Gleen Greenwald on Mukasey

Glenn Greenwald

Friday April 4, 2008 09:35 EDT

The DOJ comments on the Mukasey controversy

(updated below)

In response to the growing controversy over plainly misleading comments by Attorney General Michael Mukasey last week in San Francisco, and in response to the questions I submitted, the DOJ's Peter Carr, its Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs, sent me the following email:

In a question-and-answer session after his Commonwealth Club speech last week, Attorney General Mukasey referenced a call between an al Qaeda safe house and a person in the United States. The Attorney General has referred to this before, in the letter he sent with Director of National Intelligence McConnell to Chairman Reyes on February 22, 2008. In that letter, contained in this link [.pdf], the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence explained that:

"We have provided Congress with examples in which difficulties with collections under [Executive Order 12333] resulted in the Intelligence Community missing crucial information. For instance, one of the September 11 hijackers communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States. Because that collection was conducted under Executive Order 12333, the Intelligence Community could not identify the domestic end of the communication prior to September 11, 2001, when it could have stopped that attack. The failure to collect such communications was one of the central criticisms of the Congressional Joint Inquiry that looked into intelligence failures associated with the attacks of September 11. The bipartisan bill passed by the Senate would address such flaws in our capabilities that existed before the enactment of the Protect America Act and that are now resurfacing."

This call is also referenced in the unclassified report of the congressional intelligence committees' Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

For multiple reasons, this response heightens, rather than resolves, the severely misleading nature of Mukasey's claims. More importantly, Mukasey's comments illustrate the endless exploitation of the 9/11 attacks to demand ever-expanding power to know more and more about the activities of U.S. citizens inside the U.S., and the deceitful practice of blaming what were intelligence failures on civil liberties, safeguards and oversight, and basic Constitutional guarantees.

Several points to note about the DOJ's response:

(1) Some had speculated (not unreasonably) that perhaps Mukasey had not intended to claim that there really was an actual pre-9/11 call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Government failed to investigate, but rather, that he was speaking only hypothetically about the type of call that might have been missed due to FISA. The response from the DOJ makes conclusively clear that Mukasey really was (and is) claiming that there was an actual call of the type he describes.

(2) The DOJ's vague claim -- that "this call is also referenced in the unclassified report of the congressional intelligence committees' Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks" -- is baffling, given that three Democratic House Chairmen (including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers) said yesterday that they've never heard of any such thing ("I am aware of no previous reference, in the 9/11 Commission report or elsewhere, to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks"), as did 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow ("Not sure of course what the AG had in mind").

It's extremely unlikely -- to put it mildly -- that if an episode of such obvious significance had really occurred, nobody would know what Mukasey was talking about.

(3) There is only one reference in the Joint Inquiry report (.pdf) that has any remote similarity to what Mukasey described (p. 36), but that was a call that originated in the U.S., not in an "Afghan safe house":


Critically, the Report emphasized that FISA provided all of the authority needed to have intercepted that communication, to learn of its domestic origins and to disseminate it to the FBI and other domestic intelligence agencies. To the extent the NSA failed to do so, this had nothing to do with FISA or any other legal restraints or civil liberties, but rather, with poor intelligence practices:

The pre-9/11 failures, as the Joint Inquiry itself concluded, were failures resulting from how the NSA used its legal authorities, not from insufficient legal authorities or excessive legal restraints. Even if this were the call that Mukasey was describing -- and that is very dubious -- none of that has anything to do with FISA. Such an incident would not even have justified loosening the pre-9/11 safeguards, let alone -- after seven years of endless erosion of such safeguards -- justify any further erosion now.

This morning I interviewed Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies and one of the nation's foremost surveillance experts. She pointed out that even prior to 9/11, the NSA commonly intercepted international communications into the U.S. and -- in numerous, broadly defined circumstances -- was authorized to disseminate what they learned to the FBI and other domestic agencies. If they failed to intercept calls involving Al Qaeda and/or failed to disseminate information to the FBI about looming terrorist attacks, it wasn't because FISA or any other laws prohibited them from doing so.

(4) Even the DOJ's own response makes clear how deceitful Mukasey's speech was. The DOJ references a passage in the Mukasey/McConnell letter where they blame restrictions imposed not by FISA, but supposedly by Executive Order 12333, which is an order issued in 1981 by Ronald Reagan. That Executive Order has nothing to do with FISA, and could have been amended or rescinded at any time by George Bush (and indeed, subsequent to 9/11, it was twice amended by Bush).

