Impeach and Convict Bush and Cheney for High Treason

It is an extraordinary subversion of the [US] Constitution to send people to die...on the basis of a lie.

- Elizabeth Holtzman, Rep., NY

I can't improve on that. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the gang subverted the Constitution to carry out a war of naked aggression, itself a war crime, and, under US Criminal Codes punishable by death. But it's worse than that. It is an aggravated crime as Rep Elizabeth Holtzman makes abundantly clear.

This is a case of high treason. Treason is defined as a betrayal of one's sovereign. In time's past "sovereignty" was most often embodied in a person, a monarch, a king or queen. Louis XIV summed up the very concept succinctly: L’État, c’est moi! The various plotters against the life of Elizabeth I were accused of treason.

But what of a democratic, constitutional Democracy. In the US sovereignty resides with the people themselves, a principle established up front by the founders:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

-Preamble, US Constitution

Bush and Cheney have betrayed their "sovereign" by hoaxing the sovereign, lying to the sovereign, and, at last, betraying the sovereign by leading US troops into harm's way upon a pack of malicious lies. Lies known by Bush and Cheney to have been lies at the time the lies were told. In Elizabethan times, that would have gotten your head cut off.

The Impeachment of George W. Bush

Elizabeth Holtzman

Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.

I can still remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach during those proceedings, when it became clear that the President had so systematically abused the powers of the presidency and so threatened the rule of law that he had to be removed from office.<

As a Democrat who opposed many of President Nixon's policies, I still found voting for his impeachment to be one of the most sobering and unpleasant tasks I ever had to undertake. None of the members of the committee took pleasure in voting for impeachment; after all, Democrat or Republican, Nixon was still our President.<

At the time, I hoped that our committee's work would send a strong signal to future Presidents that they had to obey the rule of law. I was wrong.

And, again, about a year later:

Impeachment: The Case in Favor

Elizabeth Holtzman

Approximately a year ago, I wrote in this magazine that President George W. Bush had committed high crimes and misdemeanors and should be impeached and removed from office. His impeachable offenses include using lies and deceptions to drive the country into war in Iraq, deliberately and repeatedly violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on wiretapping in the United States, and facilitating the mistreatment of US detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act of 1996.

Since then, the case against President Bush has, if anything, been strengthened by reports that he personally authorized CIA abuse of detainees. In addition, courts have rejected some of his extreme assertions of executive power. The Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees, and a federal judge ruled that the President could not legally ignore FISA. Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's recent announcement that the wiretapping program would from now on operate under FISA court supervision strongly suggests that Bush's prior claims that it could not were untrue.<

Despite scant attention from the mainstream media, since last year impeachment has won a wide audience. Amid a flurry of blogs, books and articles, a national grassroots movement has sprung up. In early December seventy-five pro-impeachment rallies were held around the country and pro-impeachment efforts are planned for Congressional districts across America. A Newsweek poll, conducted just before election day, showed 51 percent of Americans believed that impeachment of President Bush should be either a high or lower priority; 44 percent opposed it entirely. (Compare these results with the 63 percent of the public who in the fall of 1998 opposed President Clinton's impeachment.) Most Americans understand the gravity of President Bush's constitutional misconduct. <

Public anger at Bush has been mounting. On November 7 voters swept away Republican control of the House and Senate. The President's poll numbers continue to drop.

These facts should signal a propitious moment for impeachment proceedings to start. Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken impeachment "off the table." (Impeachment proceedings must commence in the House of Representatives.) Her position doesn't mean impeachment is dead; it simply means a different route to it has to be pursued. Congressional investigations must start, and public pressure must build to make the House act.

This is no different from what took place during Watergate. In 1973 impeachment was not "on the table" for many months while President Nixon's cover-up unraveled, even though Democrats controlled the House and Senate. But when Nixon fired the special prosecutor to avoid making his White House tapes public, the American people were outraged and put impeachment on the table, demanding that Congress act. That can happen again.

Congressional and other investigations that previously found serious misconduct in the Nixon White House made the public's angry reaction to the firing of the special prosecutor--and the House response with impeachment proceedings--virtually inevitable. Early in 1973, once it appeared that the cover-up might involve the White House, the Senate created a select committee to investigate. The committee held hearings and uncovered critical evidence, including the existence of a White House taping system that could resolve the issue of presidential complicity. The Senate also forced the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Other committees looked into related matters. None of the investigations were prompted by the idea of impeachment. Still, they laid the groundwork for it--and the evidence they turned up was used by the House impeachment panel to prepare articles of impeachment against Nixon.

