American troops and of innocent Iraqis. It is equally unacceptable to allow Bush to finish out his term unimpeached, thus effectively sanctioning his abuses of power, his violation of the laws of the land, and his trashing of the Constitution for continuation by whoever replaces him in 2009. It's time to quit the party. To see the full argument for quitting the Democratic Party in protest, read the earlier column just below. March 30, 2007 I Quit! A Movement of One...Or Maybe a Million It's time to quit being a Democrat, and start being a democrat! I’ve always been a registered Democrat. I think it has something to do with my having reached voting age in 1967, when there were actually some serious anti-war candidates challenging the party leadership, and being able to vote in the primaries really mattered, and because in 1972, there was a genuine choice between an honest peace candidate and a truly wretched war-monger, who was working to destroy the Constitution. My party, the Democrats, eventually took a stand against President Richard Nixon, and together with some Republicans who also valued the Constitution above blind party loyalty, they brought him down, and ushered in a rare, albeit brief, roll-back in the national security state. Now we have another wretched war-monger, George W. Bush, who like Nixon before him is also doing his best to undermine the Constitution, but the party I have always been registered as a member of is letting him get away with it. Oh sure, they’re having hearings to embarrass him, and they’re playing games to make it look like they’re opposed to his war-mongering, but they are clearly not doing anything concrete to stop him, the way Democrats did in 1974 with Nixon. In fact, the leadership of my party is doing worse than nothing. They are actively blocking efforts to bring President Bush to ground. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has is known to have threatened key members of Congress, notably Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, and other early backers of impeachment hearings, with punishment—the loss of key committee and subcommittee chairs or postings, problems with any bills they might submit, and the like--in order to keep them from submitting bills of impeachment. She and other leading Democrats in Washington have also unconscionably interfered with efforts in state legislatures to pass resolutions which would demand that the House of Representatives take up impeachment. The cynical motive behind these actions is to try and win bigger majorities in Congress in 2008 by doing nothing—the idea being that Bush and his cronies and their Republican backers in Congress have made such a hash of running the country, and of their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Americans will abandon them and turn to the Democrats. The problem with this strategy—even if it were to work, which is dubious--is that by 2008 there won’t be much left of the Constitution, or of tri-partite government, thanks to Democratic inaction and cowardice. Only the impeachment of Bush and the other criminals in the current administration can restore the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the tradition of separation of powers that has provided the underpinning of American democracy for over two centuries. So after watching this pathetic post-November Kobuki show by the Democrats in Congress, I’ve had it! The Democrats need to know that they can no longer act in such an irresponsible, cynical manner. They need to know that they can no longer take my vote for granted, counting on me to stick with the party because the Republicans are so much worse. If Democrats will not impeach this president, if they in fact actively undermine attempts to express the popular will of the party's grassroots membership, I quit. I’m giving my party notice. Effective immediately, I’m going to my local voter registrar’s office and changing my registration to Green Party, and I won’t be back to vote for Democrats until they take a stand of principle and begin impeachment hearings to remove President George W. Bush from Office. I will be sending word of my resignation to the Democratic National Committee, and to Speaker Pelosi. I urge every Democrat who cares about the future of the country and the survival of the Constitution to join me. It doesn't matter whether you join the Greens, the Socialists, the Populists, or just go unaffiliated. What matters is that you quit the Democratic Party. Elections in the U.S. of late are being won and lost by narrow margins. If the Democratic leadership sees that hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of us, are not going to play their game anymore, maybe they’ll finally start acting like real Democrats again, if only to win back the progressive voters, like me, who I’m suggesting here should abandon them. If you do decide to quit, and to notify party leaders of your decision, please also send me an email with just “I quit” in the subject line (no messages please!) at: I_Quit_This_Party I’ll be publishing the results here weekly, and if the numbers get large enough, I'll be going to the mainstream press and the DNC with them. And please spread the word. March 28, 2007 Oil Traders Fear Attack on Iran; Maybe We Should Too Okay, now I’m worried. There have been several rounds of reports that the war-obsessed Bush administration was getting ready to attack Iran—first last September, then in December, and more recently in January and February. The one thing that kept me thinking that a catastrophic war with Iran might not be in the offing was oil prices, which didn’t seem to be acting as one would expect them to if there were a major war looming in the Persian Gulf. Oil prices, in fact, have been drifting slowly downward since September 2006, when they hit $68.85. Yet if there were going to be a hot war between the U.S. and Iran, one would expect much higher prices. After all, most of the combat would be occurring along Iran’s heavily armed coastline and in the Gulf, through which some 40 percent of all the world’s oil passes. In the event of such a conflict, oil shipments would shut down from that region as underwriters jacked the price of insuring oil tankers in the Gulf to astronomical levels. Estimates of how expensive oil could become in the event of a US attack on Iran, the world’s second largest oil producing nation, have ranged as high as $200/barrel—a level that would bring the global economy to a screeching halt. Well, there are new reports circulating now that an attack by US air and naval forces could come in early April, and this time, the oil traders are taking them seriously. On Tuesday, oil futures shot up $5/barrel to hit $68/barrel—quite a jump, and the highest price for oil since last September. Reports say that traders were responding to rumors—unsubstantiated—that Iran had fired on an American ship in the Gulf, and no doubt also to the ongoing tensions over Iran’s capture and detention of 15 British sailors, whom it claims had illegally entered Iranian territorial waters. Phil Flynn, a trader with Alaron Trading in Chicago, was quoted as saying that the oil market has been “on pins and needles” because of the tensions in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran. Adding to worries about oil supplies from the Gulf, no doubt, is the vast armada that the U.S. has amassed up close to Iran’s borders—an armada that includes two fully armed aircraft battle groups, equipped with hundreds of strike aircraft and tomahawk cruise missiles and capable of delivering a crippling blow to Iran’s military and industrial infrastructure. The Bush administration, while repeatedly insisting it has no plans to attack Iran, has pointedly also stated on numerous occasions that “all options are on the table” in dealing with what it claims are Iraqi efforts to develop nuclear weapons capability. The White House and Pentagon have also been running a propaganda campaign—ominously reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq invasion--of trying to make a case that Iran is providing technical aid, weapons and training to Iraqi insurgents, particularly in the use of armor-penetrating explosive devices. Iran, for its part, is continuing to develop its uranium refining skills and capacity, all the while denying that it has any plans to develop nuclear weapons. This past week, the United Nations voted stiffer sanctions on Iran for failing to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international rules and monitoring. Iran denies that it has been aiding Iraqi insurgents or providing advanced weapons for use against US forces in Iraq, and indeed the evidence presented by the U.S. has been viewed with considerable skepticism. Meanwhile, there are reports in the European press that American forces are massing along the Iraq border with Iran, even as the U.S. is conducting war games in the Gulf simulating an attack on Iran. There have also been reports for some time that US special forces have been operating in Iran, gathering intelligence and establishing coordinates on likely bombing targets, and perhaps linking with anti-government groups inside Iran that have been conducting terror attacks there. More recently there have been reports that the Bush administration has been using misappropriated Iraq reconstruction funds to finance Kurdish and Al Qaeda group attacks inside Iran. Back in the U.S., the Bush administration succeeded in getting Congress to back off of attempts to include legislation barring the White House from attacking Iran without prior Congressional approval. Bush has already claimed that Iran is a terrorist nation and that he thus has the authority to attack that country at will because of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force which was actually an authorization for the US attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It all would seem to point to the real possibility of an attack on Iran—a move that would be a war crime, that would be a disaster for the U.S., that would spark a global recession, and that would inflame the entire Middle East for years to come. Do the oil traders know something that we in America should be knowing? And why aren’t Congress and the US media discussing all this? Take action: Call your members of Congress and tell them you want them to block Bush from going to war again without an act of Congreses: 202-224-3121 March 27, 2007 Impeachment, Like Spring, is in the Air It's time for impeachment to come out of the deep freeze. For a year now, Democratic leaders like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Rep. Nancy Pelosi D-CA), Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and DNC head Howard Dean have been working to tamp down the pressures to hold the president accountable for his crimes and abuses of power by way of impeachment. House Speaker Pelosi for her part made it clear after the Democrats won the House that she would tolerate no talk of impeachment, even reportedly threatening one-time impeachment advocate Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) with the denial of his cherished position as chair of the House Judiciary Committee if he pushed ahead with or accepted bills of impeachment from other House members. House leaders and Democratic Party leaders also worked behind the scenes to kill off grassroots attempts to follow Thomas Jefferson's alternative route to impeachment by getting state legislatures to pass bicameral impeachment resolutions. They strong-armed legislative leaders in the senates of both Washington State and New Mexico to block efforts to put such resolutions to a floor debate and vote in those two states, and have been working mightily to block a similar grassroots campaign in Vermont. But the Democratic Party's efforts to tamp down impeachment efforts are coming unraveled, courtesy of the ongoing criminality of the Bush administration, which seems hell-bent on aggrandizing as much executive power as it possibly can before the clock runs out on Bush's second term of office. Democratic state committees, the top party organizations at the state level, in both Oregon and Vermont, have overwhelmingly passed resolutions calling on the House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings. In Vermont, 38 towns--roughly a third of those holding annual town meetings this past month--voted impeachment resolutions (only six were rejected), and an effort continues to move forward in both houses of that state's legislature to introduce and pass a Jeffersonian impeachment resolution to send to the House in Washington. Other efforts are underway in New Jersey and Maine. Republican Senator and presidential dark horse Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has publicly stated that impeachment is a possibility, given the president’s arrogant rejection of public or congressional accountability with regard to the war in Iraq and other issues. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has openly talked of submitting a bill of impeachment. What's missing in all this has been media attention. In fact, until lately, the media have pretty much only reported about impeachment in the negative, running stories when an impeachment resolution gets blocked by a state legislature, but not when it gets backed by a legislative committee, or by a Democratic state party organization. There has not been a scientific poll asking about impeachment sentiment since last October, when Newsweek Magazine published a poll showing that an astonishing 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment--half of those people even saying it should be a priority for Congress. Now things may be starting to change. Sen. Hagel's comments on the possibility of impeachment, first made in a Esquire magazine profile, were reported on ABC, and impeachment advocate John Nichols was interviewed about impeachment and Hagel's comment on MSNBC. CNN also ran a story. That's not much, but it's an indication that the ground is shifting. With the White House pushing forward with a new war-marketing campaign--this time against Iran--and given mounting evidence of new White House crimes, from the political firing of federal prosecutors and the abusive use of national security letters by the FBI to spy on tens of thousands of Americans, to the disaster of the show trials in Guantanamo, to the lying by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to evidence of both President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's involvement in the outing of and obstruction of justice into the investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, to the escalation of the war in Iraq and to the lying about and enforced manipulation of government evidence on global warming, the American people are getting completely fed up with the Bush administration. A recent poll found that as lame as it has been in challenging the Bush agenda over the last six years, the Democratic Party has now become the favored choice of 50 percent of Americans, while support for the Republican Party has fallen to only 35 percent--barely higher than the paltry 30 percent who still cling to their support of the president himself. It would seem to be only a matter of time before Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership will be forced to open the floodgates and permit the filing of impeachment bills. The arguments made against impeachment--that it would be "divisive," that it would interfere with more "pressing matters" in Congress, that it would mean making the almost universally loathed Cheney president, and that it would "hurt Democrats" in 2008--are all looking increasingly shop-warn and contrived. In fact, as the Bush crimes against the public, the Republic, the law and Constitution mount, the Democratic defenders of the president against impeachment are increasingly looking simply cynical and ridiculous. There is a kind of seesaw effect at work here, where the weight of presidential power and prestige, combined with Democratic cowardice, has kept one side firmly planted on the ground, while critics of Bush crimes and constitutional abuses have remained stranded up in the air. But as the weight of the evidence of Bush administration criminality, arrogance and unconstitutional actions have mounted, and as more and more citizens have lost faith in the government, the beam has been tilting. It won't be long before it is the administration and the Democratic Party leadership who find themselves dangling and without support. At that point, Pelosi and the DNC will have to surrender to the will of the grassroots, and step aside for the ensuing stampede of impeachment bills. Impeachment, like spring, is in the air. March 25, 2007 Why Neither Dick Nor Nancy Will Ever Become President Via Impeachment One argument I hear over and over when I talk about the need to impeach President Bush for high crimes against the Constitution is that it can never happen because "then we'd have Dick Cheney for president." A second argument is that impeachment could never happen because even if Bush and Cheney were removed, it would mean Nancy Pelosi would become president, and Republicans would never allow this to happen. Some who raise these issues may be genuinely horrified at the prospect of a Cheney presidency (though we really already have that), and may also be genuine in thinking that there could never be an impeachement that would change control of the White House from one party to the other. But I get the feeling that many of those who raise these objections to impeachment simply don't want to deal with impeaching the president. Certainly the Cheney canard has been quietly raised by many in the Democratic leadership to explain their shameful inaction in defense of the Constitution in the face of Bush's many grave crimes and abuses of power. So let me knock these two bogus concerns down once and for all. First Cheney. There is a precedent here. Richard Nixon, as he faced impeachment, also had what many said was a kind of impeachment insurance: Spiro Agnew. Agnew was in some ways like Cheney--a hard-right, money-grubbing, small-minded proto-fascist. He was also different in that Cheney is embedded in the highest reaches of the corporate petro-war machine, while Agnew was a political light-weight. Cheney also seems to have a Machevellian cleverness that Agnew never had. That said, both have in common that they are profoundly disliked by the vast majority of Americans--Cheney even more so than Agnew, who at least had a robust following among the yahoo, know-nothing crowd (that's pre-Yahoo yahoo usage). In any event, when it became clear that Nixon was going to go down, Republican Party leaders looked aghast at the prospect of facing the voters with Agnew as the face of the Republican Party. They found a way out, by having the Justice Department indict Agnew on bribery charges. He was gone in a flash, and thus they were able, with Democratic Congressional support, to put a safe, uncontroversial place-holder into the vice president's office, Gerald Ford, who was at the time the minority leader of the House. It made a certain sense given that had Republicans been in control of the House, Ford would have been the next in line for the presidency. If impeachment hearings made it clear that Bush's days in office were numbered, as I believe would certainly be the case, Republicans would be at least as concerned about being stuck with Cheney as their party leader heading into 2008 as their forebears were of having Agnew in that position. I have no doubt but that they would push him or threaten him or drive him out of office in the same way that they eliminated Agnew. They'd have several ways to do that. Cheney, who has myriad health problems, including a bionic heart and thrombosis, could simply push a little emergency escape button on his life-support system and claim he was having some heart problems and had to leave for health reasons. If he didn't do that, there is no doubt a file lodged in the FBI somewhere with enough serious dirt on Cheney's financial chicanery to pull him down with an indictment. He knows that, and so would almost certainly cut a deal that would allow him to skate away free. In any event, he'd be gone. In the unlikely event that he chose to ignore the pressure, and managed to intimidate his party colleagues and the attorney general's office into not indicting him, the other problem for Cheney is that he is so intricately involved in all of Bush's impeachable offenses that he would surely be impeached along with the president or more likely indicted by a special prosecutor long before the president resigned or was thrown out of office. As for Pelosi becoming president, I think it is impossible for two reasons. Firstly, if Democrats ever develop the courage and sense of principle to initiate impeachment hearings into Bush's crimes, they, like their predecessors in 1974, will want to gain at least some Republican backing, and they could never do this if Republicans thought they might be handing the White House over early to them. Clearly they would want to make it plain that they had no intention of installing Pelosi in the White House via impeachment. I suspect that the same kind of arrangement would be made in Bush's case as was made in Nixon's: Republicans would be able to pick an uncontroversial, lackluster replacement for Cheney--probably someone like House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)--to take over from Cheney. (Boehner is in many ways a Gerald Ford clone--undistinguished politically and intellectually, and unlikely to win should he run for president on his own right. There is also the delightful way that his official bio is so quick to explain that his name is pronounced "Bay-nor," and not the way one might expect it to be pronounced, which would be certain to make him the butt of late-night TV jokes the same way Ford was.) The main thing is that it is simply not correct that the fear of a Cheney or a Pelosi presidency provides Bush with some kind of insurance against impeachment. The only insurance Bush has against the impeachment he so richly deserves, and that a majority of Americans devoutly wish to see him receive, is a craven Democratic Party leadership, which because of a profound lack of principle, an excess of self-interested political calculation, and an astonishing misreading of the popular will, is going to any lengths to avoid doing what the Constitution demands it to do: impeach a president who poses a clear and present danger to the survival of Constitutional government and the rule of law in America. March 23, 2007 Congressional Democrats are a Pathetic Embarrassment What a pathetic joke this nominally Democratic Congress has proven to be. Despite polls showing that 6 in 10 Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq asap, the best that this crew can come up with is a call--not binding, or course--for the president to pull out the troops by next spring or even summer. That would be over a year from now, and more than five years (!) into this criminal and incredibly stupid war. At the rate things have been going, it would also be perhaps 1000 more dead Americans, 14,000 more gravely wounded Americans, and 100-150,000 more dead Iraqis later. And in offering this limp request, Congress is in the process of approving the appropriation of another $124 billion in spending on the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. This is action? They could be blocking that funding altogether, and shutting the damned war down. Why can't Democrats, who were put in their position of power in Congress by the voters, at least show the courage and principle of Republican Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex), who is opposing the funding and says, "It's amazing to me that this Congress is more intimidated by political propagandists and special interests than the American electorate, who sent a loud, clear message about the war in November." And those subpoenas. Congress is boldly demanding the appearance of Bush’s Rasputin Karl Rove and his ousted legal adviser Harriet Meirs. Fine as far as it goes, but what about the clear evidence at the Libby trial that his regent, Dick Cheney, orchestrated a smear campaign against administration critic Joe Wilson and his CIA wife Valerie Plame, obstructed the Justice Department investigation into that effort, and lied about what he had done? Shouldn't there be subpoenas issued to the Veep himself and all of his staff? What about the evidence at that same trial that the