If, as Mukasey himself contends, Reagan's 1981 Executive Order prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks (an absurd proposition for reasons set forth above), that is self-evidently no reason to eliminate FISA's warrant requirements or any other legal safeguards against eavesdropping abuses. Even assuming all of Mukasey's own premises to be true -- a wholly unwarranted concession -- it's still completely deceitful to cite this call and these impediments as a reason why FISA protections should be eroded further still (in the form of Rockefeller's Senate bill) or, worse, to suggest that FISA was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

* * * * *

Chairman Conyers should absolutely continue to demand answers from Mukasey as to whether or not this alleged call from an "Afghan safe house" that the Government failed to investigate ever actually happened. It is extremely dubious that Mukasey's claims in that regard are accurate.

But even if they were, the deceit here is manifest, and is extremely common ever since the 9/11 attack. The administration has no interest in improving its intelligence-gathering capabilities, its counter-terrorism strategies, or its ability to identify valuable information. Its only interest is to obtain greater and greater domestic spying powers with fewer and fewer oversights -- based on the premise that as long as they know Everything, we'll all be safe. Its appetite for this is insatiable.

As Martin points out, the principal defect in counter-terrorism prior to the 9/11 attacks was an inability to identify valuable information, not legal restraints on their ability to gather it. That summer, the intelligence community knew that bin Laden was determined to strike the U.S. and that at least two of his operatives had entered the U.S. But they failed to act with the urgency or focus that such information warranted. Whatever caused their failures to prevent the attacks, it had nothing to do with safeguards and legal prohibitions.

If anything, allowing the Government to collect greater and greater amounts of surveillance data, with fewer and fewer safeguards, results in far less effective counter-terrorism efforts. As both Martin and Rep. Rush Holt have continuously pointed out, allowing the intelligence community to suck up whatever they want about Americans in some sort of blunderbuss vacuum cleaner effect, without safeguards, is far less likely to lead to the detection of actual threats than is focused, narrow, and managed intelligence-gathering activities. More safeguards and restrictions lead to better surveillance.

And yet, the Bush administration has repeatedly succeeded in using the 9/11 attacks to obtain more and more unchecked domestic spying power. And even seven years later, the Attorney General is still parading around in public and tearfully talking about the attacks in order to claim that we need to eliminate the last remaining checks on their domestic spying powers, even though those checks do not even arguably have anything to do with the failures he tearfully exploits. But that's all this administration is and has ever been -- a relentless and profoundly dishonest exploiter of the 9/11 attacks for greater power and less accountability. In that regard, Mike Mukasey has already proven himself to be a perfect addition to the team.

UPDATE: The audio of Mukasey's appearance at the Commonwealth Club is here (ht/t Jim White). The relevant excerpt from the Q-and-A session begins at roughly the 50:00 minute mark.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Mukasey is tearfully hauling out the alleged Afghan call and failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks to demand enactment of the warrantless eavesdropping powers in the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate FISA bill, and that (even leaving aside whether the episode happened as he described it) is what makes his claims so deceitful. Those two things have nothing even arguably to do with one another -- since FISA did not even arguably prevent interception and domestic dissemination of calls of that sort -- yet here is yet another Bush official, yet again, exploiting those attacks to demand more unchecked government power.

-- Glenn Greenwald

The Clinton Tax Returns: What Will They Reveal?

An ABC News Review Has Found the Clintons Have Made More Than $50 Million Since Leaving the White House

By BRIAN ROSS and AVNI PATEL
April 3, 2008

Hillary Clinton has been pulling out all the stops to win the Democratic nomination for president -- but one: she still has not released her family's tax returns.

The tax returns will answer questions on how they made their millions.

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The campaign says they will release the documents sometime before April 15. Without them, many questions remain about how the Clintons made tens of millions of dollars -- and whether they used arcane tax loopholes available to the super-rich, an expert says. A Clinton campaign spokesman says the couple has paid all U.S. taxes at ordinary income tax rates.

An independent review by ABC News has found that since leaving the White House seven years ago, the senator and her former president husband have made well over $50 million, muchof it from paid speeches made by Bill Clinton.

A review of Sen. Clinton's annual ethics filings found that her husband has earned $47 million in fees from more than 280 speeches he has made around the world.

Clinton's biggest patrons include New York-based investment firm Goldman Sachs, which paid him $650,000 for four speeches in recent years, and two foreign firms. Gold Services International, a Colombian-based event organizer, brought Clinton to Latin America in 2005 for four days of speeches, earning Clinton $800,000. Another company, Toronto-based Power Within, paid Clinton $650,000 for a series of motivational speeches in Canada in 2005.

