The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office - Hardcover

Lindorff, Dave; Olshansky, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312360169 ISBN 13: 9780312360160

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006

Synopsis

The war in Iraq . . .
 
No bid contracts awarded to Halliburton . . .
 
Hurricane Katrina . . .
 
The CIA leak investigation . . .
 
The story gets worse and worse. The evidence is glaring. George W. Bush's record as a president is abysmal.
      And it's time to impeach him.
      The Case for Impeachment lays out the reasons why in a straightforward, letter-of-the-law manner. Mixing the cold, hard facts with the lies and deceptions of this administration, The Case for Impeachment is a serious consideration of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors while in office. This important and timely book will serve as a rallying cry for all those fed up with George W. Bush's abuses of power. It's time for the American people and Congress to act. With so much at stake, we have a president whose administration stands out in its criminality and disdain for the rule of law. The Case for Impeachment explains the legal history and grounds for impeaching George W. Bush and brings forth more than a half dozen articles of impeachment the likes of:

*Lying and inducing Congress and the American people into an unjust war.
*Allowing his friends and business cronies to profiteer off the war in Iraq.*Authorizing torture and rendition of prisoners of war and suspected terrorists--a complete violation of the Geneva Conventions, a treaty the U.S. has signed and is therefore part of our law.
*Stripping American citizens of their Constitutional rights--holding people with no charge, wiretapping them illegally, offering them no trial, and never allowing them to face their accusers.
*Failing in almost every way possible to defend the homeland and our borders.

Hard hitting and persuasive in its argument, The Case for Impeachment will be one of the most talked-about political books for the pathetic remainder of the Bush Presidency. As timely as today's headlines, this vital book explains why impeachment should be deployed against the serial Constitution-shredder George W. Bush. The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was illegal spying on Americans--a crime indisputably committed also by Bush and his cronies. But this book also makes a compelling case that Bush has arrogantly flouted his oath of office and the laws of the land by committing other impeachableoffenses--telling lies to Congress and the American people to take us into an illegal war, violating the War Powers act, abusing the power of his office, failing to protect the United States, and more. Dave Lindorff (a first-rate independent progressive journalist) and Barbara Olshansky (a dedicated civil liberties attorney), in The Case for Impeachment, have restored this vital tool to the arsenal of democracy. Any American who wants to preserve what's left of our precious Bill of Rights from further encroachments, and to repair the Constitutional separation of powers vitiated by George Bush, should read this essential book -- which should also be force-fed to every single member of Congress.
-- Doug Ireland, columnist for the LA Weekly "In the United States, our best journalism is published in books now and talked about on the radio and the internet. If you get your news from a television or a newspaper, you live in another world. This no doubt contributes to how divided we are politically. Dave Lindorff's and Barbara Olshansky's book could help bridge this national divide. The genius of this book is in its brevity. Lindorff and Olshansky have boiled the list of Bush and Cheney's documented crimes down to an amazingly concise summary, one that however gives a real flavor of the goings on in this criminal administration. I work on these issues and still learned a great deal by reading this book. If each of us who knows some of this and is able to process it easily buys ten copies to give to people who get their news from TV, this clear crisp book might just help save this country."
-- David Swanson, co-founder AfterDowningStreet.org The impeachment of George W. Bush today seems politically unlikely. But Lindorff and Olshansky insist that we not avert our eyes, that it is not OK to tolerate a president who "revokes the basic constitutional rights of American citizenship"--locking people up indefinitely without trial, claiming a right to ignore laws and court orders. President Bush justifies his violations of the Constitution by citing the emergency of a war which is in truth "a police action against stateless terrorists"--a crusade which can thus have "no beginning and no end," Lindorff and Olshansky forcefully argue. If Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about having sex, they ask, how much more dangerous is it to shrug off the corrosive impact of a president who knowingly lied the nation into a costly and counterproductive war in Iraq? The authors then proceed to meticulously document their case that many of the false grounds for war were, indeed, knowing lies. "If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now," they warn, "it may only be a piece of paper by the end of President Bush's second term."
--Vin Suprynowicz, Las Vegas Review Journal

About this title

About the Author

DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist for over three decades who has written for numerous publications including, BusinessWeek, Salon, and The Nation. He's also the author of three books, This Can't Be Happening!, Killing Time, and Marketplace Medicine. BARBARA OLSHANSKY is the Director Counsel for The Center for Constitutional Rights who is currently managing habeas litigation on behalf of 300 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One 
Why Impeachment?
 
The President, vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
 
--Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 4
 
It's time.
 