The same approach can govern now. Senate and House committees must commence serious investigations that could uncover more evidence to support impeachment. The investigations should ascertain the full extent of the President's deceptions, exaggerations and lies that drove us into the Iraq War. (They can simply in effect resurrect Republican Senator Howard Baker's famous questions about Richard Nixon: "What did the President know and when did he know it?") Congress should also explore the wiretapping that has violated the FISA law, the President's role in mistreatment of detainees and his gross indifference to the catastrophe facing the residents of New Orleans from Katrina.

Investigations should also be conducted into Vice President Cheney's meetings with oil company executives at the outset of the Administration. If divvying up oil contracts in Iraq were discussed, as some suggest, this would help prove that the Iraq War had been contemplated well before 9/11, and that a key motivation was oil. Inquiries into Halliburton's multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts should also be conducted, particularly given Cheney's ties to the company.

White House documents about Katrina that have not already been turned over to Congress should be sought to document further the President's failure to discharge his constitutional duty to help the people of New Orleans.

Our country's Founders provided the power of impeachment to prevent the subversion of the Constitution. President Bush has subverted and defied the Constitution in many ways. His defiance and his subversion continue.

Failure to impeach Bush would condone his actions. It would allow him to assume he can simply continue to violate the laws on wiretapping and torture and violate other laws as well without fear of punishment. He could keep the Iraq War going or expand it even further than he just has on the basis of more lies, deceptions and exaggerations. Remember, as recently as October 26, Bush said, "Absolutely, we are winning" the war in Iraq--a blatant falsehood. Worse still, if Congress fails to act, Bush might be emboldened to believe he may start another war, perhaps against Iran, again on the basis of lies, deceptions and exaggerations.

There is no remedy short of impeachment to protect us from this President, whose ability to cause damage in the next two years is enormous. If we do not act against Bush, we send a terrible message of impunity to him and to future Presidents and mark a clear path to despotism and tyranny. Succeeding generations of Americans will never forgive us for lacking the nerve to protect our democracy.

In some ways, the word treason is overworked. It almost fails to convey the magnitude of the heinous crimes that the US government has perpetrated upon the people of the US. Revolution is long overdue.

Additional resources:

• The “Cloud” over Dick Cheney Just Got Darker!
• Prince Bandar and 9-11
• Uncivil Liberties and the Empire's War on it's Citizens

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Like GWB, Adolf Hitler was in the death business

One of the greatest disasters to befall humankind was triggered by a state crime perpetrated by Adolf Hitler. That crime was The Reichstag Fire. [See: excerpts from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer ] It led inexorably to the Holocaust, a crime of unimaginable proportions.

In Houston, I spoke with Holocaust survivor Siegi Izakson....

Given what Hitler himself had written in Mein Kampf, it is easy enough to conclude that Hitler's desire to cleanse the "Fatherland" was motive enough to pull off a Reichstag Fire, an act of "terrorism" which Hitler exploited as shamelessly as Bush has exploited 911.

The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known. Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends.

From Goring's Reichstag President's Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.

The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goring. Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg that "it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire," and Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that "Goring knew exactly how the fire was to be started" and had ordered him "to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it." General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Goring had boasted of his deed.

--William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.

- George Santayana, American Philosopher

Sadly, however, we always forget the past. We are in need of constant reminders, especially the corporate origins of fascism and Nazism.

If you have trouble connecting the dots from Hitler's corporate base to the Nazi state to the Final Solution, a reminder: big companies --I.G Farben (manufactuers of Zyklon B), Thyssen, Krupp --all made fortunes at every step of the way. Like Bush today, Hitler was in the death business.

The Wannsee Conference was held on 20 January 1942, in a villa owned by the SS-Nordhav Foundation in the attractive Berlin lakeside suburb of Wannsee. It was presided over by SS-Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service. Heydrich summoned fourteen men representing the governmental and military branches most involved in implementing the practical aspects of the Final Solution. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had charged him with arranging all practical matters concerning the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question.1 Heydrich was an ambitious and meticulous officer who relished the responsibility of power. One of Heydrich's foremost intentions was to make sure that all these men understood perfectly what duties and responsibilities their office was expected to fulfill.

In the years leading up to World War II, the phrase "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" had taken on a series of increasingly ominous meanings in the Nazi vocabulary.2 The various implications had included voluntary emigration, confinement to ghettos in cities located along rail lines, forced removal to concentration camps, and finally, extermination. Heydrich wanted to be certain there was no confusion among the group that, now, the term referred specifically to the murder of all European Jews.

Heydrich's assistant, SS Lt-Colonel Adolf Eichmann tells us in testimony at his trial in 1961, that the meeting was relatively brief, lasting only an hour to an hour and a half, and that the atmosphere of the meeting was one of cooperation and agreement.3 These high-ranking members of the Nazi government met at mid-day over a buffet luncheon to discuss the annihilation of an entire people.

The Wannsee Conference

A flash forward to the present day proves that despite Santayana's admonition, we have forgotten the past and we are doomed to repeat it.

