George W. Bush: The case for impeachment
By: Robert Zaller
thetriangle.org
Issue date: 1/20/06 Section: Ed-Op
I thought Bill Clinton was the worst president I'd seen in office until George W. Bush came along. I was appalled when Clinton muffed the best opportunity in sixty years to reform our health care system by handing the job to his wife and even more amazed at the stupidity of providing himself no political distance from the inevitable debacle. I was disgusted with his betrayal of the working and nonworking poor by the passage of NAFTA and so-called welfare reform and at his extension of the death penalty and his weakening of habeas corpus rights for the condemned. I thought his bombing campaign against Serbia was a war crime. I believed he deserved impeachment, not for his sexual behavior, but for abusing the trust of his office in lying about it for eight months. In retrospect, it would have been an immense boon for the country had he been removed by the Senate. Then Al Gore would have become president with two years to establish a record of his own, and we might well have been spared the nightmare of the present administration.
If Clinton deserved impeaching, Bush needs it. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in two hundred years, and the future of the republic, degraded as it has already been by the runaway presidencies of his predecessors, may well be in the balance. I don't suggest impeachment lightly, and I don't suggest it on the basis of my disagreement with many, though not all, of Bush's policies. If the American people want to vote for bad air, polluted rivers, destruction of the biosphere and global warming, that is their democratic right. If they want corporate lobbyists to write their energy, health and safety laws, ditto. The remedy for policies you don't agree with is the next election, laying to one side the high probability that Bush was not elected but appointed president in the first place.
Why, then, does Bush require impeachment? I offer the following four articles for the consideration of the Congress:
(1) He has recklessly endangered the armed forces of the United States and violated international laws, treaties and conventions to which the United States is a signatory. We now know as fact what common sense told us three years ago, that Saddam Hussein, already denied effective control of two-thirds of his country by aerial surveillance and bombing, was no menace to the United States or any other nation and that no military intervention was necessary to contain him. Bush and his cohorts drummed up the fiction of a bristling arsenal of WMDs to justify an attack planned from the earliest days of his administration. It is very likely that Bush knew full well that he was selling a lie. In an account never challenged by the administration, he is described in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack as expressing skepticism when briefed by former CIA Director George Tenet in Dec. 2002 on Saddam's reputed arsenal. Bush is quoted as responding to Tenet with an "Is that all you've got?" at a time when he and his advisors were assuring the country that the arsenal, including an advanced nuclear program, was fully documented. The episode was an obviously Nixonian moment, on par with Nixon saying that "it would be wrong" to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars for the benefit of his secret taping system. When Tenet replied that it would be "a slam dunk" to deliver all the evidence Bush needed, he was setting himself up as the fall guy. (He need not have worried; he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead.)
At the very least, then, President Bush knew his assertions to the country about the threat posed by Saddam were on shaky ground. It was presumably on the basis of Tenet's slam-dunk evidence that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented maps identifying 600 weapons sites to the United Nations a few weeks later, none of which in fact existed. The president of the United States has a duty to be fully truthful and conscientious when committing its armed forces to battle; it is certain that President Bush was not.
More than 2,200 American servicemen and women have now died in Iraq; 20,000 have sustained casualties. They were sent to a place where they should never have been to fight a war that lacked all justification.
In addition, the United States under President Bush has breached the United Nations Charter in waging war in defiance of the international community, deliberately misrepresenting the terms of U.N. Resolution 1441 in doing so, and ignoring the reports of the United Nations' own weapons inspectors in Iraq. Bush further violated the Geneva Conventions on warfare and the treatment of prisoners, as well as federal law and U.S. military regulations on these subjects. His actions, which are ongoing, have brought deep dishonor to the United States and reckless assertions of presidential authority to set aside Acts of Congress and international commitments at will.
(2) The president has obstructed justice. One of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was that he had obstructed justice in the investigation of the Watergate break-in and burglary. President Bush has in all likelihood similarly obstructed justice in the federal investigation concerning the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent in July 2003 as an act of retribution against her husband, who had revealed the falsity of the administration's claims about Saddam's efforts to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. The leak of Plame's identity, which put her and other agents at risk, is a violation of federal law. A Justice Department investigation of the matter has now been ongoing for more than two years. Robert Novak, the columnist who revealed her identity, has now asserted that the president has known the leak's name all along. The White House has not disputed this claim. If substantiated, it would convict Bush of obstruction of justice and require his removal from office. (One would also like to know whether, in addition to having criminally complicit knowledge, Bush authorized the leak himself.)
(3) The president has illegally imprisoned and permitted torture of American citizens. John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban seized in Afghanistan, was confined in a cage with serious wounds untreated after his capture. His abuse and humiliation were publicly displayed. No one was held responsible for these actions. Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, both American citizens, were taken into secret military custody, interrogated in violation of their constitutional rights and held incommunicado for years without charge and for a long period, without access to counsel. Hamdi was deported without trial to Saudi Arabia. Padilla remains in custody. After being subjected to a succession of defamatory accusations by the government, he has finally been charged with lesser offenses and remanded to federal court, a move undertaken by the administration only in an attempt to preclude a hearing of his case by the U.S. Supreme Court. These displays of open contempt for the judicial process and the protections of habeas corpus put the rights of every American in jeopardy.
(4) The president has conducted illegal surveillance of Americans in violation of the Constitution and of federal statute and has claimed extraordinary powers to ignore statutory requirements at discretion, thus violating his oath to faithfully execute the laws. It is this last proposed article that most clearly signifies America's constitutional crisis. As the New York Times has disclosed in a story that might have tipped the balance of the 2004 presidential election but for the de facto censorship that concealed it for more than a year, the National Security Agency, which recently placed a recruitment ad in The Triangle, has been conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for the past four years under direct presidential order. FISA itself provided the mere fig leaf of a secret court to authorize wiretaps; of more than 19,000 requested of it, only five were rejected. As if this were not leeway enough, the Act further provided that, in case of emergency, the NSA could initiate taps without approval, provided only that the court was notified within 72 hours.
Even this, however, was too rigorous a standard for the Bush administration, which claimed that modern communications technology had made court oversight of any kind unduly burdensome. The remedy for this, of course, was to seek new law, but instead Bush and his lawyers simply decided to "interpret" FISA's intent in such a way as to negate its practical application. Since FISA was no ordinary Act, but one that created a new federal court, this meant that Bush had nullified a statute and a judicial body at one stroke, thus leaving him as the sole judge of the laws and of his own conduct. The common name for a political system in which the legislative and judicial branches of government have been subordinated to the will of the executive branch is dictatorship. It is precisely the system that Bush is attempting to create. The only proper response to this is impeachment.
What applies to Bush applies a fortiori to Vice President Cheney, whose own former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has already been indicted in the Plame case. I am not sure whether the country is ready for a President Dennis Hastert or whether Speaker Hastert himself will survive the Abramoff lobbying scandal now about to engulf Washington. Somewhere in the line of constitutional succession, however, it is to be hoped that an honest man can be found. When England's Parliament passed an act in 1641 calling upon King Charles I to call it into session at no more than three-year intervals, it provided for the King's failure to do so by empowering a series of lesser officials down to the level of local magistrates to summon it. Right now, any dogcatcher in the nation would have to be regarded as a successor preferable to George W. Bush.
___________________________________________________
Robert Zaller is a professor of history and can be reached through ed-op@thetriangle.org. |
