Charges and Evidence: The Impeachment of George W. Bush

[Jcrowley]

Charges and Evidence: The Impeachment of George W. Bush

ILLEGAL WAR This document declares, George W. Bush has intentionally misled the Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war against Iraq, intentionally conspired with others to defraud the United States in connection with the war against Iraq in violation of Title 18 United States Code, Section 371;

ILLEGAL SPYING *Update - Recently Found Guilty by District Court This document declares, 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;

GENEVA CONVENTION VIOLATIONS *Update -Found Guilty by the Federal Supreme Court This document declares, George W. Bush has 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;" George W. Bush has conspired to deny due process to prisoners of war, indiscriminately bomb cities, transfer prisoners of war from an occupied territory, and planned, prepared, initiated and waged of a war of aggression in violation of U.S. Military Code section 2441, Geneva convention (I Art 3, II Art 18, Art 19, III Art 13, Art 17, Art 33, Art 34, Art 49, IV Art 3), and the 1945 Nuremberg Principles articles 6(a) and (b);

ILLEGAL DETENTION *Update - Found Guilty by District Court This document declares, George W. Bush has acted to strip Americans of their constitutional rights by ordering indefinite detention of citizens, without access to legal 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 President of a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant", all in subversion of law;

ILLEGAL RELEASE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION This document declares, George W. Bush authorized the leaking classified national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to investigate the matter;

ILLEGAL FREEZING OF ACCOUNTS AND RESTRICTION TO FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY *Update - Found Guilty by District Court This document declares, George W. Bush ordered the freezing of financial accounts without limit to groups he has chosen to be on such a list, and further sets forth that he ordered himself the power to create blacklists of any individual he felt was associated with the aforementioned groups. Thereby creating a system of "guilt by association."

ILLEGAL USE OF SIGNING STATEMENTS This document declares, George Walker Bush has attached signing statements to more than one hundred bills before signing them, within which he has made over eleven hundred challenges to provisions of laws passed by Congress, a figure that exceeds the total number of such challenges by all previous presidents combined, and has used this practice to exempt himself, as President of the United States, from enforcing or from being held accountable to provisions of the said laws. By declining to veto even bills, and instead attaching signing statements challenging hundreds of laws passed by Congress, he has sought to exempt the executive branch from accountability to said laws, thereby violating Article 1, Section 7 and Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. These articles of the Constitution dictate that the president has the option of signing or vetoing a bill, and upon signing the bill to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

[Jcrowley]

1. If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime

If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime, one might formulate the main issues as these:

# Is the regime legitimate? After all, it took office by what millions recognize was a stolen election enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court and the president's brother's political machine in Florida.
# Is the regime guilty of massive war crimes? After all, they invaded a country that posed no threat to the US, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and have permanently destroyed Iraqi society in their rush to plunder its oil. (This, while not permitting the slightest acknowledgement that oil has anything to do with it.)
# Is the regime guilty of high crimes against the Constitution? They have eavesdropped on millions of citizens. They torture detainees, many of whom are probably guilty of little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have repealed such basic democratic rights as habeas corpus, smeared political opponents, pandered to rightwing theocrats, stacked the judiciary & federal agencies with political cronies, and quietly sneaked into legislation passages making easier the declaration of martial law.
# Is the regime a de facto dictatorship? After all, not only do they insist that the president can label anyone an "enemy combatant" and then disappear them; not only do they openly assert their belief in the "unitary executive;" they have also created an artificial state of permanent war, then claimed that a "nation at war" must grant its executive unlimited powers. They have openly claimed the right to wage war on anyone, even on false pretexts, using our bodies & tax dollars to feed a war machine owned by their cronies -- and added with sneering condescension that we have no say in any of this. Anyone who objects is a traitor! All this, in the name of "protecting Americans, freedom and democracy!"

The mainstream media are unwilling to even recognize the existence of such questions. Their comfort zones and expertise are better suited to "reporting" on the astronaut/love-triangle/diaper story, or the intriguing battles raging over Anna Nicole's corpse. There's a story in today's news that Iraq's cabinet has approved a draft of a new "oil law," which would largely turn control of Iraq's oil over to Western oil companies. But we know by now that Anna Nicole's corpse will get far more press in the days ahead, and that no media "analyst" will perceive any noteworthy connection between the new oil law and the Iraq War, originally launched because of imaginary WMD's. (That little boo-boo is regularly ascribed by the media to "flawed intelligence," an interesting phrase deserving further examination, if, against rising odds, we survive the next several months without a world-altering conflagration.)