I was most disturbed to find the comments posted on the announcement that Kucinich was to pursue impeachment were in the main derogatory. Especially those that called into question the LEGAL grounds for such an action and threw darts at D's honest attempt to try to restore some decency to America. He, Kucinich stands "impeached" and called into question as if this was the ONLY way he could get attnetion. A headline grabber who has no chance of winning.
Invidious attacks on his motives will help no one who is honest. I have noticed, in the main, the male alphas of the so-called left are all over Dennis now that he has "announced" - would that they have the power he has!! He is no wimp, and saying he is does not make him so. Nor is what he is doing to grab headlines .. where are the others in CONgress lining up to stop torture, ensure an Iraq withdrawal deadline is kept, standing against developing the Arctic slope, etc ...?
I went back through my "archives" and came up with this email below. You can see the date for yourself. This, plus TWO very respectable books have shown that there IS a case against Cheney very clearly.
I think that tomorrow, or within days we will know EXACTLY what the legal basis for the action are. It must be so.
Conyers has certainly been in possession of enough damaging evidence to go after Bush, BUT ...
At the time of the email below, we had a republican-controlled CONgress. It would have been VERY awkward to have Bush impeached and then Dick leading the puppet show. In the case of Nixon, Agnew was "relieved" of his "duties" so that he could not stand-in before impeachment against the President (mainly for wiretapping of Elsberg's psychiatrist -- and the revelations in the Pentagon Papers) was pursued. Hence, the Kucinich approach is surely more compelling and certainly more pragmatic at this point in time!! Just he kind of leadership we have been led to expect from him.
And as for Dennis, I think as time goes along, many people (and sheeple) are gonna find that what they are looking for is the Dem from Ohio ... and the team he can create to finally put people above profit$.
"Virginia S." wrote:
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 03:18:22 -0500 (EST)
From: "Virginia S."
Subject: impeachment exec summary
Richard Johnson points out that the moral turpitude of impeachment must include a finding that the official benefitted personally from a policy decision that hurt the country. It should be easy enough to prove that Cheney's ties to Halliburton, which has profited enormously from the Iraq war, meet this standard, and Cheney is impeachable.
Bush's stock holdings:
USATODAY.com - Bush portfolio shows fiscal conservatism
... Bush has had his holdings managed by a blind trust since 1995, when he On the other hand, retaliation against critics of the
was elected governor of ... None of Bush's individual stock holdings exceeds
$1,000, so a bad
... www.usatoday.
Financial gain by Bush would be harder to prove. However, it might be
possible to show that he benefitted politically from wiretapping political
critics and opponents, as Nixon did. This would require access to some of
the info gained by warrantless wiretapping and email reading. The outing of
Plame makes a much stronger case: retaliation against a truthteller for
undercutting his lies on Iraq.
Peace, Carol Wolman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Johnson"
To: "Dan Hamburg"
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 7:30 PM
Subject: RAN: Re: The Constitution in Crisis, House Judiciary Committee Minority Staff
DAN,
This is all very interesting, but there are 2 facts that make
impeachment politically infeasable [sic] at this time: the majority of the
House is held by Republicans; and the vice president is worse.
Moreover, the legal standard for impeachment according to the
constitution is moral turpitude, bribery, and high treason. This
implies there must be a finding the president intended to benefit
personally from his actions, which at the same time contravened the national interest in a material way.
The following message advocates the following as possible
impeachment grounds:
<>
administration by means that in themselves are illegal, and violation
of laws regulating spying against US citizens could sui generi be
impeachable offenses if shown they were undertaken for motives of
personal gain instead of overriding national interest.
9999999999999999999
Report | The Constitution in Crisis
By House Judiciary Committee Minority Staff
Tuesday 20 December 2005
The Downing Street minutes and deception, manipulation, torture,
retribution, and coverups in the Iraq war.