president himself was in on the cover-up and obstruction of justice conspiracy. Shouldn't there be subpoenas of staff to pin that down, and a letter of interrogatories to the president himself? While they're at it, shouldn't this 110th Congress that the people elected last fall in an effort to clean out the Augean stables of the Bush White House and to end the war be initiating an impeachment of the president, at least on his admitted felonious violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law? After all, a federal judge already tried that case and determined that the president is a felon. That's an easy case to impeach on. They could also be revoking the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. That's the resolution Congress passed on September 18, 2001, which the president has ever since been claiming makes him a dictator--that is commander in chief in a borderless, endless "war" on terror--not beholden to the Constitution, and free to ignore or invalidate acts of Congress at will. It's an astonishing abuse of power, exactly what the Founding Fathers feared could happen, and yet Congress is doing exactly nothing about it. There's no need for the 2001 AUMF. We're not at war in Afghanistan anymore, after all. There is a new, elected government there, and it has invited in NATO to help it fight a resurgent Taliban. We're just there as part of NATO, and so hardly need a special AUMF--especially one that can be falsely construed as an authorization to be a dictator. So why isn't Congress revoking the damned thing? The could revoke the 2002 AUMF too. Bush misused that one as an authorization to go to war against Iraq, since it actually required him to go to the UN for authorization--something he never bothered to do. In any event, we're not at war in Iraq either, as much as it might look like we are. The war in Iraq is over folks. We're not even occupiers there any more. Remember, we handed sovereignty over to the Iraqis in 2004! There's an elected government in Iraq--an independent government--and we're there at their invitation to help them with an insurrection problem. That's not a war, any more than it's a war in Columbia, where we've also sent troops at the Columbian government's request. So why doesn't Congress revoke the AUMF? It would be a good idea, because Bush is liable to misuse it further and claim it gives him the right to attack Iran at will. He's said as much. Again, listen to Republican Ron Paul, who says, "Congress should admit its mistake and repeal the authority wrongfully given to the executive branch in 2002. Repeal the congressional sanction and disavow presidential discretion in starting wars. Then start bringing our troops home. If anyone charges that this approach does not support the troops, take a poll. Find out how reservists, guardsmen, and their families--many on their second or third tour in Iraq--feel about it. The constant refrain that bringing our troops home would demonstrate a lack of support for them must be one of the most amazing distortions ever foisted on the American public." (Of course, Rep. Paul has his own issues when it comes to guts. He has publicly stated that the president has committed impeachable crimes, and yet he has shied away from doing the obvious, and appropriate, thing: submitting a bill of impeachment. If he does do it, it would be the ultimate shaming of Democrats in the House.) I'm fed up with the gutless mini-politics of this Congress. Who gives a damn whether they've passed a minimum wage bill? It'll never get past Bush anyhow. Neither will anything else of consequence that this Congress passes. Unless they start challenging the Bush administration directly and forcefully, Congressional Democrats aren't going to do bupkis in two years and people are going to start wondering why they were voted in in the first place. People might even start to think seriously about letting the Democratic Party just wither away. Wouldn't make much of a difference without it, really, and we might even come up with something better. It wouldn't be too hard to do. Breaking News: Crucial Abu-Jamal Hearing Before Third Circuit Court of Appeals Set for May 17 Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelpia journalist and former Black Panther activist who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982, will finally have his appeal of his conviction heard by a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which set a date of May 17. At that session, Abu-Jamal will argue that his original trial for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was fatally flawed because of racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection. He will argue that his conviction by that jury was improper because the prosecutor improperly was permitted to lessen jurors' sense of responsibility by assuring them that whatever they decided, the defendant would get "appeal after appeal" and so their decision "would not be final." He will also argue that his effort to appeal his conviction was damaged because his post-conviction relief act hearing was presided over by a judge who was clearly biased in favor of the district attorney. The hearing will also hear a claim by the district attorney that Abu-Jamal's death sentence--lifted by a Federal Judge in 2001--should be reinstated. The federal district court had ruled that Abu-Jamal's sentence had been arrived at by a jury that was given improper and confusing instructions by Judge Albert Sabo, and that their sentencing form itself was misleading. Meanwhile, it has been learned that the Philadelphia District Attorneys Office earlier this month attempted unsuccessfully to have the entire Third Circuit Court--one of the more liberal appeals courts in the nation--recused from hearing Abu-Jamal's appeal on the grounds that Abu-Jamal's claim of jury selection bias was charging then DA Ed Rendell (now Pennsylvania's governor), with having deliberately violated the law. Rendel's wife, Marjorie, is one of the appeals court judges in the Third Circuit. Abu-Jamal's attorney Robert R. Bryan, objecting to the DA's effort, noted that there was no claim of illegality on the governor's part, but rather on the part of the prosecutor in the case, Joseph McGill. It is alleged that a succession of Philadelphia DA's encouraged their prosecutors to remove as many blacks as possible from capital juries, and documentary evidence has been submitted to show that this was done, both by the DA's office over all, and by assistant DA McGill in his own capital cases. During jury selection for Abu-Jamal's trial, 11 black potential jurors who had all agreed they could vote for a death penalty, were removed by McGill using his available peremptory challenges (meaning he did not have to give a reason for his action). In a letter to the DA's office stating that the request to have all the circuit's judges recused from hearing the case had been rejected, the clerk of the court said that such a request would have to be made not as a letter, but in the form of a formal motion. In a scolding tone, the letter notes that such a motion "must be in proper form, i.e. an original and three copies and certificate of service." "It must have been humiliating for the opposition" to receive such a note, comments attorney Bryan. He notes that to date, the DA has "not had the guts" to make such a formal motion, adding, "We'll see." March 20, 2007 Why Haven't They Impeached Bush Already? After a year of running around flogging my book The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I’ve had to give a lot of thought to a question I have gotten over and over from radio hosts to ordinary people concerned about the fate of the country and our Constitution. The question: Why haven’t the Democrats already impeached the president for all these crimes, abuses of power and assaults of the Constitution? I used to chalk it up to cowardice, but I’m no longer happy with that answer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be a politician’s politician, but she hasn’t lacked for courage. She has, for example, always been ready to stand for taking a tough line on civil liberties in China, when the corporatocracy has been pressing the government to cozy up to China. It’s also hard to buy the idea that so many progressive members of the House--people like John Conyers (D-Mich.), Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Chakka Fattah (D-Penna.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)--all of whom clearly understand the nature of the president’s crimes, could be afraid to submit bills of impeachment--indeed that all the progressive members of the Democratic Party in the House are so afraid to take a stand on impeachment that not one has dared to submit an impeachment bill. (Only Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) has taken that step, and she waited until she had already been voted out of office and then filed her impeachment bill in the last week of the 109th Congress.) That said, there are some things I do know. First of all, there are members of Congress who understand that the president should be impeached. Chief among these is Rep. Conyers. Back in the last Congress, Conyers, as ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee--the committee that would hold impeachment hearings if a bill of impeachment were submitted--held unofficial hearings into some of the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors, which resulted in a book, George W. Bush Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Downing Street Memos and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Coverups in the Iraq War and Illegal Domestic Spying. The book is a clear call for impeachment. Conyers also filed a bill in the 109th Congress which called for creation of a “select committee” to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the Bush administration. It ultimately boasted 39 co-sponsors, including Reps. Rangel, Fattah and Waters. I also know that midway through the 2006 election year, Rep. Pelosi began telling reporters, at every opportunity, that if Democrats were elected to a majority in the House in the November election, there would be no impeachment effort--impeachment, in her words, would be “off the table.” And so it has been, at least inside the Beltway. And not only has it been put off the table--Pelosi and the party leadership have been actively working behind the scenes in an unconscionable effort to undermine grassroots campaigns to put it back on, via state legislative resolutions. In both New Mexico and Washington state, Democratic party leaders from Washington have put the screws on local legislative leaders to keep the issue of impeachment from even making it to an open floor debate in a legislative chamber. Clearly, progressive members of Congress have also been pressured not to submit impeachment bills. In part, I think this is all happening because Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership have bought the Republican Party’s spin--that impeachment would be “good for Republicans” because it would allegedly “energize the Republican base” that supports President Bush no matter what. Maybe that is technically true, but that base is less than 30 percent of the voting public, and it ignores that fact that impeachment would also energize the Democratic, progressive base, and might well also energize the libertarian base, all of which collectively would far outnumber any possible energized reactionary base. This leads me to what I think is the real reason the Democratic leadership is opposing impeachment--a reason I find thoroughly disgusting and unworthy of the party of Roosevelt. I believe that Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Howard Dean and the rest of the leaders of the Democratic Party, have concluded that the Republican Party and the Bush administration have so screwed up that they have lost the support of the majority of Americans, and that all Democrats need to do to win the White House and a bigger margin in the House and Senate in 2008 is to let them continue to screw up, aided by selective Congressional investigations designed to further embarrass them. While Pelosi has talked grandly about passing a progressive agenda of bills in the 110th Congress, the Democrats know that they cannot pass any meaningful progressive legislation. Their majority in both houses is razor thin and could never survive a veto, and even if they could, by watering down their bills, lure enough Republican votes to override a veto, President Bush would invalidate any bill that made significant change or reform by just issuing one of his unconstitutional and illegal “signing statements” asserting that as commander in chief in the war on terror he doesn’t have to adhere to the Constitution. So what Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid plan to do is pass legislation that they know won’t go into law, like the minimum wage bill, or global warming laws, and then go to the voters in 2008 saying, “We would have gotten these bills into law, if only we had more Democrats in the Congress, or a Democratic president.” They’re doing the same thing with the war. If Democrats wanted to end the war, they could do so immediately by refusing to pass a supplemental funding measure to support it, but they don’t want to do this. It’s not that they fear being called unpatriotic--hell, with 70 percent of the public wanting the war to end immediately, nobody would fault Congress for pulling the plug. Even the troops who are stuck over there wouldn't be upset to see the funding that keeps them there terminated. But ending the war would leave the Democrats without their best issue going into the 2008 national election: Bush’s war. So instead of ending the war, they vote to oppose it, but then continue to fund it. (Rep. Emanuel has actually said publicly that it would be good for Democrats if the war were to continue through November 2008.) It’s a supremely cynical campaign ploy, and it’s also behind the strategy of keeping impeachment “off the table.” If Bush were impeached, and witnesses began getting called in under oath to expose his and Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies and deceit in tricking the nation into war, his illegal NSA spying activities, his obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame outing investigation, his authorization of torture, his obstruction of efforts to combat global warming, his criminal failure to provide troops with armor or to plan for an Iraq occupation or to respond to the disaster in New Orleans, and his usurpation of the powers of Congress and the Judiciary in invalidating over 1200 laws passed by the Congress, it would almost certainly lead to his (and Cheney’s) removal from office and to a prompt end to the war. Then where would Democrats be? They’d have to stand on their own merits. They’d have to give voters a positive reason to vote for them. And it’s been so long since Democrats have done that that they really may not even know how it’s done. Even progressive Democratic representatives seem to have bought into this cynical thinking. How else to explain Rep. Conyers’ repudiation of his own book, even as it’s about to come out in paperback? How else to explain the deafening silence of progressives like Reps. Waters, Rangel, Jesse Jackson Jr., and, at least until this week, Dennis Kucinich? I’m hoping that at least Kucinich will finally stand up and reject this cynical Democratic thinking, and file a bill of impeachment, giving Rep. Conyers the chance to redeem himself by standing up to Pelosi et al. If he does stand up, and begins hearings on an impeachment bill, I hope other progressive Democrats—and maybe a few principled Republicans?--will join him by filing their own impeachment bills. I hope state legislators in Vermont, Washington state, New Jersey and elsewhere, will take heart from what Kucinich appears ready to do, and will shrug off the pressure from Democratic national leaders, listen to their own residents, and pass joint resolutions calling for Congress to initiate impeachment hearings, too. This dam can be broken. If it is, perhaps Democrats and patriotic Republicans will finally be able to live up to their oaths of office, which pledge them to uphold and defend the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” There is no greater enemy of Constitutional government, the rule of law, and the freedoms that so many have died to establish and to defend than President Bush and his administration. If Congress will not stand up to the crimes of this administration and call this president to account through impeachment, all future presidents will feel free to follow his corrupt example, and the impeachment clause may as well simply be removed from the Constitution. Or be rewritten to refer only to lies about extramarital sex. March 16, 2007 Kucinich Has a Chance to Make a Historic Move and Stand Out as a Presidential Hopeful If Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is looking for a way to distinguish himself from the pack of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president in the 2008 election, he need look no further than impeachment. While Kucinich can justifiably and proudly claim ownership of the anti-war position, having been there from the get-go, everyone else in the field has piled on—even Hillary Clinton—at least to the point that the average voter would have a hard time distinguishing their positions regarding the war in Iraq. But calling for impeachment of the president is something else. So far impeachment is a verboten word among Democrats in Congress, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the party leadership have made it clear that anyone who steps out of line and submits a bill of impeachment will be punished. The leadership has even gone so far as to attempt—with considerable success—to crush grassroots efforts to introduce impeachment resolutions in state legislatures (such pressure on key Democrats killed such a measure in New Mexico, and derailed another in the state of Washington, and is being used now to attempt to block a third effort in Vermont). Pelosi’s unconscionable strong-arm tactics to keep impeachment “off the table” in the 110th Congress have even cowed House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI), who in the 109th Congress had been leading calls for an investigation into impeachable crimes by the administration, and had submitted bills calling for formation of a special committee to investigate such crimes. Since Pelosi began her campaign to protect the president from impeachment, Conyers has been silent on the issue, though his discomfort has been obvious. Enter Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich, on March 15, after watching Democratic efforts to block Bush from going to war against Iran without Congressional approval get unceremoniously scrapped, announced that it looks like “impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.” Warning that “the administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran,” despite “no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies,” Kucinich noted that under international law and US law it is illegal to initiate a war of aggression, and that it is also illegal to threaten a war of aggression against another state that does not pose an immediate threat. It is now widely rumored that Kucinich is planning to act on his belief that Bush has committed crimes and that he may soon file a bill of impeachment in the House--a move that would certainly seem to follow logically from his latest statement. If he does so, here’s hoping he will not limit his bill to just the president’s Iran war threats. As serious as that charge is, it is important that Congress initiate impeachment hearings into the many other crimes and abuses of power that this administration has engaged in over the course of the last six years. In particular, Kucinich should call for impeachment hearings into Bush’s authorization of torture, his willful felonious violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, his evident involvement in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and the obstruction of justice in the investigation of that incident, his willful abuse of power in invalidating over 1200 acts or portions of acts passed by the Congress through the misuse of so-called “signing statements,” his and his subordinates’ lies to Congress and the 9-11 Commission, his criminal negligence in the Katrina disaster and in failing to provide adequate armor for troops in Iraq and to plan for the Iraq occupation that would follow toppling of the Saddam regime, his lies leading up to the Iraq invasion, and his administration’s corruption of the nation’s electoral system, most recently evidenced in some of the politically-motivated firings of federal prosecutors. Kucinich should also include a call for an impeachment hearing into claims, made by investigative reporter Sy Hersh, that the administration used some of the “missing” Iraq reconstruction money to fund Al-Qaeda-linked groups to have them secretly attack targets in Iran. The mountain of evidence of this administration’s crimes against the Constitution, the Republic, and the People of the United States has been growing by the month, and Speaker Pelosi’s and the DNC’s position—that it is better to simply run out the clock to 2008 and let the administration continue to mess up—is looking increasingly craven, calculating and unconscionable. Kucinich has long shown himself to be that rare thing—a politician of conscience. He now has the chance to prove it, by standing up to Pelosi and the do-nothing Democratic leadership. As Kucinich said in his statement on the floor of Congress, “This House cannot avoid its constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of Executive power.” If Kucinich acts on those words and puts impeachment back on the House table, he will deserve to move to the head of the table in the Democratic presidential race. March 14, 2007 Democrats' Calls for Resignations are Pointless Diversions All these calls from Democrats in Congress for Bush administration people to resign are missing, or deliberately obfuscating, the point. The FBI abused its power under the PATRIOT Act to obtain American citizens’ financial and other records without a court warrant, so Democrats are calling for FBI Director Robert Mueller’s resignation. The Justice Department and the White House conspire to fire and replace federal prosecutors who aren’t sufficiently aggressive about investigating and harassing Democratic officials (relying on a measure tucked into the renewal of the PATRIOT Act), so Democrats are calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. Seriously wounded Iraq War veterans are being treated disgracefully, if they are treated at all, and there are howls for top military and Veterans Administration officials to resign. But the problem isn’t the officials; it’s the laws that were passed--usually with Democratic Party support. For that matter, most of the most egregious crimes against the Constitution of this most criminal administration have relied, for their justification, on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by a Congress that included a Democratic-led Senate. Let’s face reality here: The Democratic Party folded under pressure in 2001-2 and passed terrible and outrageous laws that everyone with a brain knew would be used and misused by the Bush/Cheney administration to usurp and aggrandize power at the expense of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, constitutional government and the future of the Republic. Now that we have seen the predictable fruits of those terrible laws, it makes no sense to simply call for the resignation of officials who have been making predictable use of them. It’s time to repeal the damned laws. They got rid of their version of the PATRIOT Act in Canada. It’s time to throw ours in the trash where it belongs. The invasion of Afghanistan is over--it’s now a NATO operation at the behest of an elected government over there. It’s time to revoke the 2001 AUMF, which Bush has been claiming makes him commander in chief in an unending “war” on terror, and which he says means he doesn’t have to obey the Constitution, or laws passed by Congress. Firing Gonzales and Mueller doesn’t accomplish anything. Whoever is named to replace them will do the same thing they did. The only way to stop the ongoing rape of the Constitution is to change the laws that have been used as legal cover by