We will export death and destruction to the four corners of the earth!

--George W. Bush

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Bush's Sorry "Skull and Bones" Legacy of Torture and Psycho-sexual Perversity

A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison says Rumsfeld and other Pentagon honchos lied. Imagine that! Of course, they lied! When have they ever told the truth?

US defense chiefs denied knowledge of Abu Ghraib abuse

NEW YORK (AFP) - A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison said in a report out Saturday that top Pentagon officials denied knowledge of lurid photographs of the acts.

Army Major General Antonio Taguba said he met with then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials and described to them some of the contents of a report he had prepared on the notorious prison.

But Rumsfeld testified before Congress the following day that he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Taguba told the New Yorker magazine in an interview.

"He's trying to acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves," the magazine quoted him as saying, referring to Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony.

The photographs taken by US jailers humiliating prisoners who were naked or hooded, on leashes or piled in a pyramid, rocked the world, becoming one of the few things President George W. Bush has said he regretted about the war".

[A tip of the hat to Buzzflash]

It is an indication of his guilt that when Bush says "we don't torture" he has tried to make it legal after the fact. Nevermind the logical contradictions, Bush does not do nuance. The US has carried out a program of official torture at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and throughout the "secret" Eastern European archipelago.

Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos. They're looking for a way to justify torture.

-Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert

It has never made sense to commit war crimes under the cover of "truth, justice and the American way". Under Bush, the American way, the American ideal no longer exists. Bush, his "bone" head buddies and his gang of NEOCONS are subversive, actively seeking even now to undermine the US Constitution. Many of their efforts have been illegal. The US has at least one honest journalist --Seymour Hersh --who states bluntly: "We have been taken over by a cult!"

The "President"himself is a liar, a fraud, a pervert, and a mass murderer. There is about this President a perverse and immoral stench.

It's hard to tell just how long Bush has been holding himself and his henchmen above the law. Most of those efforts involve this vast program of torture. In the year 2004, the Bush gang were at work trying to convince the nation's highest court that Bush was above the law, specifically, he could not be prosecuted for war crimes. As all other American Presidents have been so constrained, I could never figure out why Bush would want to be absolved by a law sponsored by Tom DeLay in the House of Representative. If he had not been planning to break existing laws, why would he seek absolution before the fact? Clearly --George W. Bush had planned in advance to commit war crimes and other atrocities. In other cases, Bush sought absolution ex post facto. His public denials, meanwhile, are bald-faced lies and for those alone he should be impeached and removed. Innocent folk don't have to issue decrees absolving themselves of crimes.

At the SCOTUS hearing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mused:

Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture we think will help get this information.' ... Some systems do that to get information."

The answer from government lawyer, Paul Clement, was a disingenuous eye opener. Declaring that Bush would not torture, he insisted that the US would stand by its international commitments. In other words, "we" will not torture but we sure would like to have the right to do so. It had been over a year that Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers crafted, nay, conspired to get around the law, international prohibitions against torture. They have conspired with Bush to put Bush above the law.

Section 2441. War crimes

(a) Offense. - Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

- US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441

It was most certainly all Bush's idea to begin with. Sycophantic simps and other bureaucratic kiss-ups have been scrambling since to keep Bush's sorry ass off death row for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.

Consider the chilling implications of this smirking statement to the Congress from his State of the Union Address of 2003.

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. (Applause.)

--George W. Bush, President Delivers "State of the Union", 2003

Was Bush referring to his campaign of torture at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, Eastern Europe? Or was he referring to his having sanctioned murder? Or both? Since that speech, Bush has sought ways to cover his ass, to make legal crimes he's already committed.

There are indications however that if the case should ever make it to the high court, Bush will lose and badly:

Although the abuses at Abu Ghraib have not come before the Supreme Court and might never come before it, [Justice] Stevens was hinting that he and his fellow justices should not be — and weren’t — ignorant of the events at the now-infamous prison.

The government has argued that Padilla is an al Qaeda soldier. In his June 9, 2002, statement justifying Padilla’s detention, Bush said he “represents a continuing, present and grave danger to the national security of the United States,” such that his military detention “is necessary to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States.” A soldier or a subversive?

But Stevens took a quite different view: He used the term “subversive” to describe Padilla, almost implying he is akin to a political dissident or revolutionary.

Long-term detention of American citizens such as Padilla, Stevens said, cannot be justified “by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence.”

Is Stevens correct in calling Padilla’s two years of being held in the Charleston, S.C., Navy brig a form of torture?

--Rulings hint at Abu Ghraib. Possibility of torture seems to weigh on some justices, Tom Curry -National affairs writer, MSNBC

Bush’s war on terrorism is a crime against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and a hoax upon the people of the United States. Because of Bush’s war on terrorism, America, a net debtor nation thanks to Ronald Reagan and the GOP, has, at last, found some exports: brutality, perversity and torture.