Full Report:http://www.truthout
Executive Summary
This Minority Report has been produced at the request of
Representative John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of the House
Judiciary Committee. He made this request in the wake of the
President's failure to respond to a letter submitted by 122 Members
of Congress and more than 500,000 Americans in July of this year
asking him whether the assertions set forth in the Downing Street
Minutes were accurate. Mr. Conyers asked staff, by year end 2005, to
review the available information concerning possible misconduct by
the Bush Administration in the run up to the Iraq War and
post-invasion statements and actions, and to develop legal
conclusions and make legislative and other recommendations to him.
In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the
President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the
Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding
the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated
intelligence information regarding the justification for such war;
countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and
other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate
retaliation against critics of their Administration.
There is a prima facie case that these actions by the President,
Vice-President and other members of the Bush Administration violated
a number of federal laws, including (1) Committing a Fraud against
the United States; (2) Making False Statements to Congress; (3) The
War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of Government Funds; (5) federal
laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel,
inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws concerning
retaliating against witnesses and other individuals; and (7) federal
laws and regulations concerning leaking and other misuse of
intelligence.
While these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable
misconduct, because the Bush Administration and the
Republican-controll
obtain information directly from the Administration concerning these
matters, more investigatory authority is needed before
recommendations can be made regarding specific Articles of
Impeachment. As a result, we recommend that Congress establish a
select committee with subpoena authority to investigate the
misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war
detailed in this Report and report to the Committee on the Judiciary
on possible impeachable offenses.
In addition, we believe the failure of the President, Vice
President and others in the Bush Administration to respond to myriad
requests for information concerning these charges, or to otherwise
account for explain a number of specific misstatements they have made
in the run up to War and other actions warrants, at minimum, the
introduction and Congress' approval of Resolutions of Censure against
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. Further, we recommend that Ranking Member
Conyers and others consider referring the potential violations of
federal criminal law detailed in this Report to the Department of
Justice for investigation; Congress should pass legislation to limit
government secrecy, enhance oversight of the Executive Branch,
request notification and justification of presidential pardons of
Administration officials, ban abusive treatment of detainees, ban the
use of chemical weapons, and ban the practice of paying foreign media
outlets to publish news stories prepared by or for the Pentagon; and
the House should amend its Rules to permit Ranking Members of
Committees to schedule official Committee hearings and call witnesses
to investigate Executive Branch misconduct.
The Report rejects the frequent contention by the Bush
Administration that there pre-war conduct has been reviewed and they
have been exonerated. No entity has ever considered whether the
Administration misled Americans about the decision to go to war. The
Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet conducted a review of
pre-war intelligence distortion and manipulation, while the
Silberman-Robb report specifically cautioned that intelligence
manipulation "was not part of our inquiry." There has also not been
any independent inquiry concerning torture and other legal violations
in Iraq; nor has there been an independent review of the pattern of
coverups and political retribution by the Bush Administration against
its critics, other than the very narrow and still ongoing inquiry of
Special Counsel Fitzgerald.
While the scope of this Report is largely limited to Iraq, it
also holds lessons for our Nation at a time of entrenched one-party
rule and abuse of power in Washington. If the present Administration
is willing to misstate the facts in order to achieve its political
objectives in Iraq, and Congress is unwilling to confront or
challenge their hegemony, many of our cherished democratic principles
are in jeopardy.
This is true not only with respect to the Iraq War, but also in
regard to other areas of foreign policy, privacy and civil liberties,
and matters of economic and social justice. Indeed as this Report is
being finalized, we have just learned of another potential
significant abuse of executive power by the President, ordering the
National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying and wiretapping
without obtaining court approval in possible violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It is tragic that our Nation has invaded another sovereign nation
because "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy," as stated in the Downing Street Minutes. It is equally
tragic that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have
been unwilling to examine these facts or take action to prevent this
scenario from occurring again. Since they appear unwilling to act, it
is incumbent on individual Members of Congress as well as the
American public to act to protect our constitutional form of
government.
Dan Hamburg
www.voiceoftheenvir
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