When the Whole White House is Criminal,
How Do You Impeach an Entire Administration?
by James Charles
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 27, 2006
The list of criminal acts is long, depressing as it is frightening. Equally depressing is the silence of the Democrats, the media and ordinary citizens. Is American democracy dead?
In the current issue of The National Review, William F. Buckley calls for the Bush administration to admit that it made a hideous mistake by invading Iraq, writing that “the administration has, now, to cope with failure and the acknowledgment of defeat” of its entire policy from launching the war to believing it could unite and pacify religious enemies whose mutual hatred goes back a millennia, to installing a government that superficially resembles a democracy.
On one hand, when the dean of modern conservative politics says Iraq was a mistake, even the most ideologically driven neo-con must pay attention. On the other, the “failure” and “defeat” he writes about is not simply another “Oops, we goofed!” mea culpa that White House apologists can spin on the Sunday morning interview shows. While cloaking his condemnation in polite Ivy League-ese terms like “postulates” and “mitigation of policies,” Mr. Buckley overlooks one simple fact: No matter how noble a policy of spreading freedom may look on paper, the White House has been criminal in carrying it out.
The dilemma for America is: When the whole executive branch is criminal, how do you impeach an entire administration?
* President Bush knowingly lied to Congress when he certified in writing an immediate threat to the security of the United States mandated the need to use armed force to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. As has been well documented over the past three years, the administration knew before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message that there were serious doubts in the intelligence establishment -- the CIA, DIA, State Dept. and Dept. of Energy -- that Saddam had either chemical weapons or a program to build atomic weapons. Lying to Congress is a federal offence, a felony punishable with prison; on its face, it is also a “high crime and misdemeanor” -- an impeachable offence.
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* Vice President Dick Cheney, armed with an Executive Order he got Bush to sign allowing him to unilaterally declassify information, decided to declassify Valerie Plame’s role in the CIA. He then set about outing her when her husband returned from Niger and wrote a report stating that there was no evidence Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake, a necessary ingredient to make a nuclear weapon. Jason Leopold, who has been covering Plamegate from the start, reported on Feb. 24, 2006, that the White House had just “found” 250 allegedly missing e-mails about Plame and that the Vice President is implicated directly. The e-mails purportedly show Cheney lied to FBI agents about his role in the scandal, itself a federal offence punishable by imprisonment. It also meets the “high crime and misdemeanor” impeachment test.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Charles27.htm
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