Aides to the former president have said that his paid speeches are an efficient way for him to make money and devote more of his time to charitable work.

The annual disclosures do not require Sen. Clinton to fully report her husband's income, which obscures the picture of how much the former president has made in his business dealings with longtime friends and fundraisers.

Read Sen. Clinton's latest disclosure form.

For example, an examination of the records reveals her husband is a partner in an investment fund, Yucaipa Global Partnership, registered in the Cayman Islands, and was paid "guaranteed payments to partner." Sen. Clinton's forms do not list the exact amount of her husband's payments, only that they totaled more than $1,000 over four years.

"No average person has interest and funds in the Cayman Islands. This is all the above-average, non-tax-paying, super rich," said Jack Blum, an attorney and leading expert on offshore tax havens

Matt Janovic's comments on Hillary Gafee on Bosnia

Hillary's Gaffe (which one?) on Bosnia (OK) , by Matt Janovic

"For Ronald Reagan, the world of legend and myth is a real world. He visits it regularly, and he's a happy man there." --Pat Buchanan

The Campaign Trail of Tears--Why is anyone surprised by the fact that Hillary lied about sleeping with Sinbad? You have no idea how funny this is, he's from Benton Harbor, Michigan, a town close to my own home. I know--sex with Sinbad--but it'll at least squelch all those rumors...the kind that are orbiting furiously around Lynne Cheney.

Both Sinbad and Hillary flew to Bosnia, and weren't shot at by Serbian snipers. That part about the snipers was also bullshit. Does that mean she isn't going to fix our health care system and get us out of the Middle East? You think?

She [mis]spoke, for example, of how a welcoming ceremony had to be abandoned as sniper fire forced members of her official party to run for their lives.

"I remember landing under sniper fire," she said.

"There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

"But it was a moment of great pride for me."

Except...

Unfortunately for Senator Clinton plenty of television footage has survived, showing the actual circumstances of her arrival, which were very different. ("Clinton's thrilling tale falls flat," BBC, 03.26.2008)

Someone needs to introduce Mrs. Clinton to that new-fangled invention called the telephone sometime as well. And why not show her around the Army's bases to see the recent innovation of the machine-gun. There are a few analogues to this peculiar assumption that others aren't going to remember since there are things like audio-recorders and videotape and video-cameras, or that someone wasn't going to check the newspaper archives for such bald-ass lies. Oh, I know, it's just because she's a woman (and a liar, that helps tip-the-balance) that she gets these attacks. I don't mean the phantom-Serbian snipers.

These kind of bumbling examples come from the Republican Party's behavior during the 1980s and 1990s. There were the many gaffes of the current president's father--George H.W. Bush--when he challenged journalists to produce recordings of statements he was purported to have made--and to his horror and surprise, they did. Poppy thought the gramophone was still in use. But remember Ronald Reagan? I sure do, and boy was he a funny guy, just not in a "funny ha-ha" way, since it's frightening to intelligent people when the president is an ignorant , bumbling-ass. Yes, I have been very afraid since late-2000. There was that wonderful story that then-President Reagan (nobody voted back then either, so he also creeped-into-office) liked to the tell the press corps and Israeli-leaders how he had helped film concentration camps in Western Europe during WWII.

It was a half-remembered lie by the "Great Rememberer," which he told more than once to reporters. Ronald Regan never served any duty in Europe during WWII. Not in a combat unit, or even a combat film unit as people like Frank Capra, or combat journalists like Ernie Pyle. He made training films in Hollywood while real stars like Jimmy Stewart were serving their country on real battlefields. Feeble-attempts to muddy the waters surrounding the concentration camp story by former Reagan administration luminaries as Charles Hill (Exec. Asst. to Secretary of State George Schultz) have failed, and the fact remains that the president had a way of mixing fact and fantasy. He believed his own lies as most reactionaries do:

Secretary Shultz's version of this story, which suggests that the American press garbled an exchange understood by Prime Minister Shamir to mean that President Reagan had merely seen film of the camps, may be a little wishful. Lou Cannon, White House correspondent for The Washington Post during the Reagan administration, gave, in his 1991 President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, a detailed account of both how the story was originally reported and how the White House recast it. Cannon reports having first run into the story in the February 10, 1984, issue of the weekly newsletter Near East Report... ("'The Lion King': An Exchange," The New York Review of Books, 03.05.1998)

No, Mr. Hill wouldn't be biased in any way, having served in the Reagan White House, not in any respect. He wasn't protecting a legacy in any Maoist-fashion. It wouldn't mean much if it hadn't been the only occasion where the president couldn't distinguish something he saw in a film or a movie from actual reality. He also told a story of a courageous WWII bomber flight over Europe, again-and-again, to numerous audiences and to the press. It was really just a poor rehash of the "Gipper" story, and an early-sign of Reagan's dementia in his first term.