the rapist-in-chief and his accomplices. The only way to stop the trashing of veterans is to change the VA from an organization designed to keep ailing vets from getting assistance, and turn it into on that is designed to help vets get help. (Note: My own parents, both WWII veterans, are both ailing and in need of home care assistance. When I contacted the VA about getting them help, I learned that because they are not suffering from war-related ailments, they are so far down the priority list that they have absolutely no hope of getting any kind of help from the VA. This after serving three years each defending the country!) It’s also time for Democrats to stop pretending that they can set any kind of progressive agenda in Washington this year and next. They have already demonstrated that they cannot stop the war in Iraq (or even prevent a new illegal war against Iran), they cannot pass the least little bit of progressive legislation and they cannot halt this administration’s crimes through passing new laws. Any law they pass that has any real impact will be either vetoed by the president with no hope of an override, or, more likely, will be simply nullified by an unconstitutional “signing statement” by the president. There is no alternative to impeachment, and Congress should begin the process immediately and stop screwing around with pointless rants about resignations. And a Comment on Gutlessness and Betrayal President Bush likes to pose as a tough, straigh-shooting guy, but faced with the outcry over the political firings of a bunch of federal prosecutors, his true character--weasel, fair-weather friend, buck-passer, liar--has come to the fore. Although it is clear that the president and his "brain," Karl Rove, were the prime movers behind the firings, and that they were the recipients of complaints about the fired prosecutors from Republican office-holders, Bush is trying to blame the whole thing on two of his most obsequious and loyal servants, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales. As Bush tells it, he is "not happy" with what these two long-term aides did. But of course the reality is that both Mier and Gonzales are the most unself-activating of aides. Both have been servants to Bush's political career for its entire arc, from governor of Texas to President, and neither would do anything without direction from Bush. It speaks volumes that this guy would turn on these two loyal aides as soon as he runs into trouble. March 13, 2007 Democrats Kill Democracy and Protect a Criminal Presidency in New Mexico The unseen dead hand of national Democratic meddling seems to have killed a promising example of grassroots democratic activism in New Mexico that could have been a model for reviving the Democratic Party nationwide and in that key swing state. While no one has yet come forward and identified the culprits, it seems evident from the behavior and explanations of some key one-time backers of a proposed legislative joint resolution calling on the US House to impeach President Bush, who at first supported the measure but then joined 17 Republican members of the state senate in killing it, that pressure was brought to bear on them to trade sides. Only last week, the resolution, submitted by State Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino, looked like a sure thing. It had breezed through the relevant committees with solid Democratic support and only needed to be accepted for debate by a full vote of the senate, which has 20 Republicans and 23 Democrats. But then something strange happened. When accepting the resolution for debate was put to a vote, the Senate’s 17 Republicans were on hand but most Democrats were out of the room. The person chairing the session, Senator Ben Altamirano, a Democrat who had been a supporter of Ortiz’s resolution in committee, allowed the vote to go ahead despite the absence of many Democrats, and moreover, permitted a voice vote. The Republicans yelled their “nays” loudly, and Altamirano ruled that the measure had passed. Democrats came back the next day and demanded for a voice vote on the measure. It went down to defeat, 26-17, with Altamirano and eight other Democrats voting against it. Altamirano later insisted that he had not voted against Ortiz’s resolution, which he improbably claimed to still support, arguing that all he had done was vote that the prior day’s controversial ruling declaring the measure dead by voice vote had been proper. He failed to mention that he was referring on his own ruling as president pro-tempore and chair of the session the day before. Meanwhile, another turncoat on the issue, State Senator Carlos Cizneros, a co-sponsor of Ortiz’s resolution who also surprised Ortiz and other resolution backers by voting to kill the bill, offered another explanation altogether. “I didn’t vote to kill the bill,” he said in an interview days later. “I voted to send it back to committee because the votes weren’t there to pass it. I didn’t want to see it die, so I voted against it.” “That’s pretty weasily,” commended Desi Brown, an aide to Sen. Ortiz. “The bill was killed and it cannot be brought back to the Senate floor, unless Sen. Cizneros knows something about senate rules that we don’t know.” A third Democratic turncoat, Sen. David Ulibarri, failed to return calls to explain his reason from voting against the resolution after earlier backing it in committee. Ortiz aide Brown said only two of the nine Democrats voting against the resolution represent majority Republican districts, a situation which might explain their taking a negative position on the resolution. Others of the nine represent fairly conservative Democratic districts, but of course, the Bush presidency is unpopular among Democratic voters of all political stripes, and among independents too. Brown says that prior to the vote killing the resolution, five of the nine Democratic senators who voted with Republicans had been seen conversing privately, suggesting a coordinated strategy to kill the measure. Brown and impeachment movement activists in the state insist that days before the debacle in the Senate, they had clear support for passage among senate Democrats. Brown says he does not have evidence of any pressure on senate Democrats, but speculation is focused on Gov. Bill Richardson, an announced candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and on Sen. Jeff Bingaman. The Democratic National Committee has targeted New Mexico as a key battleground state for 2008, and given the national party leadership’s clear desire to avoid an impeachment battle in the House, it seems increasingly evident from the strange behavior of turncoat senate Democrats in the state, that pressure was brought to prevent the passage of a joint resolution that would have put the issue front and center in the US House of Representatives. This seems particularly likely given the overt pressure that has been brought to bear on state senators in the state of Washington by two members of that state’s congressional delegation. A similar joint resolution is facing a do-or-die vote in the Washington state senate today or tomorrow. One curious aspect in this story is the behavior of senate Republicans in New Mexico. Last spring, when impeachment talk was first surfacing, national Republican leaders argued in the media that a Democratic-led impeachment campaign would be good for Republicans since it would “rally the base” of the Republican Party. Many Democratic Party leaders have bought into that theory, which is why they are afraid of the growing impeachment movement. But if impeachment is good for Republicans, why would they have acted in concert in New Mexico to kill Sen. Ortiz’s resolution? Democrats should think twice before joining Republicans in such efforts to kill off citizen impeachment campaigns at the state level. Clearly Republicans don’t really want to see an impeachment hearing in Washington, DC, which suggests that Democrats should be pushing ahead for those hearings, not helping Republicans to fend them off. Democratic state Senator John Grubesic, a backer of the Ortiz resolution, said after the vote killing the measure, “The action taken by the Senate was not the action taken by a body that protects the freedoms of a sovereign people. The action was a carefully orchestrated option designed to protect the integrity of an institution and perpetuate the well-oiled workings of government.” He added, “Our actions today showed where our priorities are, we forgot that the Constitution was not designed to serve government, but to protect the people. There should have been a debate, argument, uproar. Instead, we quietly gutted the sovereign power of the people with polite political procedure. When future generations look back on our time, the shock will not be because of the violent, impolite nature of the fight that preceded the destruction of Constitutional government, but by the meekness with which we watched it die.” Erich Kuerschner, a local impeachment activist in the state, notes that at the state party convention held in 2006, 80 percent of the delegates endorsed a plank calling for impeachment of the president. “The party constituents made a pretty clear choice back then,” he says, “and it’s not being reflected by the actions of the party leadership.” March 12, 2007 I for one am not going to fuss about Halliburton moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai on the sunny coast of the Persian Gulf. It makes sense, and it makes things so much clearer, too. Halliburton, recall, is the company that has made the most money of any private enterprise off of the Iraq War--$27 billion to date, most of it in the form of extraordinarily profitable no-bid contracts (the company earned a record $2.3 billion last year alone). It is also Vice President Dick Cheney’s company. He headed it for five years before deciding to go into “public service” as President Bush’s regent in 2001, and he continued to receive compensation from the company, and to hold options for Halliburton stock well into his vice presidency, refusing even to put his holdings into a blind trust, as wealthy political figures normally do to ensure that they don’t make decisions based upon considerations of personal gain. Before, there was always the old argument that "what's good for Halliburton is good for America." That line may have been hokey when it was first uttered with regard to General Motors by then GM chairman Charles Wilson, and it is surely hokey today, but it can lead to some confusion among Americans still in thrall to the corporate creed. But with Halliburton now a Dubai corporation, with its tax obligations now owed to the Dubai Revenue Department instead of the IRS, that deception is gone. We know now that when Dick Cheney makes a foreign policy or war policy decision regarding Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia, he is really thinking about what it will do for Halliburton and Dubai--and for Dick Cheney. Remember the big brouhaha that arose when a Dubai-based company was in line to take over the operation of several major U.S. ports last year? Members of Congress were in high dudgeon over that and in the end the plan was abandoned. So how do we feel knowing that virtually the entire supply line for our over-extended troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is now in the hands of a Dubai corporation, and that it has its hooks into the central policy arm of our government, Blair House and the Office of the Vice President? Next time Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary serves our troops toxic, bacteria-ridden food, or puts untreated Euphrates River water into their canteens, maybe we should look harder to see if this was just another case of corporate corner and cost-cutting, or whether something more sinister was at work. We--and members of Congress, if they still remember how to do their job--ought to be asking whether Halliburton's move to Dubai has anything to do with anticipated business should Cheney get his way and the U.S. attacks Iran this spring. Since such a war would inevitably include the destruction of much of Iran’s state-owned oil industry, it would represent a huge new business opportunity for Halliburton, which first and foremost is an oil-services company. Seeing all this is much easier with Halliburton based in Dubai, rather than Houston. Especially when you also consider the new oil law written by America and passed by the Iraqi parliament, which opens Iraq's oil reserves to American oil companies. The American soldiers and marines stuck in Iraq, who have long been led to believe that they are over there fighting to defend America, should have little trouble these days seeing that they are really fighting and dying for Halliburton, Exxon/Mobil and Chevron…and Dubai. March 10, 2007 This event was held on March 9 in Washington DC, sponsored by the Washington Peace Center. To view the session, go to Investigations to Impeachment: a Panel Discussion [5]. For a clearer video of the whole event, go to Democrats.com [6] and click on the links in the Forum topic headlined "Terrific New Impeachment Video." March 9, 2007 Bush Dodges a Constitutional Bullet in New Mexico President Bush dodged a Constitutional bullet in New Mexico Thursday, when nine Democrats in the state senate joined all 17 Republicans to prevent a proposed joint resolution calling for the US House to begin impeachment hearings to come to a floor vote. Supporters of the measure said it appeared that the Democrats in question mostly came from Republican districts and were worried about electoral repercussions of a pro-impeachment vote. There is reason to suspect, however, that there was some arm-twisting from national Democratic leaders, who appear dead set on avoiding impeachment hearings, whatever the public sentiment on impeachment (Newsweek reported last fall that 51 percent of Americans favor impeachment) and whatever Bush’s crimes, Constitutional violations and abuses of power. In the state of Washington, where another such effort is being made in that state’s senate, the state’s senior Senator, Pat Murray, and one of its senior representatives, Jay Inslee, both Democrats, have been lobbying state senate leaders behind the scenes urging them to prevent Sen. Eric Oemig’s proposed joint resolution on impeachment, as well as another senator’s bill calling for an end to the Iraq war, from getting a floor vote. A decision there is expected before March 14. Supporters of Sen. Oemig’s bill say they think the votes are there to pass his measure in the full Senate, if they can get it past the procedural hurdles. It would then go to the state’s house of representatives. (One reason leading Democrats want to prevent a floor vote is that impeachment advocates could then rebut their claims that impeachment would be "divisive" and that it "detracts from the Democratic agenda.") Perhaps the best chance for passage of a state impeachment joint resolution is in Vermont. There impeachment activists have made it through committee in the House. Meanwhile, a grassroots effort has been underway to get towns across the state, most of which operate under a town-meeting form of democratic governance, to pass impeachment resolutions at their annual town meeting. In nearly a third of the state’s towns, 48, residents agreed to put the issue on the agenda of their meeting, and of those, 38 passed the resolution. Only one town voted the resolution down. That kind of public expression of support for putting Bush in the dock in Congress could help convince wavering Democrats in the state’s legislature to vote for impeachment whatever national Democratic leaders may say. Other efforts to pass state resolutions on impeachment are reportedly underway in Maine, California, New Jersey and elsewhere. The Constitution lays out a process for initiating impeachment which begins with the filing of a bill of impeachment by a member of the House of Representatives, but Thomas Jefferson, recognizing that Congress in some cases might be too cowed by a powerful president or to removed from public sentiment, established, in his Manual of Rules for the House, a second route to impeachment--a joint resolution by a state legislature--on the theory that state legislators are much closer to the people. Indeed in modern times, with members of Congress earning six-figure incomes, traveling in chauffeured limousines, and living most of the time in Washington, inside the sterile Beltway, this is even more so that it was back in Jefferson’s day. In many states, state legislators are part-time government officials, earning modest salaries and living for the most part in their home districts, where they drive their own cars, shop with voters, and send their kids to the local schools. This probably explains why so many states are seeing impeachment resolutions while House Democrats maintain a stony silence in the face of Bush’s ongoing rape of the Constitution. The Democratic Leadership, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) in particular, clearly have decided that the only issue for Democrats is winning the presidency and more seats in Congress in 2008, and that the way to do that is to lie low, avoid controversy, and go to voters hoping that disgust with Republicans will win the day for them. Although they are all sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic, and although they all know that this President is a clear domestic enemy of the Constitution who has broken laws, obstructed justice, abused power, violated international law and established international treaties, shredded the Bill of Rights, and displayed extraordinary criminal negligence as a leader, they are refusing to act on their oaths of office. If no member of Congress will show the courage to stand up to this shameful failure of leadership, it is up to the people, through their state legislators, to make Congress act. March 8, 2007 Through the Looking Glass in Iraq What’s going on in Baghdad? Wasn’t that “surge” and security crackdown supposed to be reducing the violence? Certainly that was the argument Bush made when he announced his latest new “strategy” of adding 21,500 troops to the occupying force in Iraq. He said that the so-called “surge” was needed to “reduce the cycle of violence,” but so far, the violence has only increased, with more bombings, more killings, more Iraqis—both Shias and Sunnis—dying--albeit spread around in the areas outside of the central city--and more American troops being killed. This is progress? I guess maybe it is in the Through the Looking Glass world inhabited by the president and by the vice president, who recently declared that the decision by Britain to cut and run from Basra was a sign of “progress” in the Iraq War. Maybe President Cheney (a man who, after all, has a hard time distinguishing a quail from a hunting companion), really believes that the increasing violence in Baghdad is some kind of death spasm of the resistance to US occupation and to the fratricidal conflict that the US War on Iraq has ignited. He was saying that the insurgency was in its “death throes” back in May 2005, and we all see how dead they are today. No doubt Vice thinks that the upsurge in violence in Baghdad and in western Iraq (what the US Marines refer to now as “Marineland”), is evidence that the U.S.; is winning, too. It must be heartening to the U.S. troops who see their buddies being cut down, and to the families of the dead, to know that we are winning over there. If we win any more, though, the president may have to reinstate the draft to keep enough targets, er I mean boots, on the ground. It's a bad sign that the "surge"--a word that was meant to imply a brief, dramatic increase in troop numbers, followed by a drawdown--now appears likely to last well into 2008, meaning a year or more, which sounds more like an escalation of the war than a "surge." But hey, we're talking semantics here, right, not lives. While we’re still inside the mirror, how about the support this administration has been giving those troops? You go over to Iraq or Afghanistan, give your all, get chewed up by an AK-47 or a roadside bomb, or all too often by friendly fire from your own side, and then come home, often missing some body parts, to rat-infested quarters and a military/Veterans Administration bureaucracy that works tirelessly to deny you treatment and a disability rating. In Bush/Cheney Land, I guess that’s called “supporting the troops.” It is this altered reality which the Democrats, now in control of Congress, are talking about bringing to a merciful conclusion…at the end of 2008. And that’s what they call taking a stand against the war. Clearly it’s not just Bush and Cheney who have gone through the mirror. March 6, 2007 Libbygate: Now to the Real Story So Scooter Libby has taken the fall. Three and a half years and a long bloody war after he and a gang of war-mongers in the White House and Blair House, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, set out to undermine and trash the reputation of an Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Libby has been found guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a Washington jury. Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out just why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed upon a minor state department official and why they went so far as to violate federal law and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, in the process destroying her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Because that's what this whole Libby story is really about. The whole focus of the media in this case has been on the narrow, inside-the-Beltway question of who leaked information about Plame to the media. Entirely forgotten or ignored has been what this leak was all about to begin with. For that, you have to go back and look at what Wilson did in the first place that so enraged or frightened the Vice President and the President. And that was to go to Niger, one of the poorest nations in Africa, to prove conclusively that there was no truth to a set of forged notes on the letterhead of the Niger embassy in Rome, purporting to be receipts for 400 tons of Niger uranium ore allegedly being sought by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Wilson knew those documents were cheap forgeries--the name of the mines official on the papers was someone who hadn't been in office for years--but he went to Niger anyhow, just to make doubly certain that no such purchase attempt had been made. None had. So the real question then is, who is behind those forged documents? There is an interesting story here--and an important mystery to be solved. As it happens, way back in early 2001 there was a pair of burglaries at the Niger Embassy in Rome and at the home of the Niger ambassador. Police investigating the crimes found that the only things stolen were official stationery and some official stamps, used to make documents official. A cleaning lady and a former member of Italy's intelligence service were arrested for the crimes. They were odd burglaries to be sure, since there is precious little one could use, or sell, such documents for, given the country involved. I mean, it might make sense to steal official stationery from the French Embassy in Rome, which a thief might use to finagle a pass to the Cannes Festival. But Niger? Jump to October 2001. A few weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by his ministers of defense and intelligence, made a visit to the White House. There he reportedly handed over the forged Niger documents (they were on Niger government stationary, and had Niger government stamps!), which appeared to be receipts for uranium ore, made out to Saddam Hussein. Now forget the matter of why either Hussein or Niger's government would want paper receipts for such an illegal transaction, and forget the matter of how Hussein would have transported 400 tons of yellow dust across the Sahara to his country without somebody noticing. The simple fact is that Bush's own intelligence experts at the CIA and State Department promptly spotted the forgeries, and they were dumped. We know this because we know, from the likes of onetime National Security Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that Bush was pushing for war with Iraq almost as soon as he finished reading My Pet Goat following the attack on the Twin Towers. Surely if the White House had even thought those Niger documents might be legit, they would have leaked or broadcast them all over creation. They didn't. The documents were deep-sixed, and mentioned to no one. But according to some dedicated investigative reporters at the respected Italian newspaper La Repubblica, they resurfaced before long at a very suspicious meeting. This meeting occurred in December 2001 in Rome, and included Michael Ledeen, an associate of Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and a key figure in the White House's war-propaganda program, Larry Franklin, a top Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), convicted Iraqi bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress, and Harold Rhode of the sinister Defense Department Office of Special Plans, that office set up by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under Feith's direction to manufacture "evidence" to justify a war on Iraq. Also at this peculiar meeting were the heads of the Italian Defense Department and of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency. According to La Repubblica, it was at that meeting that a plan was hatched to resurrect the forged Niger documents, and to give them credibility by recycling them through British intelligence. And that is what Bush was referring to when, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he famously frightened a nation by declaring, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush lyingly implied that this was new information, when in fact he knew--had to know--that the "evidence" in British hands was the same set of documents he had been offered by Berlusconi almost a year and a half earlier, which had been declared to be bogus. No mainstream American media organization has pursued this story, or even published the details as reported in Italy. Most Americans, consequently, don't even know what a grand lie Bush and the White House perpetrated upon them and the Congress in order to win approval for an attack on Iraq. Perhaps now that Libby has gone down for his part in this grotesque crime, some editor will ask the obvious question: Why did the White House and the Office of Vice President go to such extraordinary lengths to attack Wilson and his wife? And more importantly, who was behind those Niger embassy burglaries and the forged uranium ore sale documents? And what was OSP doing meeting in Rome in December 2001 with the head of Italian intelligence? Make no mistake: this whole story has the odor of a "black op" designed to target the American people. If so it was an act of high treason. It is not just Libby who should go to jail for this crime. It is the president and vice president. At this point, what should happen is that Fitzgerald, with Libby in the bag, would take the next step and hold the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence recommendation over the convict's head in order to try and win from him a promise of cooperation with the prosecution. Because Libby knows who was behind all this. That's the way prosecutors go after criminal syndicates and conspiracies, but Fitzgerald has folded his tent, reportedly saying that he plans no further prosecutions. That means it's up to Congress, which should take the cue and initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney based on the evidence of crimes and obstruction that came out during the Libby trial testimony. And of course, it's up to the media, which if they were still doing their job, would be all over this story. March 4, 2007 It's the People of Washington v. Pelosi ed al In the State of Washington, it is the people versus Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership. At issue is a bill, S8016, submitted in the state’s senate by freshman state Senator Eric Oemig, which would call on the U.S. Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution and the people of the United States and of the State of Washington. The measure, which would take the form of a joint resolution by the two houses of the Washington state legislature, accords with the instructions laid out by Founder Thomas Jefferson, who, in his Manual of the Rules of the House of Representatives laid out state joint resolutions as an alternative route for initiating presidential impeachment proceedings in the House in addition to the more usual route of a member submitting a bill of impeachment. Jefferson’s prescient thinking was that if Congress, by reason of political cowardice or inattention, ever proved unwilling or unable to initiate impeachment when it was called for, state legislators, far from Washington and closer to the people, could do it for them. But two unprincipled and devious Democratic members of Washington’s congressional delegation, Sen. Pat Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee, are undermining Jefferson’s carefully designed fail-safe system by pressuring Democratic state legislators to kill Sen. Oemig’s bill. The Seattle Times in a March 2 article, reports that Murray and Inslee are telling Democrats in the state senate to kill the impeachment bill on the grounds that it would lead to “divisiveness” in Washington, and that it would impede the “Democratic agenda” in Congress. Forget grave spinning! This wholly inappropriate interference in state affairs by the state’s two leading national political figures must have Jefferson shitting in his mouldered pants! Clearly, Murray and Inslee have decided to abandon their constituents in the state of Washington, a majority of whom want this criminal president impeached, and are instead doing the bidding of US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who have completely lost touch with the nation’s voters and with their own sense of principle. But this battle is not over. The grassroots movement in Washington that has led to Sen. Oemig’s bill getting as far as a hearing in the Senate’s Government Operations and Elections Committee, is growing rapidly. The Citizens Committee for Impeachment in Olympia, with almost no money and no press coverage, brought 900 people to a rally a week before the committee hearing, and hundreds more to the capitol building on the day of the hearing. A massive phone and letter-writing campaign to committee members and state senators is now underway to insure that the bill goes to a vote in the full Senate. If Democratic state legislators know what is good for them, they will send Murray and Inslee packing back to Washington and will vote to defend the Constitution and their constuents by approving Sen. Oemig’s bill in both houses and sending his resolution to the House, forcing Pelosi to put impeachment back on the House agenda where it belongs. After all, what is this supposed concern about “divisiveness”? The nation is mired in a criminal war that has killed 3200 American troops and injured another 52,000, many of them from Washington state. The president has trashed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and is bankrupting the nation, wasting money that could be helping Washingtonians and other Americans. Washington today is not too divisive; it is not divisive enough! As for that Democratic agenda, just how do Murray and Inslee expect anything passed by the current Congress to make its way into law if the President is free to continue, in direct violation of Article I and II of the Constitution, to invalidate the laws passed by the Congress through his use of what he calls “signing statements”? February 27, 2007 Video of Lindorff, McGovern and de la Vega on Impeachment in Olympia, Washington These links are segments from an impeachment event held on Feb. 20 in the Performing Arts Center of Olympia, Washington, which was organized by the Citizens Movement to Impeach Bush/Cheney. Dave Lindorff [7] Ray McGovern [8] Elizabeth de la Vega [9] Q&A [10] February 26, 2007 Bush is Funding Al Qaeda, Making Him an Unlawful Combatant It was always clear that the $21 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds, most of which disappeared into Iraq (much of it was in the form of bales of $100 bills), didn't just vanish. Given the number of veterans of the Iran-Contra scandal operating in the Bush White House and Pentagon--many of them convicted felons or unindicted co-conspirators in that baroque criminal scandal from the Reagan presidency--it seemed obvious that such easy cash would end up being funnelled into secret wars and secret military projects, as well as other nefarious activities. Now we learn from ace investigative reporter Sy Hersh, speaking on CNN that Bush and his criminal crew have been using this illicit, stolen cash to fund covert attacks on Iranian targets, and that much of the money has been going--get this--to Sunni jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda--the very people we're fighting in Iraq! This is surely taking that old saw, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," to the extreme! First we let Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, and now we're funding him and his allies, supposedly to attack our new enemy, Iran. It's enough to make you queasy. Osama must be laughing all the way to the bank. First we set him up, when we wanted him to attack the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then he turned on us and attacked us. And now we're back to supporting him again. No wonder when Congress passed a bill creating an office of inspector general to check on all that vanishing Iraq cash, Bush furtively issued one of his "signing statements" saying that the new inspector would be barred from examining any funds that involved the Pentagon--effectively nullifying the law! Now, it should be pointed out that under anti-terrorism legislation submitted by the administration and passed into law by the Congress, providing aid to Al-Qaeda or to organizations in any way linked to terrorism is a federal crime and classifies the perpetrator as an abettor of terrorism and even as an "unlawful combatant," subject to loss of citizenship rights, and suitable for rendition to Guantanamo or some other secret torture hell-hole. I suppose the proper thing at this point would be for some patriotic prosecutor or some general to march into the White House and haul the president off to be waterboarded until he lays out all the details of his treasonous actions. (Sure he is the president and is immune from prosecution, but if he's an "unlawful combatant," none of that applies. The president has declared this to be so.) For make no mistake: secretly providing money to terrorist organizations that are daily attacking Americans in Iraq, in order to ignite a new war against Iran, especially at a time that the US military is stretched beyond the limit in Iraq, is nothing short of treason. Even viewed in a more minimalist way, absconding with public funds and diverting them to illegal purposes is criminal fraud. If Congress does not jump on this immediately, its members will have betrayed their oaths and the nation. These are dangerous times. We are being led by bloodthirsty men drunk with power and the people who are supposed to be standing up to them are afraid to lift a finger. The time is fast approaching when the only way America's beleagured and abused troops will be able to defend themselves will be by laying down their arms--or perhaps turning them on their demented leaders. February 25, 2007 A Message to Washington State Legislators (and to those in VT, NM and elsewhere) This is my testimony, submitted to the Government Operations and Elections Committtee of the Washington State Senate, which is holding a hearing March 1 on a proposed joint resolution, S8016, calling on the US House of Representatives to initiate impeachment hearings: To the Committee: Thank you for your important and patriotic work in considering Sen. Eric Oemig's bill for a joint legislative impeachment memorial to the US House of Representatives. As co-author of the book The Case for Impeachment, published last June by St. Martin's Press, I want to urge you to allow this important bill to go forward for consideration by both House and Senate in the State of Washington. Founder Thomas Jefferson, as a key architect of the Constitution and of the government that has become a model for democracies the world over ever since, specifically established, in his "Manual of Rules for the House of Representatives," that not just individual members of Congress, but also state legislators, acting collectively through a joint resolution, should have the power to initiate an impeachment inquiry in the US House of Representatives. It was clearly his view that the matter of whether or not a president had committed impeachable crimes against the Constitution or the Republic is very much an appropriate responsibility and concern for state legislators, not just members of Congress. Indeed, given the parochial concerns that members of Congress have with getting themselves re-elected, and given the power of the president to threaten and cajole members of Congress, it might be argued that Jefferson was prescient in seeing the need to provide an "outside-the-Beltway" avenue--closer to the people--for calling a wayward or criminal chief executive to account. You as state legislators have as much of an obligation as do members of Congress to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States--the more so when Congress has been failing in its duty to do so. Specifically, you need to consider how this president has been violating his own oath of office, by usurping powers that the Constitution clearly assigns to Congress and the courts, by lying to Congress and the American people about such grave matters as the reasons for going to war, by undermining such fundamental rights of the citizens of Washington as the First Amendment's freedom of speech and the Fourth Amendment's protection against illegal search and seizure, and by his revocation of the ancient right of habeas corpus. We know the president of the United States has broken the law. He admits he broke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ordering the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens. Indeed, a federal judge in Detroit, after hearing arguments by the government and the ACLU, concluded last July that the president had broken that law, thereby committing a Class A felony, and violating the First and Fourth Amendments. For that one crime alone he should be impeached. But the Founding Fathers made it clear that by "high crimes" they meant political crimes--crimes that undermine the Constitution and threaten the survival of the Republic. (I would note that in 1974 the House Judiciary Committtee voted 27-11, with many Republicans voting yes, on an article of impeachment that accused President Nixon of "making false and misleading statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.") And Bush is guilty of such high crimes also. For example, when the president, in his 2003 State of the Union Address to Congress and the nation, claimed that there was new evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from an “African nation,” he knew that information was bogus and a fraud. Indeed he had been shown those forged documents as early as October 2001 and they had been rejected even then as cheap forgeries. He lied too in claiming a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. These are huge, consequential lies that have ended up destroying a nation and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including nearly 3200 American troops, many of them from the State of Washington. They are lies that have also led to many of the administration actions that have been undermining the founding principles of our democracy--for example to Bush's outrageous claim that as commander in chief he may at his own discretion nullify laws duly passed by the Congress--something he has now done over 1200 times! Please note that the words "unitary executive" and "signing statement" appear nowhere in the Constitution, and know that while other presidents have issued signing statements, none claimed that such addenda meant that the law in question was null and void as this president is doing. I would finally point out that Bush's impeachable crimes have had a direct and measurable harmful impact on the people of Washington. The nearly $500 billion wasted to date on the Iraq War is money that could have helped fund schools, roads, police, park development, environmental preservation, dam restoration, veterans benefits and other important things in this state. It could have also helped provide Washington residents with better health care and a more secure retirement. For all these reasons, I hope you will take a stand in support of Sen. Oemig’s S8016 bill, and send it to the full Senate for consideration. Respectfully, David P. Lindorff February 21, 2007 Breaking the Dam in Olympia If the state of Washington ends up passing a joint legislative resolution next month calling on the US House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, it will because 900 people who crammed into this capital city's Center for the Performing Arts last Tuesday evening, and countless others across the state, pushed them into it. The crowd at the arts center had come to attend an event organized by the Citizens Movement to Impeach Bush/Cheney, a local ad hoc citizens' organization in this little burg that had convinced the local city council to make the 1000-seat auditorium available for a hearing on impeachment. When I and my two co-speakers, CIA veteran Ray McGovern and former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, came out on the stage, we all felt not like political speakers or authors, but like rock stars. The applause was deafening, not just at the start of the program, but after each speaker's points were made. It was clear that even if the Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says impeachment is "off the table," a sizeable hunk of the American public is hungering for a taste of it. Washington is one of a group of states where a serious effort is underway to pass joint legislative resolutions that, thanks to Rules of the House penned by Thomas Jefferson and in effect for nearly length of the Republic, would put impeachment back on the table at the House right under Speaker Pelosi's nose. The significance of the gathering in Olympia is that a freshman senator from Olympia, Eric Oemig, has introduced a bill in the state senate calling for such a resolution. His bill, S6018, is slated to go to a hearing on March 1, to determine whether it can be considered by the full senate, and impeachment activists are planning to have hundreds-perhaps thousands-of backers on hand to make sure it gains committee approval. "We don't hear any of our leaders today talking about impeachment," Oemig told the crowd. "So the fact that the grass roots have built up the way they have is remarkable!" Oemig brushed aside what he said was a common argument among colleagues in the legislature that impeachment was not the state's business, and that it would "interfere" with more pressing state matters. Noting that the war in Iraq-one of the key impeachable crimes because of the lies that were used to justify it-is costing hundreds of billions of dollars, Oemig pointed out how many crucial projects affecting Washington State residents were in jeopardy because of lack of federal funding. He noted too that issues like the president's violation of civil liberties and his abuses of power directly affect citizens of the state. "I don't think this is a partisan issue," he said. "Many of my Republican colleagues have grave concerns about some of the Constitutional violations of this administration." In my own address, I focused on some key Bush constitutional violations and crimes which I believe are the best arguments to use in convincing conservatives and Republicans of the importance of impeachment. Among these are Bush's order for the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on American citizens, his use of so-called "signing statements" to invalidate (so far) 1200 laws or parts of laws passed by the Congress, and his authorization of torture. In the first case, I noted that the president has already been declared, by a federal judge, to have committed a felony by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the second case, I explained that Bush is claiming-illegally--that the so-called "War" on Terror makes him a commander in chief unfettered by the Constitution, with not just executive, but also legislative and judicial authority-a claim of dictatorial power that has no basis in the Constitution. Finally, I pointed out that in authorizing and failing to punish torture, the president, by making it less likely that enemy fighters will surrender, has been directly causing death and injury among US troops. The biggest laugh came when I pointed out that failing to impeach Bush over the signing statements issue would mean that the next president-perhaps Hillary-would be able to cite Bush as a precedent and also ignore Congress. "That," I said, "should put the fear of god into Republicans." McGovern told the crowd that the administration had destroyed the CIA, preferring "faith-based" to real, hard-nosed intelligence. With the angry intensity of a man who has given nearly 30 years of service to the government only to see it trashed by a know-nothing, criminal administration, he suggested that impeachment was the best way to bring the War in Iraq to an end and to prevent the launching of yet another illegal war-this time against Iran. De la Vega, a veteran federal prosecutor, and author of a new book, The U.S. v. Bush, which imagines a grand jury investigation and indictment of the president and vice president on a charge of fraud, laid out the case that the Bush administration has in essence been a criminal syndicate defrauding the American public on a scale far worse than Enron. Meanwhile, she said, the Congress, the media and the American public have, like the Queens neighbors of stabbing victim Kitty Genovese, averted their eyes from the crime. Questions following the three presentations focused on why the Congress has been so unwilling to act to initiate impeachment, and on what the American people can do. The answer all the speakers gave in one way or another was to organize-to convince neighbors, co-workers and friends of the need to impeach the president, to lobby a cowardly Congress to act, and, most importantly, to help move Sen. Oemig's bill forward in the Washington Senate and House. At present, three states, Washington, Vermont and New Mexico, have bills calling for joint impeachment resolutions (other states, including Rhode Island, New Jersey and California, may also see bills submitted). Under Thomas Jefferson's Rules of the House, any one of those resolutions, if passed and forwarded to the House of Representatives, could start the process of impeachment. It seems likely that if Washington passed Oemig's bill (it currently has eight co-sponsors), or if one of the ones moving through the legislatures of Vermont or New Mexico were to pass, the other states might follow suit. As well, representatives in Congress could feel emboldened to submit their own bills of impeachment. In other words, the dam will burst, and impeachment will be underway. In Olympia, as 900 fired-up and fed-up citizens left the hall last Tuesday--signing impeachment petitions on the way out--it was clear that the dam had already burst, at least locally. February 15, 2007 The President Needs a Padded Cell It's time to simply admit the obvious: The president of the United States is crazy as a loon, and the Congress and the media are functioning as co-dependents as he runs the country off a cliff. Bush says in his latest press conference that he is "certain" that Iran is providing "technically sophisticated" roadside bomb weapons to Iraqi insurgent forces to help them to kill Americans. He probably is "certain." But nobody else of consequence in the government is, and the evidence to support his claim is simply not there. Shaped charges are not sophisticated. They can be made in a garage. The technology was invented in 1888 by a Navy engineer. It was widely used in World War I and II, as well as in Vietnam, and was even provided to by the British to the IRA in a botched sting operation that led to its being disseminated around the world to every conceivable resistance and terror organization. Instructions on how to do make these weapons are available on the web. A highschool student could do it in shop if the teacher wasn't looking. On top of that, the people who are primarily responsible for killing Americans in Iraq are Sunnis, who are certainly not the beneficiaries