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David Rozelle: Bush should be impeached
By Dave Rozelle
March 1, 2004
The president of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Article II, Section 4, the U.S. Constitution
George W. Bush may well be voted out of office in November. That is as it should be. He deserves defeat. But defeat alone is not enough. Justice will be cheated if this president is expelled with only election-night headlines ringing in his ears.
The time has come for us to at least speak the I word out loud: Impeachment. The charges? One accusation dwarfs all others - the highest of the Constitution's "high crimes." It speaks for those human beings, both American and Arab, who would not have died by military violence had this nation not been consciously deceived into war by its chief executive. No crime by a president could rank more rankly. "An immoral war was thus waged," as Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it in a speech in England last week.
George W. Bush lied about the reasons for our instigating war in Iraq. Others may quibble about lied. But to twist, distort, exaggerate, shape, misrepresent, or even "spin" a fact that is not a fact, and which causes the death of even a single person, is the moral equivalent of a monstrous falsehood. The United States has fomented hell on earth in Iraq for premeditated reasons we have too late discovered were made out of sand.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. No biological-chemical agents or factories. No Iraqi ties to al-Qaida or to 9/11. No "imminent threat" of attack by Iraq. In other words, there was no cause for war.
What there was, from this president's first day in office, was a determination to invade Iraq. "It was all about finding a way to do it," asserts Paul O'Neill, Bush's ex-treasury secretary in the recently published "The Price of Loyalty" by Ron Suskind. The administration, according to O'Neill, seized Sept. 11, 2001, as the pretext it had been looking for to wage war on Iraq.
Granted, impeachment may be unlikely but that is not a reason not to demand it. If William Clinton could be tried by the Congress of the United States for lying about a tryst in the Oval Office, then surely George W. Bush should be brought before the same body, under the Constitution, to answer for a deliberate deceit - or even distortion - that has already cost the lives of more than 540 American citizen soldiers and an estimated 10,000 Iraqi innocents (including women, children and the elderly) and maimed far more.
Oh, the president has, under election-year pressure, ordered (and staffed) a commission to look into pre-war intelligence. But the commission's charge is to judge the quality of the intelligence, not to conclude if, in the president's hands, the same intelligence had been twisted or even created out of whole cloth. Meanwhile, neoconservatives such as Richard Perle are scapegoating the CIA, as if Bush's inner sanctum were "shocked, shocked" to be accused of inventing or manipulating the data they had used post-9/11 to stampede the Congress, the media and this country into war.
Sure, the chances of impeachment are slim during a time when the Constitution's balance of powers is dangerously unbalanced. This partisan Republican Congress will never rise above itself to call to task the executive branch for spilling the blood of our citizenry through promulgating falsehood. And even if it did, this partisan Supreme Court would quash any conviction on appeal.
Nevertheless, we, as citizens, are, as of this moment, still free enough to shout the word impeachment at the gates to the White House. The founding fathers did not intend that the application of constitutional principles be expropriated by the party in power. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States belong to its citizenry. "High crimes" are high crimes. And the buck still stops at the president's desk, along with Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.
David Rozelle lives near Spring Green. E-mail: rozelle@mhtc.net.
Published: 6:17 AM 3/01/04 |