If there is any good news to be found in this slimy residue it is this: a revolt against Bush may be brewing inside the CIA. Many are said to live in fear of indictments and subpoenas. What’s called “Wehrmacht group” have leaked sordid details about how the Bush administration conducted torture and perversion at Abu Ghraib and how Bush deliberately tried to skirt US and international laws with a program of “rendition”, that is, flying victims to other countries for the purpose of skirting the law and fooling the US and international public.

Racking someone is bad enough but torture American-style seems especially abhorrent and sexually perverse. In US torture will be found Satanism, and various degrees of psycho-sexual morbidness that defies description and digestion. For example, Seymour Hersh says that the US has video tapes of children being raped, sodomized and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Seymour Hersh: Children Raped at Abu Ghraib

Reprehensible images to be found among unreleased photographs include images of rape, torture, mutilated animals, circles of candles, swastikas, and sexual activity among the torturers themselves, often in front of the detainees.

There’s much, much more. From Salon's exclusive:

"A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts."

It’s hard to believe that the entire torture program is anything other than an excuse by perverts to indulge in psycho-sexual and/or satanic rituals that might be more at home inside the walls of the Skull and Bones or the Nazi SS than in a legitimate program to elicit useful information in a “war on terrorism”. In fact, the “war on terrorism” itself is premised upon lies and propaganda, nothing but an excuse to indulge satanic perversity not seen since the Holocaust. As one blogger put it: “…it's right out of a dark occultist's playbook.” Indeed, it is.

Who but a Bonesman could be its chief architect? Who but the man who set records for executions in Texas could create its policies? Who but the man who ridiculed death row inmates would defend the perverted rationale of torture? Who but someone who got his jollies blowing up horned toads in West Texas could defend it, encourage it, and, at the same time, deny it and cover it up?

This program of torture creates terrorism where none had existed before. The US campaign of terrorism is sure to inspire another generation of terrorists. Yet, the Bush administration’s defense and active cover up of these atrocities bespeaks its complicity in heinous crimes against humanity. The only rational explanation is this: Bush needs new enemies to justify a permanent occupation.

Meanwhile, a report on US interrogation tactics entitled “Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” challenges the various rationalizations cited inexplicably in defense of an act that had been denied by Bushies. Why defend an act that had not occurred? Scott Horton, a human rights activist has since cited various “torture memoranda” to disprove Rumsfeld's position that Abu Ghraib was but the work of a few “bad apples”. The reports by Seymour Hersh are consistent with Horton’s work; they tend to support the conclusion that Abu Ghraib is but one “island” in the American gulag archipelago. Torture is Bush’s policy and it will be his sorry legacy, a cancer on the American body politic, an indictment of the national morality, a final chapter in what Theodore Dreiser called "Tragic America".

When it all comes crashing down, Bush will defy the Supreme Court of the United States in a critical case, a divisive case brought about by the reckless and incompetent leadership of brinkmanship played out with innocent American and Iraqi lives.

It is the duty of those Americans, true patriots still loyal to the Constitution, to make sure Bush loses and loses decisively.

The future of the US absolutely depends upon the utter and ignominious defeat of this subversive, perverted cultist, this sociopath for whom nothing we hold dear is sacred.

This is a dangerous game on which Bush is willing to wager the farm that his weak-kneed opposition will buckle! A recent Democratic concession on war funding is not a good omen.

The stakes are too high and when the Constitution itself is at stake, there is no center to triangulate. Bush likes absolutes. Here is one he most certainly understands: if Bush wins, the people of the US lose. America will no longer have the legal recourse of removal; impeachment will be a dead issue. If impeached, Bush will not go willingly into that good night. There will be no jaunty salutes from a helicopter. There will be no teary farewells. I don't like to think about the worst case scenario except to say that Bush must, for the sake of legitimate government and the Constitution, lose!

Having subverted every protection afforded the people by our founders, Bush and company will have left us no choice but slavery under a dictatorship or a popular uprising and revolution. It's his modus operandi.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Nixon was called an “imperial President”. Interestingly, the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon were concerned with his obstruction of justice in connection with the Watergate Scandal and various abuses of agencies to include the CIA and the IRS. Bush makes Nixon look like a boy scout.

When the final us v them showdown occurs, I wonder: will the Congress support the restoration of the US Constitution, American Democracy, Due Process of Law?

Additional resources:

• A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
• Les Enrages: Pardon Everyone
• The Criminal Indictment Against George W. Bush
• Impeachment Resolution
• Efforts to initiate the impeachment of President George W. Bush
• Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush
• Charges and Evidence
• Tokyo War Crimes indictment against George W. Bush

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