of Iranian government assistance, since Sunnis are killing Shias, who are the ones that Iran is close to. None of this matters to Bush. Why? Because he's crazy. Reality and Bush are wholly different worlds, people. When you have a person who's off his nut in a position of authority, whether it is in your house, in your office, driving a car or running your country, you need to do something to prevent them from causing harm. It won't do to say, "It's too much trouble to confront him," or "He'll get angry if I challenge him." This seems to be the attitude in Congress and the media. The Democrats, who could put the president in a richly deserved straight jacket, are afraid to take that step. The media are afraid the president and his crazy backers would howl if they pointed out how nutty he has become. So they all let him rant on, as though he were making sense. The problem is that this president is also the commander in chief. He has ordered three heavily armed (and nuclear-equipped) carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf and is talking about "dealing" with Iran. We all know what that means. He wants to attack Iran and expand his disastrous war in the Middle East to put us at war with another 70 million people. Experts are saying we can expect this to happen in mid March or April! They say this even though there are no facts that could justify such a criminal act. But facts don't matter to this megalomaniac. Co-dependency is a condition where people associated with a sick person enable that person to ruin not only their own lives, but the lives of others, because of an inability to confront the sick person. It happens in families, and it is happening today to the American nation. Co-dependency destroys families, and it has the potential now to destroy the lives of thousands of Americans, tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians, and perhaps America itself. There is only one proper response to having a lunatic in the White House, and that is to get him out of there, and to prevent him from doing harm to himself and others. What ought to happen is Bush's medical team should have him declared incompetent. Since that is unlikely to happen, we're left with two other alternatives. One would be for the military leadership of the nation to recognize Bush's orders-should he order an attack on Iran-to be contrary to International Law, and to disobey him. That seems unlikely, though it is to be profoundly hoped for. The other is for Congress to recognize its co-dependent behavior, and to take action, filing impeachment bills and getting the process of impeachment hearings underway. Since the president has clearly broken the law in the case of the National Security Agency spying he ordered up, and since he has clearly abused his power and violated his oath of office with his signing statements, there is really no need for prolonged hearings. An impeachment panel could quickly vote out articles of impeachment on these two issues and send them to the full house for a vote. Were they to do this, I suspect they would find at least some honorable and patriotic Republicans voting with them. At that point the issue could go to the Senate for trial. Meanwhile, the impeachment panel could continue with hearings into Bush's other crimes and misadventures-the lying about the Iraq War, the torture authorization, the violation of habeas corpus, the cover-up of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the lies to and obstruction of the 9-11 Commission, the abandonment of New Orleans to its fate during and after Hurricane Katrina, the war profiteering in Iraq, etc., etc. The first step, however, is to acknowledge that the president has lost his mind and has become a dangerous psychopath. February 12, 2007 A Word of Caution on Charges about Iranian Weapons Killing GIs in Iraq If reporters could all stop the heavy breathing for a moment, they might ask the folks at the White House and in the Pentagon to explain why those bombs that they displayed as "evidence" of Iranian perfidy had English words and numbers on them, instead of Persian. I understand that Iranian manufacturers use English to identify products produced for export, but these devices--if they are Iranian--aren't really part of their general export product list. That's not to say that Iran is not involved in any of the fighting in Iraq. It would be astounding if they were not, being as they are right next door and have an intense interest in the future of Iraq, a country that fought an eight-year, US-supported war against them not long ago. But I think it raises questions about the quality of the US evidence purporting to prove that Iran is providing bombs that can pierce American armored vehicles. Of course there are other reasons to doubt the administration too, besides the simple fact that it has shown itself to be seriously truth-challenged. A major problem is that most of the Americans who have died in Iraq, and who are continuing to die in Iraq, are being killed by Sunni fighters, and Iran has been backing the Shia side there, not the Sunnis. At least until Bush came up with his bright idea of escalating the Iraq War by attacking Moktada al Sadr's forces in Baghdad last month, the Shia forces were leaving American troops alone, and were focused on killing Sunnis and the occasional Brit. The other thing is that these shaped charges are not all that sophisticated, for all the huffing and puffing over at the Pentagon. Basically it's a matter of making a concave bottom of the blast cannister, which converts into a high-velocity slug in the explosion, becoming an excellent armor penetrator ahead of the explosion. This is not rocket science, and is easily within the technological capabilities of the insurgent forces in Iraq. In fact, if you google "Iraq and shaped charges," you discover that the Sunni insurgents have been using shaped charges against U.S. forces for well over a year and a half, to devastating effect. On October 10, 2005, for example, the BBC ran a story by Neil Arun headlined, "Shaped bombs magnify Iraq attacks." It stated, "According to defense sources, basic armor-piercing weapons are easy to manufacture, drawing on principles discovered more than a century ago and in use since World War Two." It adds that the system uses something called the "Munroe Effect" after an US Navy scientist, Charles Munroe, who invented the technique in--get this--1888. So clearly there is no need for Iran to be providing such devices to Iraqi insurgents. Why do mainstream American reporters and editors--like the reporters at ABC and MSNBC--have to repeatedly display such ignorant and willful gullibilty? Why can't they at least check their own clip files or do a 30-second google search before they run with the garbage being spoon-fed to them by by Washington's official war-mongers? Speaking as a reporter, I have to say I'm embarrassed for them. February 11, 2007 Inappropriate Behavior and Impeachment So let’s get this straight. Douglas Feith, who headed up the insidious Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon that was created to develop, gin up, and manufacture “evidence” to justify a US attack on Iraq, has been reprimanded in a long-delayed report by the Pentagon Inspector General’s office, which concludes that the whole OSP project, while perhaps not illegal, was “inappropriate.” Feith and the Republican establishment are taking that as the final word, and as an official okay for the OSP’s activities. But wait a minute. When is the last time we heard the term “inappropriate behavior” used? Right. It was Bill Clinton and his cigar in the Oval Office. And that “inappropriate” behavior, according to the Republican Congress, was grounds for siccing a special prosecutor on the president, for calling him before a grand jury and grilling him, and finally for impeaching him in the House and trying him in the Senate. All over an “inappropriate” consensual sexual escapade that didn’t hurt anyone. Feith’s inappropriate behavior, however, which was organized by the White House, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was central to the president’s obsessive plan to invade Iraq. It was Feith’s OSP operation that developed the false evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, that developed false evidence of Iraqi efforts to develop a uranium centrifuge, and that developed the false evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Feith and the OSP were central to the administration’s success in gaining Congressional support for an attack on Iraq, and for the ensuing conflict that has killed over 3100 Americans and as many as 650,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. If there were any sense of integrity, courage and patriotism in Congress today, members of the House would be lining up to file a bill creating a special prosecutor to investigate Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, the White House and the whole OSP story. They’d be lining up too, to file bills of impeachment against the president and vice president. If there is any sense of integrity, courage and patriotism abroad in the nation at large, we will see resolutions of impeachment passed in coming weeks in the legislatures of Vermont, New Mexico, New Jersey, and perhaps other states like Washington, Oregon, Rhode Island and California, demanding the commencement of impeachment hearings in the House. Even if what the OSP did was not technically illegal—which is a big if—it was clearly inappropriate, as well as duplicitous, and in a matter as serious as sending the nation to war, clearly rises to the level of an impeachable offense. Equally inappropriate is the House leadership’s refusal to take action on such a serious matter as fraudulent evidence being used to justify a war. Americans and Iraqis are continuing to die in ever-greater numbers because no one in Congress has shown the courage to put a stop to the ongoing atrocity. Now that the Pentagon’s own inspector general has at least had the courage to rule that the activities of Feith and his treacherous colleagues was “inappropriate,” such legislative cowardice can no longer be tolerated. Every day that passes without Congressional action to call the criminals of the Bush administration to account for the war in Iraq means more blood on the hands of the party that now runs the House—the Democrats. Every day that we, the American People, don’t demand action from our representatives, means more blood on all our hands. It is time for all this “inappropriate behavior” in Washington to come to an end. Impeach the President! Impeach the Vice President! February 8, 2007 It's Time to Take Away the Toys Okay, now here’s a really bad idea. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that the U.S. needs a bigger Army and a bigger Marine Corps. Much bigger. Why? For “future wars,” he says. Let’s think about this. Supposedly, this current escalation--you know, the “surge”--in Iraq is supposed to make it possible to start bringing the troops from Iraq home. That, at least, is the official argument. It’s certainly the argument of Sen. Joe Lieberman, Bush’s official pet Democrat in the Senate. So if we’re bringing soldiers and marines home, why do we need more of them? All having a bigger Army and Marine Corps does is encourage our leaders to use them. Especially our current leader. Does anyone really think this is a good idea? It’s like giving a 12-year-old a gun. You know the kid’s going to do something stupid with it. Instead of talking about bigger military budgets (and can we stop calling them “defense” budgets please?), we should be talking about smaller military budgets. The latest one looks to be close to $800 billion, which is about double what it was when Bush first took (there’s a well-chosen word) office in 2001. If we had smaller military budgets, the nuts wouldn’t be able to have their way with pre-emptive wars of aggression around the globe, and we’d have money to solve all the nation’s pressing problems, like educating our kids, getting healthcare for 40 million people who don’t have insurance, taking serious measures to combat global heating, and doing something about the shameful spectacle of millions living in poverty in the wealthiest nation in the world. Imagine what $400 billion, spent on those kinds of things instead of bombs, bullets and military wages, could do! We could even have a Manhattan or Apollo Project to find solutions to climate change. Well, if you’re having a hard time imagining that, then listen to what spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a doomed war effort and on American imperialist activities around the globe is doing: Claiming the federal till is empty, Bush is slashing funding for child health programs. Education funding is being short-changed. The Social Security Trust Fund is being sucked dry, critical satellites to monitor the earth’s climate are being cancelled from the NASA budget, Veterans programs are being gutted. Still want a bigger military? For what? Fighting terrorism? The world’s mightiest military is doing a pretty poor job of that as it is, and the billions of dollars of good money they want to throw after bad isn’t going to help a bit. In fact, America’s enemies don’t need to attack the U.S. Bush and the DemPublican War Party in Congress is doing such a good job hollowing the country out and bankrupting us, they can just sit back and watch us shrivel up like a dried husk. From now on, no candidate gets my support who isn’t for an immediate pull out from Iraq, and a 50-percent reduction in the military budget. Truth or Consequences: Some Questions for President Bush President Bush makes a big deal out of his alleged "faith." Certainly a part of that faith ought to be speaking and behaving honestly. Just recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece saying Vice President Dick Cheney should come clean with the American people by either answering a few questions or resigning. But if coming clean with the American people is required of the vice president, surely it is also required of the president, and Bush too, has a few questions to answer. If failure to answer honestly means Cheney should resign, Bush should be held to at least as high a standard. Here then are a few of the questions Bush should be compelled to answer: * Mr. Bush, what was your role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame? And were you lying to the press and the public when you said you had no idea who did it and wanted a thorough investigation into that leak? We know that when information was first leaked to Robert Novak disclosing that former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA undercover agent, you promised a vigorous investigation to find out who had done this treacherous thing. You also promised that whoever did it would be fired. Now we're seeing some evidence in the trial of Scooter Libby--including a handwritten note by Mr. Cheney--which suggests that you knew all about his role and in fact were actively involved in the leak. * Why did you say to Congress and the American people in the 2003 State of the Union address, just weeks ahead of your invasion of Iraq, that you had just learned from British intelligence that Saddam Hussein had "recently sought" to purchase uranium ore from an African nation? We know now that the documents in question--the forged Niger letters which purported to be receipts of sale, but which actually contained the faked signatures of officials who had not been part of Niger's government for a decade--were not new at all. In fact they had been presented to you a year and a half earlier by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. We know that you were informed by CIA and State Department intelligence people back then that the documents were fakes. That, of course, is why you didn't go straight to the press and Congress with them back in October of 2001, when you were, reportedly, looking for any excuse to have the U.S. go after Iraq. So a second question in this vein would be: * Since you clearly were alerted that the documents were bogus way back in October of 2001, why did you cite them to Congress and the American public on January 28, 2003, and pretend that they were new information? * While we're on the matter of the war, why did you claim in your official letter to Congress on March 18, 2003, announcing your intention to attack Iraq, that you were acting because Iraq posed "a continuing threat" against the United States" when it posed no immediate threat at all? And why did you claim the attack was part of "continuing" action against "international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001," when you knew that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that Iraq posed no threat to the US? These two justifications for going to war were both absolute lies, weren't they, and you certainly knew it, didn’t you? You knew the UN inspectors were saying there were no weapons of mass destruction, and anyhow, you knew Saddam had no air force and no navy and no long-range rockets, so he had no delivery systems anyhow, and he was no threat to anybody. And since not one of the terrorists on those planes was Iraqi, and since there was no linkage ever demonstrated between Saddam Hussein and the hijackers or Al Qaeda, the second justification was just as bogus, right? * Why did you tell the American people, in an address in Buffalo, NY on April 20, 2004, that "any time you hear the United Stated government talking about [a wiretap], it requires a court order”? That a bald-faced lie, wasn’t it? It was way back in September, 2001 that you ordered the National Security Agency to start wiretapping people--thousands of people in fact, or maybe more--without going to the secret judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court for warrants as required by law. So why did you lie about this? Don't you have an obligation to be honest with the people of the United States, or is honesty just another "quaint" relic of an older time, like the Geneva Convention ban on torture (as your then White House counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez so inelegantly put it)? * While we're on torture, why did you issue an executive order authorizing the use of torture on captives in the so-called War on Terror? Do you think that you are above the law? You have claimed that the Geneva Conventions are somehow vague and ambiguous in their definition of torture, yet the wording of the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War--which was signed by the U.S. and has the full force of law under our Constitution--would seem to be anything but ambiguous. It reads: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantgeous treatment of any kind." Where is the ambiguity there, and how do you square this language with Don Rumsfeld's instructions about the use of stress positions, etc.? * Where do you find the authority to ignore acts of Congress with your "signing statements"? Aren't you simply asserting the power of a generalissimo here? The Constitution seems crystal clear when its states, in Article I, that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Note that it does not say "some legislative powers," nor is there any asterisk or footnote attached. It's rather definitive. As for Article II (that's yours), it says, "the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” Note that it does not say anything about legislative or judicial powers, which is what you're claiming with this "unitary executive" stuff. By the way, that raises another question I think you ought to answer: * Just what exactly do you think being commander in chief means? Does it mean you don't have to obey the Constitution? After all, the Constitution, in Article II, only says this about the title you love to use: "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States." That's it. It doesn't say anything about unitary executive powers. It doesn't say anything about being commander in chief of the Congress, or of the courts, or of the American people (it doesn't even say you run the Air Force). Where are you getting this stuff, anyhow? Finally, while we're coming clean here, sir, how about answering us one more question: * Are you deliberately trying to destroy the country by running it into the ground financially and by destroying the military by having it fight and lose two, or maybe even three wars at once, or has this all just been ,a string of incredibly bad judgements on your part? Times columnist Kristof thinks Cheney should resign if he can’t answer his questions truthfully. Certainly you should do the same. Honesty is a Christian virtue--something I'm sure God has mentioned in His communications to you. Surely you owe the American people some straight answers. If you can't bring yourself to give them, maybe it's time for Congress to put impeachment back "on the table." If you're not willing to give us a "stiff dose of truth," an impeachment panel is the only way we'll get it. February 5, 2007 Borat Goes to Washington: Don't Experiment with US Economy Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, in a press conference following release of the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change report earlier this month, made an interesting comment. Asked why the Bush administration has been opposed to experimenting with carbon caps for American industry, he said, “The U.S. economy is not something to be experimented with, in my judgment.” Hold on! Isn’t what the Bush administration, and indeed the whole US, has been and is doing, in refusing to deal with global warming, really experimenting not with just an economy, but with the entire biosphere of the earth—that extraordinarily narrow band of climate that sustains life? Aren’t they experimenting right now with the fate of humanity and the millions of life forms that share the planet with us? How is it that we can be perfectly willing to “experiment” with the survival of the planet and our species, but not with the U.S. economy? What boggles my mind is this: If the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are correct, the Earth, thanks to an experiment called industrialization, is headed irreversibly into a period of intense warming not seen in the history of mankind, and perhaps not seen since the end of the dinosaur era some 55 million years ago. If the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are correct, this experiment gone wrong threatens to destroy most life on the planet, and certainly the civilization that we humans have developed over the last 10,000 or so years. Given all this, isn’t a little experimentation with the American economy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and perhaps deferring catastrophe worth a shot? I mean, what are we talking about here? Let’s say the government was to impose strict carbon emission limits on American industry. Say that we passed a law requiring power plants to reduce their carbon emissions by 50 percent over the next 10 years, whether by new technologies or simply by reducing production of electricity. And say we reduced auto carbon emissions by ordering all vehicles to get a minimum of 50 miles per gallon of gas by 2017—roughly double the current average. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe we’d see economic growth decline by a few points. Maybe we’d even have a recession. That would be unfortunate, especially for people who lost jobs because of a slowdown. But what’s the tradeoff here? What’s the worst that could happen if we don’t cut carbon emissions from power plants and automobiles over the next 10 years? Well, the worst that could happen is that global warming could accelerate (remember, every estimate of the pace of global warming over the last decade has been higher than the last one, so we should be prepared for more bad news). That means the world gets hotter, critical croplands get drier, storms get bigger, and economic losses due to these problems grow—perhaps leading to a serious global economic slowdown. But it could also mean that Siberia’s permafrost could melt faster, and that the 4000 billion tons of methane trapped under that permafrost could start boiling into the atmosphere faster. If that came to pass, we could have temperatures far hotter than predicted by the latest UN report. Indeed, with methane gas 24 times as potent a global warming blanket as carbon dioxide, we could find ourselves facing a run-away heating scenario that could turn most of the world into a desert. The U.S. economy is not something to be experimented with? Is this guy serious? Besides, the Bush administration, which claims the only valid way to run an economy is to leave it alone to “market forces,” which says that tinkering with market forces is ipso facto a bad idea, has been quietly plotting ways to tinker with the earth’s weather in a big way. According to a number of reports, the same Bush administration that won’t experiment even with something as benign as carbon trading, is funding research into projects like producing a sun-blocking smog layer of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, or launching gigantic mirrors into orbit to block some of the sun’s light from reaching earth. One assumes that Bodman’s alleged fear of economic experimentation stems from concerns that such experiments could lead to negative consequences. Well, just what do these guys think might happen as a consequence of tampering with the sunlight? Cut the amount of solar radiation reaching earth, and you wreak havoc on crop production everywhere—including places where millions, even billions of people can’t afford even a minor crop loss. (Such actions by one country, I might note, would clearly be an act of war against the other nations of the world.) And what about that smog layer? Eventually, the sulfur dioxide will break down into sulfuric acid and fall on land and sea, adding to already worsening acidification problems in both places. When you consider all this, the Bush administration, and its obstinate and criminal six-year stall on dealing with global warming, starts to look like a kind of Borat government. Stupid statements are launched into the media, where they are treated as though they were serious and worthy of serious consideration. Stupid policies are initiated, and funded by Congress as though they were rational. Stupid people are nominated to office and given responsibility as though they were genuine public servants and skilled managers. The Democrats in Congress, and the voters who put all these people, Republican and Democrat, in power, are looking like Borat’s unwitting extras—taking it all seriously, and acting as though what we had in Washington was a real government of dedicated public servants. Meanwhile, a vast experiment with the earth as test subject is running wild, like a mad scientist’s unattended array or tubes and flasks. The bunson burners are blasting, the test tubes are boiling over, caustic steam is billowing everywhere, and Borat-Bush and Borat-Bodman are outside the lab, warning the citizens not to experiment. January 31, 2007 This is Like Hitler's Suicide Order from the Bunker This is madness! I wrote last September that Bush was gearing up for war with Iran, as evidenced by the moving up of the deployment date of the carrier group headed by the recently re-fueled and re-armed USS Eisenhower, some of whose crewmembers had leaked that its mission was to attack Iran. At the time, there was considerable skepticism expressed about the article, which appeared in the Nation’s online edition. Now, four months later, it is widely assumed in Europe that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran, and even in the U.S., members of Congress are openly talking about their concern that Bush is planning to attack Iran. Does anyone think this is lunacy? The U.S. is deeply mired in a losing war in Iraq, and is also losing Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban. The Pentagon is scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with the measly 21,500 additional troops Bush has vowed to send to Iraq, and the 4000 troops that his commanders in Afghanistan are asking for. Iran, meanwhile, poses no immediate threat to the U.S. But it does have a huge, battle-hardened army, much better equipped than Saddam Hussein’s rag-tag troops, and equipped with some very sophisticated weaponry courtesy of Russia and China. Any U.S. forces that went into Iran could expect to take heavy casualties, and could hardly hope to conquer a nation with a population bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined—a population that, unlike Iraq’s—can be expected to rise as one against a US invasion. Even if Iran is meddling in Iraq, it hardly seems like attacking that country is likely to put a halt to that kind of thing. Indeed, attacking Iran would be more likely to lead to an escalation of Iranian efforts to hobble U.S. forces in Iraq—something Tehran could easily do through its Iraqi Shia allies. Nor would attacking Iran put an end to that nation’s nuclear program, which is spread out, carefully hidden, and in many cases located in underground bunkers. Nuclear experts agree that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would only slow down its efforts, not end them, and moreover, would encourage the country to redouble its efforts to get the Bomb and achieve the kind of protection against future attack that countries with the bomb have. Oh. I haven’t mentioned the economic disaster part, have I? Iran is the second largest oil producing country in the world, and it borders the entire eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s oil passes every year. If it was attacked, all of Iran’s oil, and most of the oil produced by Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, would be taken out of circulation indefinitely. Oil prices would soar way past $100/barrel, and maybe past $200 a barrel, causing a U.S. and a global depression. So why are we even talking about this? We’re talking about this because the President of the United States, the Vice President, and the neoconservative political gang that has brought the nation six years of war, destruction and Constitution-wrecking, is under attack, and this cabal of madmen and mad women has decided that chaos, death and destruction offers the best hope of salvation. We are, it appears, about to witness the American equivalent of Hitler’s suicide orders to the German people as he scurried to his bunker in Berlin. What to do? The answer is simple. It is time for the Congress, and the American people, to act. If Senators and Representatives pass a resolution barring the use of any military forces against Iran, or the expenditure of any funds for war against Iran, Bush will not be able to push the country over the precipice. American military leaders would have reason to ignore any orders that would put them in violation of the law of the land. This would be a historic moment—a reassertion by Congress of its Constitutional primacy in matters of war and peace. Members of Congress should follow up that move by initiating impeachment proceedings against this whacko immediately. Congress must not duck its patriotic duty. President Clinton was impeached for a little blowjob. This president wants to blow a hell of a lot more than an intern. An attack on Iran would be an international crime under the Nuremberg Charter, which calls the invasion of a country that doesn’t pose an immediate threat a “Crime Against Peace.” But even aside from such matters, anyone with a lick of sense knows that it would be crazy to go into another even larger war while the American military is completely tied down in two other desperate situations. The whole Bush administration has clearly gone stark raving mad, and is willing to sacrifice the nation for its own short-term gain. This cannot be allowed to happen. No War against Iran! Impeach the President now! January 29, 2007 Impeachment: The Word Largely Missing on the Stage in D.C. Last Weekend--But Not on the Street! The largely unstated word at the massive anti-war rally in Washington on Saturday was "impeachment." Not that it wasn't on demonstrators' lips and signs, but with rare exceptions, it wasn't coming from the podium. The rally, 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 "nvestigate, 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' 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. Bush and Cheney have stated publicly that they will not be swayed by the November election, or by polls or demonstrations, all making it clear that the vast majority of Americans want the Iraq War ended quickly. They have thrown down the gauntlet saying that they will ignore any Congressional resolution condemning the escalation of American involvement in Iraq. They have made it clear by sending a Naval armada to the Persian Gulf and by their threatening statements, that they are getting ready to attack Iran despite universal international opposition and warnings from military experts that it would be a disaster. There is really only one way to stop the madness: impeachment. Investigations into administration wrongdoing won't do it. Demonstrations won't do it. Critics of impeachment, especially among the Democratic leadership, and even some progressive Democrats, say it is too soon. They say, with an excess of caution, that the first step should be investigations. This is a misunderstanding, or a deliberate distortion, of what the impeachment process is. The impeachment process itself begins with investigations. To argue that first a case for impeachment has to be proved before a bill of impeachment should be submitted in the House is akin to saying that a case of murder must be proved before an indictment can be brought. Should a majority of the House vote to impanel the Judiciary Committeee as an Impeachment Committee, that is when the investigation would begin in ernest--a process we saw in action twice in recent memory, first in the case of Richard Nixon, and second with Bill Clinton. In Bush's case, there is ample evidence already in the public record to justify multiple bills of impeachment. Just to name a few, we know: * A federal judge has ruled, after hearing evidence from both sides, that President Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a felony, and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by authorizing warrantless monitoring of the communications of American citizens. * The president violated the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions by both authorizing torture of prisoners in captivity, and by failing to act to prevent and to punish torture when it was brought to his attention. * The president has abused his power by assuming legislative powers to invalidate duly passed acts of Congress through his issuance of so-called "signing statements"-- a process not even mentioned by the Constitution, which assigns "all legislative authority" to the Congress. On these and a number of other issues, there is really no need for investigations at all. The crimes against the Constitution are obvious, blatant and self-evident. (And in the case of NSA spying, are actually laid out in a federal judge's opinion.) All that is lacking at this point, is a principled, courageous and patriotic House leadership to initiate the process. To hear a presentation of the full case for impeachment against the president, and against some of the key members of the administration, including Cheney, Gonzales and Rice, check out the new release of a video, "The Case for Impeachment," by Squeaky Wheel Productions,available at: The Case for Impeachment [11] (Be sure and pass this link on to everyone you know, and to your congressional representative!). ======================== January 26, 2007 Why We Must Have Impeachment Many well-intentioned and patriotic Americans, including progressives and liberal Democrats, have expressed opposition to the idea of impeaching President Bush, arguing that it is a diversion from more important issues like ending the war in Iraq, or taking effective action on climate change. Their concern is understandable, as these are indeed important issues, but they are wrong. Fortunately, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers, who knows this, is beginning the impeachment process next week by calling for a hearing to examine one of the president’s crimes: abuse of power. Fortunately too, several state legislatures in places as disparate as New Mexico, Vermont and Washington, are considering passing resolutions calling on the House to initiate impeachment hearings. There are important reasons why this president must be impeached and they include those very urgent issues that people are afraid will be shunted aside by an impeachment battle. The key reason this president must be impeached is that his offenses against the Constitution and the nation are so serious that the very survival of Constitutional government and the separation of powers on which it is based are at risk. Let’s take the war in Iraq. The president clearly lied and tricked both the Congress and the American people into allowing him to invade that country. He and Vice President Dick Cheney carefully cherry-picked half-truths and known falsehoods to lay out as “evidence” that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and that he was in league with Osama bin Laden. His White House orchestrated a campaign to damage the reputation of an honest critic, ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had discovered that a key piece of that “evidence” --some alleged documents from the country of Niger--had been forged, and even “outed” Wilson’s CIA-agent wife. These lies have led directly to the pointless deaths of nearly 3100 American men and women in uniform and to the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Bush also illegally pulled American troops and equipment out of Afghanistan, right at the height of a Congressionally authorized campaign to capture or kill bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization (fatally crippling that effort), and sent them to the border of Iraq in preparation for his war there. If this president is allowed to do such things, unchallenged and unpunished, we can expect subsequent presidents to do so in the future. Indeed, many experts and members of Congress believe that Bush is getting close to repeating this criminal behavior himself, this time with an unprovoked attack on Iran. Clearly, in order to stop such abuse of presidential authority and such a second national and international disaster, Congress will have to impeach the president. Then there’s the so-called “signing statements.” These are the letters--not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution--which Bush and his crony attorneys in the White House and Justice Department claim allow him to invalidate all or part of any bill passed by the Congress. Bush has used signing statements to do this over 1200 time during his presidency, for everything from refusing to accept a Congressional ban on torture to giving himself the power, in clear violation of federal law, to monitor first- class mail. Once again, if this president is not impeached for this outrage assertion of presidential absolute power, all future presidents will feel free to do the same thing, simply ignoring acts of Congress. The Constitution is crystal clear on this matter: Article I says “All legislative powers granted herein shall be vested in Congress of the United States," and Article II says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Note that the Constitution does not say that “some” legislative powers or “most” legislative powers are vested in the Congress. It says “all.” Nor does it say that the president shall execute “some” of the laws. For Congress to let this blatant abuse of power to go unpunished would be to leave future Congresses as little more than vestigial debating societies. As for the warrantless spying which the president has authorized the National Security Agency to engage in since the fall of 2001, in blatant violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, here is a case of the president unapologetically violating federal law and committing a felony. He is, here, simply daring the Congress to confront him. So far, they have been too cowardly to stand up to the challenge. And yet, if Bush is allowed to get away with this crime, all future presidents will argue that they too are above the law, and that they may pick and choose what laws they will honor and what laws they will break. No Constitutional system, no democratic system, can long endure under such circumstances. The same can be said for the president’s willful violation of the Geneva Conventions barring torture. It is clear that the president both authorized torture, as defined under the Conventions, and failed to take action to prevent even the most heinous of torture acts, which reached the point of lethality, when they were brought to his attention. These, it must be pointed out, are not merely crimes which violate international law. The US is a signatory (and author) of the Geneva Conventions, and as these have been adopted by the Senate, under the Constitution they have full force of law within the U.S. Furthermore, the Republican Congress in 1996 specifically incorporated the Geneva Code into the U.S. Criminal Code, making it all the more clear that the president’s actions—and his inaction—on torture are criminal acts under U.S. law. As such they must be prosecuted, if the law is to have any meaning, and that requires, as a first step, impeachment of the president. There are many other reasons that the president should be impeached--his criminal negligence in sending American troops into battle with inadequate armor, his criminal negligence in failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq, his extreme criminal negligence in failing to act to rescue the trapped and drowning citizens of New Orleans following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, his refusal to provide evidence requested by the 9-11 Commission (and his administration’s lies to that commission), the massive and unchecked corruption in Iraq which has so extravagantly enriched administration campaign contributors, White House corruption linked to the Abramoff and other scandals, illegal use of taxpayer funds for a program of administration propaganda using government agencies, and perhaps an orchestrated campaign of stealing elections, etc. These should all be investigated. Some are easier to document than others, but all deserve a hearing. Meanwhile, however, it is essential that the key crimes be introduced as bills of impeachment in the House as quickly as possible, so that hearings can begin. Critics of impeachment have argued that it is pointless to call for impeachment since removal from office would require a vote by two-thirds of the Senate, which is 49 percent Republican. That ignores the impact of truth and fact on a group of politicians who will be looking at 2008 very anxiously. When impeachment hearings began for President Richard Nixon, a scant one in four Americans thought he should be impeached. During the Clinton impeachment farce, support for the president’s removal from office never topped 36 percent. Yet a Newsweek poll taken last fall found that a remarkable 51 percent of the American public felt this president should face impeachment (including 29 percent of Republicans!), and than only 44 percent opposed impeachment. The likelihood is that, once impeachment hearings began, they would have the same impact on Republicans this time around as they had on Republicans in Congress during the Nixon impeachment. That is, as the depth of administration perfidy and criminality was exposed on live television, through the testimony of White House staff talking under oath, honest Republicans facing re-election soon would feel compelled to cut their ties and support for Bush and his cronies. Who knows? Some might even support impeachment for reasons of principle and patriotism as the facts came out. The real reason Bush must be impeached, though, is that if he is not impeached, this usurper will simply ignore any bills passed by Congress, will act despite any resolutions passed by Congress, and will break any law that he thinks gets in his way. Furthermore, future presidents, Democrat and Republican, will use Bush as a precedent to ignore Congress and break laws themselves. The real question for impeachment skeptics then, is: “What are you waiting for?” January 25, 2007 Chairman Conyers Puts Impeachment for Abuse of Power Back `On the Table' 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 1200 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. January 24, 2007 Falling Dominos and Failing Presidencies There was a word missing from President Bush’s pathetic State of the Union Address. That word was "domino." With all his arguments for continued war in Iraq now exposed as lies and shams, our "war president" and would-be generalissimo has fallen back on the same last straw that Tricky Dick Nixon clutched to the end of his sorry presidency: the domino theory. As Bush the Lesser put it last night, to a skeptical Congress and an even more disbelieving American public: "If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists backed by Al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country, and in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict." Sound familiar? It should. Back in the Vietnam War days, we were told that if Vietnam "fell," then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia would "fall," and who knows what other countries after that, like a chain of dominos--leading, the hoary argument went, right back to America. Of course, it didn't quite happen that way. Vietnam won its war against the U.S. The indigenous revolutionaries of Laos, the Pathet Lao, defeated the CIA-backed royal government in Laos, too, but in Cambodia, it was the U.S., not Vietnam, which spread the war to that neutral kingdom, by overthrowing the existing government and setting up a vicious right-wing dictatorship under Lon Nol, which was later ousted by a Maoist movement, the Khmer Rouge. But that nominally communist government was no ally of the Vietnamese. It was indeed the Vietnamese who rescued the Cambodian people from the genocidal Khmer Rouge, who ended up, incredibly, being backed by the U.S. Thailand and Malaysia, of course, were never at risk of "falling." The domino theory made no sense in Southeast Asia in 1970, and it is equally ridiculous in the Middle East today. It is simply the last desperate ploy of an administration that is terrified about having to face the reality that the U.S. has lost its war in Iraq. Digging Himself a Bigger Hole on Global Warming While we're at it, let's mention the president's energy plans, if they can be called that. The biggie would be his pledge to cut gasoline consumption by 20 percent. Two points here. First of all, it turns out that if you read the fine print, he wasn't talking about cutting gasoline use from current levels by 20 percent, but only about cutting future projected use in 2017 by 20 percent. That would really mean he was not talking about cutting gasoline use, or imports, at all since gasoline use is projected to rise nearly 20 percent over the next decade. Furthermore, he said he wanted to achieve that so-called "reduction" not by making cars more efficient, but by increasing the amount of ethanol in our gasoline. This would have precious little impact on the climate change which the president finally, for the first time in his life and his presidency, publicly admitted to be a serious problem, since ethanol 1) takes a tremendous amount of energy (and carbon emissions) to produce and 2) produces carbon emissions when it burns. (Not to mention that cars burning an ethanol/gasoline mix actually get worse mileage than cars burning 100% gasoline.) Meanwhile, the president said nothing about reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which are at least as serious contributors to global warming as are automobiles. The real joke came when Bush called for a doubling of the size of the National Petroleum Reserve, that giant hole down in Louisiana's salt domes, where the U.S. has pumped vast quantities of crude oil (and taxpayer dollars) to create an artificial oil patch. The tax money that would go into doubling that huge hole, and into buying oil at upwards of $50/barrel to fill it up, might be much better spent drilling steam holes into the earth’s crust to make large numbers of geothermal generating plants which could replace some or all of the coal-fired generators around the country, thereby seriously reducing America’s carbon emissions--and producing clean electricity which could, besides lighting our homes, power a new generation of electric or hydrogen-powered cars. Oops. I guess that's not an idea that would be real popular with the oil industry or the coal industry. My bad. January 23, 2007 We're Takin' It to the Street January 27 