The problem was, the bomber story was just something he saw in a movie from 1944 called "A Wing and a Prayer." While the boys were fighting and dying on the beaches of Normandy, Reagan was watching and making movies in Hollywood on a kind of deferment for his eyesight. But that's how it goes with armchair soldiers claiming that they have some upper-hand, a better "national security" image than their political rivals, and that's exactly what Hillary Rodham Clinton was attempting to project with her lame story of her visit to Bosnia in 1996. It's also part of why she authorized the use of force against Iraq in 2002, but that's for later. At least Reagan had the excuse of senility and a generally atrophying-brain. From Reagan's New York Times obituary in 2004:

His flights of imagination remained equally vivid when he went to the White House. In 1983 he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel that as part of his war duties he had been assigned to film the Nazi death camps. One of his favorite stories, one that he told over and over again to different audiences, concerned a pilot in World War II who told his crew to bail out of their crippled B-17 bomber. When the tail gunner said he could not move because he was badly wounded, the pilot replied, "Never mind son, we'll ride it down together." When he told the story to a meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society he added that the pilot was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. In fact, no medal was ever awarded for such an incident and the story came, almost word for word, from the script of a movie starring Dana Andrews called "Wing and a Prayer." ("Ronald Reagan Dies at 93;Fostered Cold War Might and Curbs on Government," The New York Times, 06.06.2004)

It's hard to tell what the actual effects of Hillary's fabrication are going be. One can only hope that it means the end of her questionable candidacy for president, as she offers no genuine alternative to the lies and corruption of the Bush II White House and the decades preceding it. Clinton was one of the many senators who voted to authorize the use of aggression against Iraq in late-2002. Only one Republican voted against this authorization.

Her behavior is so much like that of her Republican Party peers in the Senate that she's virtually indistinguishable from them. She echoes their agenda in so many areas of her voting behavior and in her public statements that she must be considered an extremist form of that dreaded creature, the arch-conservative. One can only shudder to think what she sounds like in her private conversations. Hillary Clinton has been one of the greatest enablers of the current GOP outside of Joe Lieberman. The Bosnian-gaffe is just one more lie, and a minor one at that.

The BBC on Hillary's Gaffe: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7313885.stm

Ronald Reagan's New York Times Obituary: http://www.python.net/crew/manus/Presidents/rwr/rwrobit.html

Charles Hill vs. Joan Didion, March, 1998: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/916

Impeachment TOOLKIT: Why Impeachment

Why Impeachment?
http://impeachforpeacemarshall.org/mustimpeach.htm

Can't We Just Depend (or wait? after all, it's only 2 more years) On the Political Process?

Consider the following statements by the Democratic leadership:

"I know half your audience wants us to impeach the president…but it's not going to happen."

Howard Dean, November 8, 2006

"…Impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it,"

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) spokesman Brendan Daly
at weekly caucus meeting - Wednesday May 10, 2006

“I have said, and I say again, that impeachment is off the table.”

House Majority Leader In-Waiting Nancy Pelosi
Wednesday November 8, 2006

“So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses. The oversight I have suggested would be performed by a select committee made up equally of Democrats and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader.”

Rep. John Conyers Jr., Thursday, May 18, 2006;
The Washington Post Company

"I think there is an orderly and dignified way to find out what happened… And, if there was a legal violation there needs to be accountability... you can't put the cart before the horse, but I would not rule out any form of accountability.” That would include impeachment, Feingold told reporters.

Rep. Russ Feingold, January 8, 2006; Vermont Guardian

"I'm concerned about the abuses of executive power in the areas of torture and the areas of spying - and about how we're treating individuals in terms of the court systems."

"I don't think that's [impeachment] called for now."

Sen. Ted Kennedy, ABC’s “This Week”, Jan. 2006

Impeachment? "No. While we will vigorously exercise our oversight responsibilities, Democrats are interested in working to improve the lives of middle-class families, not tying up the House in endless investigations."

