Editorial 10.2, February 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich

Impeach the Bastards!
February 11, 2008

Four years ago, in the February 2004 issue of the Republic, I published a news article about the movement to impeach George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld. At that time, Professor of International Law Francis Boyle and former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark were leading the charge. Since then, the case against these men—and others in the two junior Bush administrations—has grown only stronger.

Yet, the idea of impeachment is treated as, well, laughable, hardly worthy of news reporting in the mainstream media. This wasn’t helped along by Nancy Pelosi’s betrayal of those who voted in the Democratic majority in the House when she proclaimed, “Impeachment is off the table.” Fortunately, she doesn’t have the power, even as Speaker of the House, to remove from consideration this constitutional check on overreaching by the Executive Branch.

According to the Center for Public Integrity’s report on Iraq, “The War Card: orchestrated Deception on the Path to War,”

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

The following seventeen members of the House of Congress have signed on to the articles of impeachment: Baldwin, Tammy, WI; Capuano, Michael E., MA; Clarke, Yvette D., NY; Clay, Wm. Lacy, MO; Cohen, Steve, TN; Farr, Sam, CA; Grijalva, Raúl M., AZ; Gutierrez, Luis V., IL; Kucinich, Dennis J., OH; Lee, Barbara, CA; Moore, Gwen, WI; Moran, James P., VA; Thompson, Mike, CA; Towns, Edolphus, NY; Woolsey, Lynn, CA; Wexler, Robert, FL; Wynn, Albert Russell, MD.

That’s it. Isn’t it amazing that, with an administration demonstrably guilty of war crimes, up to its neck in human rights violations, and sunk hip-deep in the muck of partisan corruption and pay-for-influence policy deals, the Democratic Party-controlled Congress can’t be bothered to actually DO something about it?

This is a sorry pass this country has come to. This administration has bent the Constitution so far over backwards that it may very well be broken, and the Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be able to be able to see past the end of this adminstration to a time in the future when a Democratic president might take the power that this Congress has handed to the Executive Branch. Republicans in Congress who fail to see the dire danger that the “Unitary Executive” poses to them and to this nation are overlooking the fact that the president is most decidedly not a king—but he’s acting like one, and the next president might also.

The basic rationale for impeachment boils down to twenty specific charges, viewable at the site www.impeachbush.org. A few of the more egregious: illegally seizing power to wage wars of aggression; lying to the people and Congress, and providing false and deceptive rationales for war; instituting a secret and illegal wiretapping and spying operation against the people; assaulting Iraq in a war of aggression; authorizing, ordering and condoning assassinations, summary executions, kidnappings, secret and other illegal detentions of individuals, torture and physical and psychological coercion of prisoners; acting to strip United States citizens of their rights, ordering indefinite detention of citizens and/or noncitizens, without access to counsel, without charge, and without opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation by the Executive of a citizen as an "enemy combatant;" use of secret arrests of persons and denial of the right to public trials; authorizing the monitoring of confidential attorney-client privileged communications by the government; ordering and authorizing the seizure of assets of persons in the United States, prior to hearing or trial, for lawful or innocent association with any entity that at the discretionary designation of the Executive has been deemed "terrorist;"engaging in criminal neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, causing mass suffering and unnecessary loss of life.

These crimes make those of any other president pale into insignificance. To not impeach this president and his cohorts would be a gross failure to defend the Constitution. It is important to remember that in this country, we, the citizenry, are the government, and if our government is failing us, it is we who fail.

We must act, and swiftly, or our government will no longer be ours.

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