What madness has gripped America? In November the nation clearly voted, by a margin of some seven million votes, for an end to the interminable war in Iraq and a return to sanity in Washington. Today, less than three months later, with a new Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, we have the president not pulling troops out, but sending more troops to Iraq, where the death toll is mounting faster than ever (25 U.S. troops killed in one day last weekend alone). And worse yet, a Navy armada is being assembled in the Persian Gulf with the clear intention of attacking Iran, a nation that poses no immediate threat to the U.S. And where is Congress? So far, mulling a pair of non-binding resolutions expressing Congress’s disagreement with the president's escalation of the war in Iraq. Wow! That's really telling him! How can it be that a president who has lost the support of the public--President Bush, in the latest polls, remains at a dismal 33 percent approval rating--is able to lead the country in this way from one collossal disaster to an even worse disaster? The answer is that we, the American People, are letting it happen. We have become so disengaged from our government and from the basic concept of participarty democracy that if we do anything at all--and more than half of us don't--we just go to the polls and cast a vote (which may or may not be counted). Having done that, we go back home, recline on our sofas and bitch. Which is to say we do nothing. Well, we have a chance this weekend to change that. United for Peace and Justice, ImpeachforChange and other groups have organized what looks likely to be the largest anti-war march on Washington since the days of the Vietnam War--and in mid-winter no less. The march, scheduled for this coming Saturday, January 27, is expected to see people coming in by bus and train from at least 31 states. It will be followed by a massive lobbying of Congress on Monday, Jan. 29. The lobbying message is that Bush's wars must be stopped--and that the president should be impeached. Congress knows what it has to do--cut off funding for the war and pass a measure barring the president from attacking Iran without prior congressional approval, and entertain bills of impeachment. What senators and representatives need is a stern and loud reminder from the public that they can no longer hide behind the flag or behind administration lies. They are going to have to take a stand for sanity and for the Constitution, which they are sworn to defend and uphold. No one should sit this one out! Be in Washington on January 27. (If you absolutely cannot go, then join the virtual march. Tell Congress: No more war in Iraq! Bring the troops home now! No attack on Iran! Impeach President Bush! January 20, 2007 Was Iraq War a `Blunder' or Was It Treason? New Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), is calling President Bush's invasion of Iraq a "stark blunder" and says that his new scheme to send 21,500 more troops into the mess he created is just digging the hole deeper. I wonder though. It seems ever more likely to me that this whole mess was no blunder at all. People are wont to attribute the whole thing to lack of intelligence on the president's part, and to hubris on the part of his key advisers. I won't argue that the president is a lightweight in the intellect department, nor will I dispute that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that whole neocon gang have demonstrably lacked the virtues of reflection and humility. But that said, I suspect that the real story of the Iraq War is that Bush and his gang never really cared whether they actually would "win" in Iraq. In fact, arguably, they didn't really want to win. What they wanted was a war. If the war they started had ended quickly with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that would have served their purposes, at least for the short term. Bush would have emerged from a short invasion and conquest a national hero, would have handily won re-election in 2004, and would have gone on to a second term as a landslide victor. But if it went badly, as it has, they figured he would still come out ahead. He would be a wartime president, and he'd make full use of that role, expansively misdefining his "commander in chief" title to imply authority over the Congress and the courts, to grab power heretofore unheard of for a president. This, I suspect, was the grand strategy underlying the attack on Iraq. If I'm right, there may have been method to the madness of not building up enough troops for the invasion to insure that U.S. forces could occupy a destroyed Iraq and help it rebuild, method to the madness of allowing looters free sway to destroy the country's remaining post-invasion infrastructure, method to the madness, even, of allowing remnant forces of Hussein's to gather up stockpiles of weapons and even of high-density explosives, so they could mount an effective resistance and drag out the conflict. So many apparently stupid decisions were made by people who should clearly have been too smart to make them, from leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded to cashiering all of Iraq's army and most of the country's civil service managers, that it boggles the mind to think that these could have been just dumb ideas or incompetence. (L. Paul Bremer, for instance, who made the "dumb" decision about dismantelling the Iraqi army, prior to becoming Iraq's occupation viceroy, had headed the nation's leading risk assessment consultancy, and surely knew what all the risks were of his various decisions.) I mean, we expect a measure of idiocy from or elected leaders and their appointees, but not wholesale idiocy! This disaster has been so colossal, it almost had to have been orchestrated. If that's the case, Congress should be taking a hard look at not just the latest installment of escalation, but at the whole war project, beginning with the 2002 campaign to get it going. Certainly throwing 21,500 new troops into the fire makes no sense whatever. If 140,000 of the best-equipped troops in the world can't pacify Iraq, 160,000 aren't going to be able to do it either. You don't need to be a general to figure that out. Even a senator or representative ought to be able to do it. So clearly Congress should kill this plan. Since it's not about "winning" the war, it has to be about something else. My guess would be it's about either dragging things out until the end of 2008, so Bush can leave office without having to say he's sorry. But of course, it could also be about something even more serious: invading Iran. We know Bush is trying mightily to provoke Iran. He has illegally attacked an Iranian consulate in Iraq (an act of war), taking six protected consular officials there captive. He is sending a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, and is setting up Patriot anti-missile missile bases along Iran's western border. This buildup has all the earmarks of a pre-invasion. All that's needed now is a pretext--a real or faked attack on an American ship, perhaps, ala the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" that launched America into the Vietnam War. The way I see it, either way the president is committing treason, because he is sending American troops off to be killed for no good reason other than for aggrandizing power he shouldn’t have, and/or simply covering his own political ass. Treason is the number one impeachable crime under the Constitution, and we're at a point where Congress is going to have to act or go down in history as having acquiesced in the worst presidential crime in the history of the nation. January 18, 2007 What Do They Think We Are, Idiots? In at least one area, President Bush is on the run. Congress should run him to ground. The issue, which should be of concern to Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, is illegal spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. Back in 2005, the New York Times (after unconscionably holding the story for a full year) exposed the fact that Bush, in late 2001, had authorized the NSA to illegally begin a wide-ranging program of monitoring the phone calls and internet communications of Americans in direct and blatant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That act had been passed by Congress in 1978 precisely because of a similar spying program authorized by President Richard Nixon. It had turned out Nixon was using the NSA illegally to spy on political opponents both outside and inside his own administration. Last year, a federal judge determined, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, that Bush's actions had been illegal, violating both FISA (a felony), and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Civil Libertarians both among the public at large and in Congress, have been up in arms ever since disclosure of the Bush spying, both because of its clear affront to the rule of law, and because no explanations for it put forward by the administration made any sense. Bush and his legal advisers at the White House and in the Justice Department have been claiming for nearly two years that they "had to" violate FISA because of a supposed need to monitor suspected terrorists, but critics rightly point out that the FISA law was designed to make such monitoring easy. Under FISA, there is a special secret court of 12 senior federal judges whose only responsibility is to hear government requests for secret wiretaps. Its top-security-clearance rated members stand ready to act even in the middle of the night, and in fact have only rejected such requests for warrants four times since 1978. Furthermore, critics note, the FISA law gives law enforcement and NSA wiretappers three days to seek a warrant after they start wiretapping! In other words, there is no issue of timeliness. Under FISA, the administration can start spying, and seek permission retroactively. This has many people suspecting that what the administration has been doing was not spying on terrorists at all--but rather spying on people it should not have been spying on--people that even the most accommodating FISA judges would not have granted warrants for. Who might these people be? Well, given the administration's many comments about how critics of the president are "aiding the terrorists," they could well be legitimate critics of administration policies like torture or the Iraq War. Given the administration's paranoid obsession about leaks, they could also be people within the Bush administration. Both such groups were targets of Nixon's illegal NSA spying, and it seems likely they have also been targets of Bush's mysterious spying campaign. In any case, while past efforts to get answers from the administration foundered in a Republican Congress, with the Democrats in control of both houses, it was becoming clear that Bush would be facing hard questioning, possibly including subpoenas of documents and people, by the new Congress. That prospect has led the administration to chaznge course and announce that it is ceasing the warrantless spying, and will now be adhering to FISA and seeking warrants when it wants to monitor someone’s communications. Clearly Bush is hoping that the problem will now go away; that the Congress will drop plans to seriously investigate the five-year illegal NSA spying campaign he illegally ordered up. Indeed, the Justice Department has reportedly already gone to the Court of Appeals to request that the federal case finding the spying to be illegal, currently on appeal by the government, be "mooted," or ruled no longer at issue because of their new decision to operate within the law. No doubt similar arguments will be made to the House and Senate intelligence and justice committees. Such efforts should be slapped down. The fact remains that for more than five years, this president willfully violated a federal law. Both the courts and the Congress, as well as the American people, have a right and a duty to know, in clear detail, both what he did and why he did it. Only a few months ago, the president and his attorney general were insisting that Bush's illegal spying campaign was absolutely essential in the so-called "War on Terror," and that the procedures of the FISA law were "too slow and too cumbersome" to do the job. Now, faced with the likelihood of real congressional inquiry, the president and his attorney general are claiming that they can do just fine staying within the law, and getting warrants from the FISA judges. If, as seems almost certain, the president abused his power and sicced the NSA on American citizens who were not violating the law or involved in terrorism, he should be impeached for the most grave of Constitutional violations. January 16, 2007 Death Watch in the Persian Gulf and Washington Watching the slow-motion march to war against Iran is a bit like watching a terminal cancer patient in a hospice. We know how it's going to end. We know it's going to be tragic and ugly. But we are powerless to stop it. There is a difference of course. For the cancer patient, there really is no alternative. For us, there is an alternative to the catastrophe which President Bush and his regent, Dick Cheney, are preparing for us all. We could rise up as a nation and demand that our elected representatives pass a Boland-type amendment banning any use of the military in Iraq. We could demand that a resolution be passed revoking the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq. We could demand the revocation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force which the president has improperly cited as giving him extra-Constitutional powers. And we could demand that Congress tell the president and vice president that if they attack Iran without explicit congressional authorization they will both be immediately impeached. The votes could be there for such an action, as even some Republicans are clearly opposed to this insanity, but the courage to call the president’s hand and lay down the cards is not. And so the horrible march to disaster continues. The cynicism of this administration is beyond belief. We have the supposedly "straight talking" defense secretary Robert Gates telling Congress that there is no plan "at the moment" to attack Iran--even as he sends two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Persian Gulf and stockpiles Patriot anti-missile batteries in the region (of what use are carriers and anti-missile rockets in a counter-insurgency in Iraq?). We have the president authorizing a blatantly illegal and clearly provocative attack on an Iranian consulate in Irbil, Iraq, and violating international law by arresting six people in that raid. Let's be clear. An attack on Iran, which poses no immediate or imminent threat to the United States, would be the most heinous of international war crimes--a "crime against peace" violating the UN Charter and the Nuremburg Charter. It would also be a strategic disaster that would dwarf even the president’s collassal strategic blunder in invading Iraq. There are no more troops left to fight in Iran, so all the U.S. could hope to do would be to bomb that country. But bombing that country would do nothing to stop Iran from retaliating in myriad ways that could bring the U.S. to its knees. Take sappers. Iran, which has a sophisticated and well-equipped espionage apparatus, could set out on a campaign of sabatoge, blowing up U.S. chemical plants, petrochemical refining and storage facilities, and power plants. Since these are all known to be on the target list of U.S. bombers in Iran, Iran would be well within its rights retaliating in kind inside U.S. borders. If the U.S. were to follow its usual criminal practice of also attacking Iranian hospitals and other civilian targets, Iranians could and likely would follow suit. I wouldn't be surprised, given how long the administration has been talking about attacking Iran, if its military strategists hadn’t already smuggled bombs into place in shipping containers, ready to blow if we attack. Feeling safer? Iran has other options too, to hurt us. The Shia militias in Iraq, which have largely ignored U.S. forces unless harassed, are tight with the Iranians, having received shelter and support from Iran during Hussein's brutal rule, and sharing, as they do, a common religion. If Iran comes under attack, it is hard to believe that the Iraqi militias will not turn their substantial firepower on outnumbered US forces in Iraq. When you think of it, attacking Iran would be a wonderful way of doing what the U.S. claims it has been wanting to do for several years now: uniting the Sunni and Shia forces in Iraq and ending their fratricidal conflict. The only problem is that they will be joining hands the better to attack U.S. troops! How clever this administration is! And then there's the economic costs of an Iran War. Here Iran really has to do nothing, though it could make things all the worse by using one of its high-tech anti-ship missiles to sink an American naval vessel or even just a civilian tanker in the gulf. Even without such an action, an invasion of Iran would lead to a shutdown of oil coming from the Persian Gulf. That's one quarter of all the oil supplies in the world. Even if Iran never fires a missile, the insurance industry will make it financially impossible for any ship-owner to sail into the gulf. So forget $80/barrel oil. Crude oil would quickly soar past $100 a barrel, past $160 a barrel, probably. Some analysts have even talked of $200 a barrel. No matter—after $100 a barrel, the world economy would grind to a halt. And the American trade deficit would go through the roof. We're not talking slowdown here,; we’re talking global depression. All this is clear. But it is also clear that the Congress doesn't have the guts and principle to halt this march to madness. And so we just continue to watch the patient die. January 15, 2007 Ignoring Global Warming and Our Children: Are We All Simply Mad? (As this was written, the temperature outside this Jan. 15 at 9 pm is 61 degrees Fahrenheit. It has not snowed yet this season in the Philadelphia area. Cherry blossoms are blooming and the daffodils are about to bud.) Most of us who are parents will live to see our children reach adulthood, and will even live to be grandparents, and yet we all spend thousands of dollars paying for life insurance, just in case we were to die before our kids get through college. Most of us will never suffer a house fire, but over the years we spend tens of thousands of dollars insuring our houses against that disaster (we also spend huge sums of tax dollars paying for fire stations and equipment). Most of us will never have a serious accident, and yet we all spend even more money insuring our cars, just in case we do. As a nation, we are extremely unlikely to suffer a germ-warfare attack, and yet at a cost of billions of dollars we have stockpiled smallpox and anthrax vaccines. We also spend countless billions of dollars on research to find cures to diseases like AIDS and bird flu which most of us will never contract. (For that matter, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting an alleged "terror" threat which at its worst might threaten a few hundred or thousand people, and that also might never occur.) We spend our hard-earned cash to insure against all of these things not because they are likely to happen to us but because in the unlikely case that such things did come to pass, it would be such a personal, or a national calamity, that we need to be prepared. So why are we, as individuals and as a nation, doing nothing or next to nothing about global warming--a disaster which is potentially worse than anything else imaginable, including nuclear war? Even if the darker scenarios being drawn--which range from global drought, lost coastlines and a northward march of deadly tropical diseases to the collapse of civilization and the virtual extinction of the human race--are unlikely, the reality that they actually could happen should be leading us to take out some kind of insurance policy, and should be driving us to start taking steps to prepare, just in case. In fact, however, we are ignoring or denying the problem--and in fact are actively increasing the risks. Even though we know that the polar ice caps are melting at an accelerating rate, and that the vast regions of permafrost north of the Arctic Circle are melting, we are not even requiring that automobiles meet strict fuel efficiency standards. As a nation, we continue to promote a society based upon the personal automobile, and as citizens we continue to buy earth-killing SUVs and muscle cars. As a nation we keep heating our homes at 70 degrees in winter and air conditioning them at 65 degrees in summer, adding ever more generating capacity that keeps pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. As a nation, we refuse even to contemplate a policy that would actually significantly cut emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As individuals, we refuse to alter our lifestyles to reduce our carbon footprint. Are we nuts? What would we call parents who refused to buy life insurance, or who refused to carry health insurance when they could afford it? What do we call people who drive their cars without having insurance? We call them selfish and stupid, and in the latter case, even criminal. So what should we call a society that is risking the future of civilization, of humanity, for the selfish reason that its people just don't want to be discomfited in the slightest? I would say it is madness. Someone who refuses to recognize reality, who refuses to see disaster ahead, who refuses to act on the basis of self-preservation, but instead does things that are likely to cause self-inflicted injuries or death, is certifiable. That's us--certifiable, both as individuals and collectively as a nation. In a sense, we’re lucky--our house hasn't burned down yet. We can still act. Maybe the better analogy is the person who didn't buy life insurance. If we'd bought it when we were young, it would be cheap to pay the premiums, but because we're nearly at retirement age now, it will be a lot more expensive to buy--if we can get it at all. That's how it is with climate change. The die has been cast. The polar caps are melting, setting in motion a raft of irreversible changes. The permafrost melt, for example, is creating vast swamps with unimaginable amounts of organic material which, under water, will rot anaerobically, releasing not carbon dioxide, but methane, a gas that has 24 times the global warming effect of CO2. The loss of the north polar cap, and of the vast snowfalls in the arctic north, is reducing the reflectivity of a large portion of the earth’s surface, increasing the sun’s heating effect. Forests in temperate and tropical zones are dying or shrinking because of decreasing rainfall, and falling river levels. Like an insurance policy purchased at an advanced age, the available remedies to climate change are getting more and more costly. Just cutting car and power plant emissions to 1990 levels will not be enough anymore. Even if we cut emissions by 80-90 percent, we will still likely see catastrophic sea level rises this century, and massive global crop failures, and starvation on an unimaginable scale. But that grim prognosis is no reason not to act. If we don't take action--serious action--the catastrophes will be even worse. Living in China in the early 1990s, I marvelled at how the government there was trashing the country's environment in the name of development and industrialization. It is clear that for the ruling Communist Party, the short-term interest of staying in power by keeping people happy with jobs and rising incomes trumps longer-term concerns like gallopping desertification, life-threatening pollution and global warming. But how different is our capitalist society and government, really? In the name of ever-rising profits over the short-term, we too are putting survival the nation and of the human race in jeopardy. In fact, since Americans, 5% of the world's population, produce 25% of the world's greenhouse gasses, we are actually worse than China, by far. We must, as human beings, as a society, and as individuals, snap out of it, and take dramatic action. If we don’t, we’re all just plain crazy. January 10, 2007 No Blood for Face! This isn't blood for oil; it's blood for face. President Bush's "new and improved" plan for "prevailing" in the Iraq War he started almost four years ago--to send an additional 21,500 US troops into the chaos of Baghdad and