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Chairman DCCC), Oct. 6, 2006, Chicago Sun Times

“?”

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.NY)

“?”

Sen. Charles Schumer (D.NY)

Then Consider The Following:

The Vice-President:: "I think it [a democratic mid-term election victory] will have some effect, perhaps…but the President has made clear… his objective is…victory in Iraq. And full speed ahead on that basis, and that's exactly what we're going to do. It may not be popular with the public. It doesn't matter, …we have to…do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office…’”

Q: If you're subpoenaed by the Democrats, would you go?

The Vice-President: “…probably not…constitutional officers…don't appear before the Congress.

Vice-President Richard Cheney, ABC News November 5, 2006

"the American people clearly were voting for change” …they "were not voting for anything less than a success in Iraq."

President George W. Bush, quoted by Condoleeza Rice

“Prepare(ing) to bomb Iran should be a top priority for the movement in the next two years…

Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office… We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes."

Joshua Muravchik; American Enterprise Institute Fellow
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Comment:

It is neither my intention, nor my place, to tell you what to think but I believe that all the above information and representative statements demonstrate several things.

First, I think they show the Democrats are unwilling to ‘rock the boat’ to any extent beyond that necessary to achieve electoral victories and push a limited ‘bipartisan’ progressive agenda. To this end, and despite what I perceive as a veritable mountain of evidence of Bush’s & Cheney’s direct responsibility in crimes against the American people and Iraq - the nature and magnitude of which exceed the abuses of any prior administration - they are willing to ‘let bygones be bygones’, wipe their hands of the campaign grime, and get on with the ‘hard job of running the country’. Essentially, giving the Bush Administration’s a free ride for their crimes against the American and Iraqi peoples as they become lost in the ‘day to day’ of running the country. I may be wrong, perhaps their outrage is as deep as mine and is only concealed behind a political mask and their statements of moderation are only ‘politics’ to gain the necessary foothold from which to effect real change…but I doubt it. The recent midterm elections will be proven to not have been a “change in direction” only a change in drivers.

Second, unless Congress moves to impeach Bush and remove his Administration (unlikely at best despite the new Democratic majority - as I noted above), he will have more than two years in which to accomplish his agenda. He has been sufficiently forthcoming about the nature of that agenda that, based on his statements, his prior performance, and reasonable extrapolation one may reasonably believe that, before he leaves office, he intends to:

• Attack Iran, effect “Regime Change” there, and consolidate U.S. hegemony over the oil- & natural gas-rich regions of western-central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikistan which, despite many questionable governments and human rights violations, our government supports and overlooks its stated commitment to ‘spreading Democracy’) and the Mideast (Iraq and Iran). Our huge network of military bases throughout the region (including the Balkans) and the maintenance of our armed forces at ’Cold War’ levels serves no other useful purpose. Would the “new” House & Senate stop him? I don’t know. It is clear, however, that the Democrats do not have a single, unified, view on the issue capable of stopping him if necessary.
• Effect “Regime Change” in North Korea by continuing to deal in bad faith with the dysfunctional government of Kim Jung Il creating (as he did to Iraq and is currently doing with Iran) a ‘case’ for overthrowing that government by military force and against the wishes of the other nations in the region. Again, recent changes in Congress might not be sufficient to prevent him.
• Continue the repressive & regressive agenda of ultra-conservative right-wing Christianity (so-called “Christian Reconstructionism”) in the functions of our government with the further disenfranchisement of women, the denial of their reproductive freedom, and the destruction of the 1^st Amendment “wall” between Church & State begun before the November 2006 elections and which, despite having a simple majority, the Democrats could probably not push corrective legislation past a Presidential veto.
• Defend his attack on the fundamental liberties & rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights from repeal or corrective legislation by use of the Presidential veto.

Of Concern in this respect:

The “Military Commission Act of 2006” (MCA 2006) which:

• Grants unprecedented and unchecked authority to the Executive Branch to label as "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain an overly broad range of people, including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents inside the United States.
• Denies any right to independent judicial review of these detentions (loss of ‘Habeas Corpus‘).
• Eliminates accountability for past violations of the law & the Geneva Conventions.
• Authorizes the President, without accountability, to re-define the protections of the Geneva Conventions and to define what does, and does not, constitute torture.
• Permits the use of evidence obtained through coercion & torture and prevents the accused from knowing that evidence and challenging it…even in death penalty trials.
• Gives the Secretary of Defense authority to deviate from time-tested military justice standards for fair trials…at his whim, and without accountability.
• Creates crimes of “conspiracy” and “providing material support for terrorism”, the definitions of which are deliberately vague and may even include giving or reading this website!