On April 29, 2004, a nervous President George W. Bush went before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to answer questions about how his administration had responded to the attack. The commission had already taken testimony from a long string of witnesses in the military, intelligence, justice, and other agencies of government. All had been questioned under oath about their knowledge of the events leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, including the government's response--or lack of response--to early warnings. All of that testimony had been widely reported, even televised. Only a handful of people know what happened after President Bush entered that room, though, because he (who had opposed creation of the commission in the first place) had made some curious demands before agreeing to appear. He insisted that only a few selected members of the ten-member body could be present, that he not be placed under oath, that he could have Vice President Dick Cheney by his side, and that no recording or notes be made of his testimony. The entire interview was conducted behind closed doors, with the press and public barred.
 
The only possible explanation for this behavior is that the president did not want the American public to know the truth--or that he had no intention of telling the truth--about his knowledge of the attack on America. Not only had his administration been criminally negligent during the months before the attacks, he, Cheney, and their neo-conservative advisers had shamelessly exploited that American tragedy to accomplish the greatest executive power grab and the worst descent into secret government in the history of the republic. They had used it as an excuse to launch two wars and a full assault on the Bill of Rights, the courts, and the political opposition.
 
Flash back more than a year to January 29, 2003. Standing before the assembled joint session of the Congress for his State of the Union address, President Bush told a hushed chamber of senators and representatives, and millions of Americans who were watching, that they were facing the imminent threat of a nuclear attack from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. With the Pentagon already engaged in an all-out campaign to ferry troops and materiel to the Persian Gulf region in anticipation of war, and with U.S. fighter/bombers stepping up provocative aerial attacks in Iraq under the guise of maintaining several "no fly" zones in that country, the president said:
 
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon, and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.
 
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
 
Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
 
Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
 
Bush went on to drive the terrifying message home, saying:
 
With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region.
 
And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.
 
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses, and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained.
 
Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.
 
We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.
 
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?
 
If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
 
Scary stuff, but it was just not true. According to a series of memos written at that time, two days after this speech was given the president had informed Tony Blair, the British prime minister, that with or without UN approval, he intended to take America to war. In fact, he was considering flying a U2 surveillance aircraft painted in UN colors over Iraq, hoping to provoke an attack to which America could respond in force. Additionally, the president already knew at that point that the documents suggesting that Iraq had tried to buy yellow-cake uranium ore from Niger were forgeries and that no such effort had been made. (Indeed, as we shall explain later, there is reason to suspect that the Bush administration may have been involved in those forgeries.) The president was also aware that there were other far more likely and permissible uses for those aluminum tubes--such as fuselages for small rockets. In fact, scientists had noted that the pre-cut tubes were too short for use in a centrifuge, as was being claimed by Bush. Finally, the president also knew by the time of his address that not only was there no credible evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda--an organization which had, in fact, condemned Hussein as a godless apostate--but that Hussein viewed Al Qaeda as a potential threat to his regime.
 
It is commonplace for politicians and presidents to lie. Some lies though, are more serious than others. Only five years before Bush's State of the Union address, the House of Representatives had voted 228-206 to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury convened by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who was investigating, among other things, the weighty matter of whether Clinton had had consensual sex with an intern. The House also voted 221-212 to impeach Clinton for obstruction of justice. Nobody died (or even got pregnant) as a result of Clinton's deceit, but the impeachment effort, which purported to focus not on the sex but on the lying, nonetheless led to a bitter political battle and ultimately to a trial in the U.S. Senate, where Clinton was acquitted of the charges.
 
Meanwhile, Bush's dissembling and fabrications are more than garden-variety whoppers about illicit sex. His lies were designed to make the Congress and the public ready and willing to support a war of aggression against Iraq, a battered and impoverished country of 26 million people, which the president and his advisers knew posed no credible threat to the United States, or even, thanks to years of embargo and sanctions, to its neighbors. They are lies that led directly to a war that by March 2006 had killed over 2,300 American troops and grievously wounded more than 19,000, as well as killing an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, most of them civilians. And they have cost hundreds of billions of dollars.*
 
Where impeachment is concerned, the issue is not whether an official was under oath or not; rather it is the significance of the lie, and what the liar was attempting to accomplish. Furthermore, there is a precedent for impeaching a president for lying to the public and to Congress, even if he was not under oath. Richard Nixon is the model here. On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 for an impeachment article accusing Nixon of making false and misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States [author's emphasis] into believing that a thorough and complete investigation has been conducted with respect to allegation of misconduct on the part of personnel of the Executive branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct.1
 
As we will see, this is remarkably similar to President Bush's role in revealing the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Speaking through his press spokesman, on several occasions Bush has falsely assured reporters and the public that he knew of nobody in the White House who was responsible for disclosing her identity. In fact, there is evidence that well before those assertions, Bush had criticized his closest adviser, Karl Rove, for his involvement in the outing of Plame to the media.2
 
But Bush's lies about Iraq and the Plame affair are only the beginning of the case for his impeachment. Over the course of his one and a half terms, this president and his administration have committed a staggering string of what could clearly qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors. Among them:
 
· The arrest and detention without charge of American citizens, who have been denied their constitutional rights to due process and a speedy and public trial.
 