Anbar Province--turns out to be nothing more than a coward's way of trying to avoid having to say the war has been lost. Over 3000 Americans and several hundred thousand innocent Iraqis have died because Bush and his handlers decided early in his first disastrous administration that they needed a bully little war to solidify his position, win the Congress, and grab dictatorial powers by setting him up as a "war president." The scheme worked at first. Bush got his war, he won control of Congress in 2002, and squeaked back into office in 2004, all by running as a commander in chief in time of war. He also managed to usurp powers from Congress and undermine the Constitution, again by playing commander in chief. But his war didn't go as planned. The Iraqi people didn't want to be invaded, much less occupied, and a home-grown insurgency in that ravaged nation of 24 million, armed with just RPGs and AK-47 rifles, has brought the world's most powerful military to its knees. Rather than admit that his Iraq adventure has been an unmitigated disaster--one which has essentially handed the world's third largest oil-producing nation over to the control of its neighbor, Iran--Bush has decided to escalate the slaughter. The 21,500 additional troops, 17,500 of whom will be in Baghdad, and 4000 of whom will be in Anbar, will be fighting the overwhelmingly popular Mahdi army of Moktada al Sadr in Baghdad, and the entrenched and battle-hardened Sunni fighters in Anbar. Casualties on the American side will predictably soar. The slaughter of innocent Iraqis in both places, but particularly in the slums of Baghdad, will also mount, because the way Americans fight is with heavy (and indiscriminate) weapons and aerial bombardment, not hand-to-hand. This carnage will not produce peace and stability in Iraq, but will rather energize support for the resistance to US occupation, and in turn, the influence of Iran, which backs that resistance. Bush, in his address to the nation, continued the fiction that the violence in Iraq is the work of Al Qaeda and "foreign fighters," though the military brass, and soldiers on the ground, know otherwise. As Lt. Gen (ret.) William Odom, commenting after Bush's address in an interview on ABC News, put it, "I expected to hear a clearer view of the enemy we are fighting. What I heard was `foreign fighters.' In fact, there are several wars going on: US against many forces, Sunnis against Shias, and Al Qaeda as allies of the Sunnis. So I don’t think he (Bush) understands the nature of the war." Odom may be correct as far as our inarticulate and famously uninquisitive president is concerned. You can't learn too much when your entire research effort consists of scanning one-page executive summaries each day. But Bush's advisers, and particularly his political advisers, are well aware of what they are up against, and know that the war is already a lost cause--and one which at least 70 percent of the American public have already decided should be ended. Since they can't admit to that, they've decided to let some more young Americans (and a hell of a lot of innocent Iraqi men, women and children) take the bullets for them, in hopes that they can stretch out the day of reckoning past January 19, 2009, when it will be the next president's job to watch the helicopters departing from the US embassy roof of the Green Zone. Or maybe ABC commentator Mark Shields was onto something when he suggested, following the Bush speech, that perhaps it was all a plan to "give everything" to the Iraqi government, say it's the Iraqi government's chance to get the country in order, and then blame the failure on the Iraqis. If so, it's just another dirty trick on the Americans who are being sent into battle to kill and die as cover for Bush's debacle. January 9, 2007 There is no Justification for not Stopping the War and for not Starting Impeachment Hearings One of the most common criticisms I get when I discuss the impeachment issue among Democrats and progressives is that I'm impatient and that I'm asking too much of the new Congress--that Democrats need time to get settled into their new role as majority party. As one person wrote in a comment to my latest essay in Daily Kos, calling for immediate action to end the war and to initiate impeachment proceedings, "…let the subpoenas do their work, the committees get the dirt….These hearings will shatter the Republican Party for years to come. Let the process work." The problem with this go-slow line of thinking is two-fold. First of all, it assumes that the Congressional Democrats and especially the party leaders want the process to work. And that is taking a lot for granted. Clearly, Congress has the power to force a halt to the war in Iraq. The Democrats in Congress claim that they heard the voters in November and that they want the war wound down and the troops brought home, but then the same people whine that they don’t have the power to cut funding for further war, and that they don't have the power to stop Bush from sending in more troops and expanding the war. This is nonsense! It's not power they lack; it's spine. Increasing troop levels in Iraq by 20,000 or more is increasing the troop numbers by over 15 percent, which certainly qualifies as a "substantial" increase, and means that the War Powers Act is in play. According to that act, Bush must first gain Congressional approval for the escalation, and if he goes ahead without that approval, he is committing an impeachable crime. Clearly too, Congress, which has the power of the purse under the Constitution, can say how it wants that money used. If the House and Senate were to allocate money to the war effort but with the stipulation that it could only be used for purposes of organizing a safe departure from Iraq, that would be all that the Pentagon would be allowed to do with the money. Democratic leaders have also been quick to say that they will defer to what the generals say is needed, but that is a cop-out of the first order. Bush has just fired his top generals because he didn't like what they were saying, which was that he should start pulling the troops out of Iraq (just as he fired Chief of Staff Gen. Shinseki on the eve of the Iraq invasion for stating honestly that it would take 200-300,000 troops in Iraq to occupy the country). Hey Democrats! In a democracy, the civil government is supposed to call the shots, not the generals. It becomes even more ludicrous and facile to say that you’re going to defer to the generals when the president is cherry-picking for promotion only those generals who are sycophants willing to give him what he wants (which is how General David Petraeus and Admiral William Fallon made their bureaucratic way to the top of the toadie ladder). Besides, the very idea of "giving time" to the new Democratic Congress is obscene, when American troops are dying and getting maimed every day in a doomed project whose only purpose, clearly, is keeping President Bush and his gang of thugs and liars from having to admit to the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of the nation. It's exactly like the situation during Nixon's presidency, when he just kept the war in Indochina grinding on, expanding it into Cambodia, killing all the while, simply because he didn't want to have to be the president who lost a war. Bush's goal, clearly, is to run out the clock and hand the job of surrendering in Iraq to whoever it is that succeeds him in 2008. As for impeachment, the situation is similar. As we learned on December 20--when Bush issued yet another so-called "signing statement," this time claiming the right to have federal authorities monitor and read citizens' first-class mail without obtaining a court order--every day that this president sits in the Oval Office, the Constitution, American civil liberties and the rule of law are at risk. There is no time for delay. Nor is there any need for hearings to "get the dirt." The dirt is everywhere in Washington. A federal judge has already declared that Bush is a felon, having deliberately violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). There is no need for a House Impeachment Panel hearing on that issue; the Judiciary Committee could just publish the judge’s ruling and re-label it an Article of Impeachment. Likewise the president’s authorization of and toleration of torture. The US Supreme Court, last June in a case called Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, issued a decision finding that the president had violated the Third Geneva Convention and the U.S. Criminal Code. Again, there is no need for a committee investigation; the Judiciary Committee could just publish the majority opinion of the high court and retitle it an Article of Impeachment. As for the other impeachment issues--the signing statements, the revocation of habeas corpus, the round-up of foreign residents of the Islamic faith, the abandonment of the citizens of New Orleans, etc., etc.--we need hearings, to be sure, but those hearings should start immediately. There is no legitimate excuse for delay. Delay is simply a dodge, and increases the chances that this most impeachment-worthy president will run out the clock and leave Washington at the end of his term, with his crimes not just left unpunished, but endorsed through inexcusable Democratic default. That would be a crime of historic proportions. Now is the time for all Americans to act, and to demand that our Congressional representatives step up to their responsibility and do the two things that their oaths of office require of them: End this criminal war in Iraq, and impeach this president! January 7, 2007 Democrats are Reverting to Form Reverting to form, Democrats in Congress are cautiously trying to have it both ways so as to avoid having to take a stand on any of the issues that matter. Faced with President Bush's own disastrous decision to go "double or nothing" on his losing Iraq War by adding another 20,000 or more troops to the front, House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Harry Reid chose to…write a letter to the White House "urging" the president not to go that route. The idea seems to be that if he goes ahead and sends the additional troops into the cauldron and things go from bad to worse, Pelosi and Reid will be able to say that they opposed the idea, while they will be immune from right-wing charges that they undermined the commander in chief, since they didn't do anything concrete to block his insane plan. The truth is that Democrats could, if they had any principle and if they honored the wishes of the electorate, bring U.S. involvement in the Iraq War to a screeching halt. How? They could vote to cut off all funding for the Iraq War except for the costs of safely withdrawing all troops from the country. Nobody could accuse them, were they to do this, with putting American troops at risk. But they would have to face those who would accuse them of "cutting and running." Democrats also have the votes to put an end to Bush's serial trashing of cherished civil liberties. Instead of grumbling about violations of the First, Fourth, Fifth and other Amendments, as Democrats have been doing so ineffectively now for five years, they could simply vote to revoke the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, approved almost without objection by both houses of Congress back in September 2001 (resolutions are not subject to veto). It is that resolution which Bush and his mob attorneys in the White House and the "Justice" Department have been citing as justification for the president’s assumption of dictatorial powers, such as the power to revoke habeas corpus rights of American citizens, the power to authorize torture and detention without trial, the power to kidnap and render people, the power to declare American citizens to be "unlawful combatants" devoid of citizenship rights, the power to invalidate duly passed acts of Congress, and the power to ignore federal laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Revoke the 2001 AUMF and the president would have no grounds, fraudulent and unconstitutional as they in any case are, to claim that the nation is in a state of war and that he, as commander in chief, is no longer constrained by the Constitution. We don't hear any calls in Congress to revoke the AUMF though, because that would require taking a concrete and resolute stand on principle in defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and taking the heat from right wing cranks who would accuse them of being "soft on terror." (Democrats aren't soft on terror; they are soft on the Constitution.) And of course there is impeachment. On Jan. 3 and 4, most members of Congress took their oaths of office for the 110th Congress. That oath pledges them to "support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic." If they were to take those words to heart, it's pretty clear that--given the president's blatant abuses of power and willful violation of both law and Constitution--they constitute a call to action. This is, after all, not a simply matter of lying about a blowjob; President Bush has already been found by a federal district judge to have violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--a felony. Moreover, a majority of the Supreme Court justices also declared last June that Bush had violated both the Third Geneva Convention and the U.S. Criminal Code in authorizing and failing to prevent rampant torture of captives in the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and the so-called "war" on terror. The members of the House and Senate know full well that the president lied to them and to the American people in 2002 and 2003 about the reasons for the Iraq invasion, just as he and his administration are lying now about the reasons for a looming war on Iran. All of these things--and the list runs much longer (check out my book, The Case for Impeachment)--are serious threats to the Constitution, and call for Bush's impeachment. In fact, the escalation of the war in Iraq, with the addition of 20,000 more troops, will itself be a clear impeachable violation of the War Powers Act unless the president first obtains the approval of both houses of Congress. As constitutional attorney Francis Boyle points out, the Section 4(a)(3) of the War Powers Act states unambiguously that the act is triggered "in the absence of a declaration of war [and there has been no declaration of war in the case of the Iraq invasion], in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced…in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation." So where are the bills for impeachment? The party's Grande Dame, Nancy Pelosi, still insists that "impeachment is off the table," and John Conyers (D-MI), the new House Judiciary Committee chair, a man who knows better and who even has a new book out that outlines many of the president’s Constitutional crimes, has so far buckled under to pressure from Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership, even echoing her words about impeachment being "off the table." The Democrats, so far, are proving yet again that they have become a party devoid of principle, without spine and without conscience. One thing is certain: If the Democrats, having control of both House and Senate, fail to act on these three critical issues--ending the war, revoking the president's claim to dictatorial powers, and initiating impeachment proceedings--they will have sealed their fate come 2008 as an anachronism, not a party, and will deserve to be abandoned by all thinking voters. January 4, 2007 Feeling the Heat Things are getting hotter in 2007. I just returned from a canoe trip in the Everglades National Park, and the picture there is not pretty, even if the park is. Not only was this last wet season the driest in memory for this unique ecological gem, but the rangers say it's only a matter of time--and not that much time at that--before rising seawater drowns the entire park (and much of southern Florida along with it). The rangers say these kinds of things under their breaths these days because their employer, the Bush administration, doesn't like science mixing with park business. It's not even permissible for rangers at the Grand Canyon National Park to respond if visitors ask them how old the ancient gorge is, for fear the scientific answer might offend some yahoo who thinks the park was carved by the retreating waters of Noah’s flood a few thousand years ago. Back in the so-called civilized world, I read that our mad president is buying into yet another version of the neocon fantasy. This time, instead of claiming that we could beat the Iraqi Army by low-balling the troops on the ground (because the Iraqi people would rise up and welcome the American invaders with flowers), he's saying we'll go in with more troops than we even used for the invasion, and the now well-entrenched Iraqi insurgency will somehow be smashed, leaving in its and our bloody wake a new democratic and pro-American Iraq. The soldiers on the ground, of course, know better. According to the latest poll of the troops, more than half think that the war has already been irrevocably lost, and a majority want to just pack up and go home. I also learned on my flight home to Philadelphia that Bush, just before Christmas, issued yet another "signing statement"--he’s up past 1200 now--this time claiming the right to subvert the very bill he was signing into law. The law in question was the Postal Reauthorization Act--a seemingly routine measure providing federal support for the postal service. But where that act reaffirmed the inviolability of the mails from government snooping without a warrant, Bush in his signing statement gave himself a blank check to inspect any mail he wants--and screw the warrants. Maybe he wanted to check out all the Christmas and Hanukah cards to look for illicit Muslim holiday greetings. As disturbing as these things all are, there is precious little relief to be derived from watching the Democrats in their new role as majority party in the Congress. Even with Paleolithic-aged ice sheets suddenly breaking away at both poles, global warming doesn't appear anywhere on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 100-hour agenda of urgent items, and with people like Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich) in key positions in the new Congress, with his record of obsequious support for the auto industry, it seems unlikely that much of consequence can be expected over the next two years. All the more so with Bush still pretending there’s no problem. As for the war, Democrats in leadership positions are falling all over themselves offering support for Bush's preferred "surge" option for expanding the war by sending as many as 32,000 additional troops to Iraq. It's as though the election, in which American voters made it clear they wanted the U.S. out of Iraq, never happened. In a few months, the Bush fiasco known as the Iraq War will be transformed into a full-fledged Democratic fiasco, just as the Vietnam War, initially a Democratic fiasco, became Nixon’s fiasco in the late 1960s. The irony was that today, the members of Congress, including especially the new members who have never served before as Senators and Representatives, were taking their oaths of office, in which they swore to “support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Given the president's and vice president's extensive abuses of power and crimes against the law and the Constitution--which have included, among other things, lying to Congress and to the American people about the reasons for going to war, violating international law by invading another nation which posed no immediate threat, authorizing torture and kidnappings, violating the FISA law by spying on the American people, subverting and ignoring laws passed by the Congress, failing to act to protect the lives of the residents of an American city during a declared state of national emergency, and obstructing a federal investigation into the deliberate outing of an undercover CIA agent--it is nothing short of a violation of that very oath for Congress members not to be initiating an immediate investigation into impeachable crimes by the Bush administration and by the president and vice president in particular. Instead we have Pelosi basking in the encomia at expensive party celebrations reminiscent of a presidential inaugural ball, all the while insisting that impeachment of the president is "off the table." Pelosi should check the capital refrigerator. It’s full of impeachable offenses that are going to start reeking if they aren’t laid out on the table and acted on very soon. One of the things I learned while exploring the Everglades was that alligators, while looking fearsome, are actually very timid animals with walnut-sized brains that leave them functioning largely by instinct. According to the park rangers, gators generally attack only small prey and shy away from anything larger than they can comfortably swallow whole. In that, they sound not unlike Congressional Democrats, who may talk a good game on the stump, but who in office are afraid of their own shadows. The good news is that the public is riled up, especially over the war, and on January 27, will show its anger to the new Congress, with a major march and rally in Washington DC for peace and impeachment. Scared and startled, alligators can become truly aggressive and dangerous, park rangers say. Maybe if members of the new 110th Congress are confronted with masses of irate Americans demanding that the troops be brought home from Iraq and that the president be called to account for his crimes, they’ll be scared into acting in accordance with the oaths they swore today.
----------------
=========================
=======================
====================================
The move by Kucinich comes as impeachment is gaining ground among the broader public. Today, the Vermont House of Representatives will hold a floor debate and vote on a resolution calling for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against both President Bush and Cheney. That measure would be a companion to a similar resolution passed last week by Vermont's state Senate. If the state's lower house passes its version, Vermont will be the first state in history to pass a bi-cameral resolution on impeachment.
==================
~~~~~~~~
=============
============================
==========================
=============================
======================
=========================
===========================
============================
==============================
=============================
===============
==================================
==============================
========================
=========================
==========================
--------------------
========================
===============================
=========================
======================
==========================
=======================
What's Good for Halliburton (and Cheney) is Good for...Dubai
=============================
Hear Dave Lindorff, David Swanson, Jim McGovern and John Judge on Impeachment
===========================
=======================
===========================
==========================
====================
========================
========================
=====================
===================
========================
===========================
=========================
=================================
=======================
===========================
=======================
In fact, the proper procedure, laid out by the Founding Fathers, is for a member of Congress to submit a bill of impeachment claiming that the president has violated his oath of office, or has engaged in actions that threaten the Constitution or the rule of law. That bill goes to the House Judiciary Committee which must decide whether the bill makes a serious enough charge to warrant going to the full House to request the establishment of an Impeachment Committee, armed with subpoena power, to investigate. (Alternatively, of course, a state's legislature can submit a joint resolution calling for impeachment, which may happen soon.)
=======================
============================
------------------------------
===========================
======================
=========================
What do they take us for, idiots?
=============================
=============================
===========================
======================
===========================
===========================
=======================