The 2007 Defense Appropriations Bill which:

• On June 22, 2006, modified the Insurrection Act. As part of the 2007 Defense Appropriations Bill Section 1076 of the new law changes Sec. 333 of the "Insurrection Act," and widens the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States to enforce the laws. Under this act, the President may also deploy troops as a police force during a natural disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or other condition, when the President determines that the authorities of the state are incapable of maintaining public order.
• The bill also modified Sec. 334 of the Insurrection Act, giving the President authority to order the dispersal of either insurgents or "those obstructing the enforcement of the laws."
• The new law changed the name of the chapter from "Insurrection" to "Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order."

“It also should concern us all that the Conference agreement includes language that subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law.“

Sen. Patrick Leahy, Conference Report, Congressional Record, September 29, 2006

He will continue to ignore, and obstruct responding to, the only current threat to the ongoing survival of human society as we’ve known it - Global Warming - while continuing to reward fossil fuel energy mega-corporations with more ‘corporate welfare’ and an undeserved, excessive, voice in the energy affairs management of our nation and the world.

Continue to violate Federal law and our Constitutional rights through illegal surveillance by obstructing corrective legislation by use of the Presidential veto.

While the new Democratic majority may provide a new direction on some issues (Alternative Energy, Congressional Oversight, Global Warming, and Corporate Welfare as examples) there is no reason to believe they - as a Party - understand the inherent criminality of the American invasion of Iraq and the need to reverse it as quickly as humanly possible, that they understand that America is not the center of the Earth and that our national priorities must take a place in line the those of other nations - particularly where another nation’s natural resources are of interest, that our nationalistic foreign policy is - in large part - the root cause of the world’s antipathy toward us, or that they are any more willing to address the fundamental realignment of our national resources needed to meet the only true existential threat to mankind’s current civilization - Global Warming.

Third I believe that the Bush Administration is guilty of crimes that disqualify them from continuing to serve in office, disqualify them from representing our country to the world, and that failing to address those crimes makes those who ignore them complicit in them. I believe the allies were right to remove the Nazis from public office and punish them after WWII, that leaders of the Khmer Rouge were brought to trial in Cambodia for the mass murder of their own countrymen in furtherance of justice, that the International Criminal Court was right to try Slobodan Miloševic and other Serbian & Croatian human rights abusers for the genocidal murder of ethnic Albanians & Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, that Spain’s indictment of the past leaders of Guatemala’s government for the attempted genocide of the Mayan people is just, that South Africa’s ‘Truth & Reconciliation Commissions’ addressing the facts of the Apartheid were a good and healing thing, that the prosecution of leaders of the Hutu extremists who committed the Rwandan Genocide who have been tried and convicted in ICC-led courts was just, and that Chile’s revocation of Augusto Pinochet’s immunity for the crimes he committed as their leader 25 years ago is also just and that Saddam Hussain deserves to be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the remainder of the Bush Administration may be guilty of similar crimes against Iraq and, if so, they should not be allowed to lead or represent our nation - the issue of their prosecution and punishment for their crimes aside.

In order secure justice for those harmed, to prevent ongoing violations, and who knows what else more there seems, to me, only one immediate recourse: Impeachment of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.

To delay is to invite disaster and delays justice and accountability.

IMPEACH! ...because they lied.

Click here to download a copy of my "Impeachment Handbill"

Please feel free to print it and copy it to hand out to your friends & other contacts. It is conveniently formatted for two-sided copying to get two handbills from each page.

Tee Shirt Detail (click on image to order one):

To View the "It's Worse Than You Think" teach-in conducted by
"The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime" on Oct. 30, 2006 Click here.

Enjoy the Dixie Chicks' "I'm Not Ready To Make Nice"
...neither am I!

From a comment on the digg site regarding Peter MacKay ..

"The Gentlemen who recorded this stream of lies coming from Mr. MacKay's mouth should be held in the highest esteem by those of us who have Minds, Eyes and Ears open instead of our hands and mouths. I applaud both the interviewer and the camera man for their fine work and balls to get right out there and get down to the truth... oh as for the whole "Private Family BBQ".... it was a Conservative Party 'Meet and Greet' open to party members and THE GENERAL PUBLIC. Even on a small scale he's a lying sack of meat."

The comments calling Canadian politician$, crook$ and liar$ is now in full swing.