· The violation of international treaties that the United States has signed, and which have thus become the law of the land, such as the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of soldiers, military detainees, and civilians, and the conventions against torture--protocols that the current U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, in his earlier role as White House counsel, advised the president is just a "quaint" artifact of an earlier time.
 
· Willfully ignoring or violating acts of Congress, through the issuance of hundreds of so-called "signing statements" by the president, in which Bush declared his intention to interpret laws in his own way and to obey only those that he feels like obeying.
 
· The blatant violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, by secretly authorizing secret warrantless spying on thousands of American citizens by the National Security Agency.
 
· The foolish and disastrous transfer of the nation's first-line defenders--police, firefighters, and border patrol personnel who were long encouraged to supplement their income by joining their local National Guard units--to Iraq, leaving the nation unprotected against both cross-border infiltration and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed much of the city of New Orleans.
 
As the list grows, so have calls for the president's impeachment. In June 2005, Zogby International, a well-respected nonpartisan polling organization, found that 42 percent of Americans thought that Bush should be impeached if it were determined that he had lied about his reasons for invading Iraq. That was an astonishing number, particularly because at the same time an even higher percentage of Americans were telling pollsters they believed the president had lied about the reasons we went to war. Compare that to polls taken at the height of the Republican campaign to impeach President Clinton; according to sixteen major polls conducted during the summer and fall of 1998, only 36 percent of the public thought impeachment should be considered, while only 26 percent thought the president should be removed from office.
 
Since June 2005, support for impeachment of President Bush has steadily increased. A poll conducted in early October 2005, by Ipsos Public Affairs, another nonpartisan polling firm, found support for the impeachment of the president up to 50 percent. A month later Zogby asked the same impeachment question which it had asked four months earlier: of 1,200 Americans polled, 53 percent said they supported impeachment while only 42 percent of Americans opposed impeachment. Even among self-identified Republicans, 29 percent said that if the president lied about the war, he should be impeached. Another Zogby poll, this one conducted in January 2006, found that 52 percent of Americans supported impeaching President Bush if he authorized warrantless domestic spying on Americans by the NSA, an action he openly admits to.
 
Impeachment isn't a popular election, nor is it simply a legal matter to be tried in a court of law. Impeachment is a political process played out in the Congress. Technically, it is an action taken by the U.S. House of Representatives, which must first consider a bill of impeachment, vote articles of impeachment out of the Judiciary Committee, and then put the question to the full membership. If a majority of the House votes for an article or for multiple articles of impeachment, this becomes the equivalent of an indictment, which must then be "tried" in the U.S. Senate. A two-thirds majority is required to convict and to remove the president from office. There have been two presidential impeachment trials in American history--both of them brought for political rather than legal reasons. In 1868, Democratic President Andrew Johnson was impeached and came within a single vote of being removed from office.
 
In 1998, President Clinton was confronted by a House that had a Republican majority. His own Democratic Party still held a narrow edge in the Senate, meaning there was no chance he would be convicted and removed from office, but there were plenty of Representatives, the vast majority of them Republicans, ready to vote for impeachment. In contrast, approaching midterm elections in Bush's second term, the Republican Party has a firm grip on power in both the House and the Senate, making even a hearing on impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee almost inconceivable, no matter how serious the president's crimes.
 
The two situations are almost mirror opposites. In the Clinton case, a popular president's congressional Republican enemies were seeking impeachment, while a majority of Americans did not support it. In the present case, Bush, an unpopular president, has the backing of a majority of both houses of Congress, so more than five years into his presidency only a handful of Democratic legislators had even suggested calling for his ouster. Despite the unpromising political situation in the Congress, a number of grassroots campaigns promoting impeachment have sprung up, and numerous polls suggest widespread support for impeachment. What would be the point of impeaching Bush though, if the Republican Senate would never consider removing the president?
 
"There is in a sense an impeachment campaign whether we want one or not," says David Swanson, co-founder of the organization A...

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0312360169
• ISBN 13: 9780312360160
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288