"On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.)
introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it
to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent
to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of
pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture,
retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding
grounds for possible impeachment."
"...what did he hope to prove or to gain?"
"To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two
or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were
you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush
Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the
license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present
can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it
escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a
supreme leader exempt from the rule of law."
One HUGE problem with impeaching CICBush43: Dead-Eye-Dick Cheney...
David Bier
The Case for Impeachment
Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush
Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006.
An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis
H. Lapham.
A country is not only what it doesit is also what it puts up
with, what it tolerates. Kurt Tucholsky
On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.)
introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it
to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent
to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of
pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture,
retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding
grounds for possible impeachment." Although buttressed two days
previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal
surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little
or no attention in the pressnothing on television or in the major
papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy
sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The
nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the
congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In
time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to
impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as
the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on
Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers
presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to
take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of
subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and
rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the
prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of
symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove
or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone
from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.
"To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two
or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were
you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush
Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the
license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present
can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it
escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a
supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.
A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account
for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of
supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after
next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the
President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him
nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow
Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes,
their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man
home to Texas. Conyers said:
"I don't think enough people know how much damage this
administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time.
What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes?
Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be
done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the
story that ought to be front-page news."
Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635not a
high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182
pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six
months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush
Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime
against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on
evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of
credible witnessesgovernment officials both extant and former,
journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and
foreignthe authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud,
the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth,
secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same
time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from
the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the
report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its
inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords
of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be
seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of
the absurd. Entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street
Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and
Coverups in the Iraq War," the Conyers report examines the
administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be
explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the
administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in
a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.
* * *
That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of
invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of
himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about
seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to
"kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a
cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial
conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council
on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the
possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the
Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil
Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of
interest to various European governments and American corporations.
Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke
still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld
tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info
fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will
justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House
basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and
counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if
Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the
White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime
minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we
must come back to Iraq."
By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in
Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs
of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush
isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security
Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, "What have you got in
terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep
it secret."
The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq
until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of
Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, "Fuck Saddam.
We're taking him out." At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same
month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the
assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United
States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice
president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is
a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has
reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11
attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons
of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the
regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not
to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more
than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the
conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no
credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al
Qaeda or international terrorism; "even the best survey of WMD
programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear,
missile and CW/BW weapons fronts..." A series of notes and memoranda
passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London
and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of
2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly
desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of
Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing "the
intelligence and the facts...around the policy." The American
enthusiasm for regime change, "undimmed" in the mind of Condoleezza
Rice, presents complications.
Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that
Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs
"legal justification" for the maneuversomething noble and inspiring
to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification
"currently exists." Neither Britain nor the United States is being
attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is
the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which
leaves as the only option the "wrong-footing" of Saddam. If under the
auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum
requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist,
his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact,
possess such weapons.[5]
Over the next few months, while the British government continues to
look for ways to "wrong-foot" Saddam and suborn the U.N., various
operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend
to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi
informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous
weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of
unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]
By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in
its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to
come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq
Group hits upon the phrase "mushroom cloud" and prepares a White Paper
describing the "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's nuclear
arsenal.[7] The objective is three-foldto magnify the fear of Saddam
Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the
American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the
country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled
patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional
elections.[8]
* * *
The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the
administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the
last three yearsmisuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva
Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture
individuals arbitrarily designated as "enemy combatants," etc.but
conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the
President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have
expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was
either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why
we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in
the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and
reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks
to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who
engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the
world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's
wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply
the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminalknown to be armed and
shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the
courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for
having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle.
Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he
get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?
* * *
The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the
March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Notes
1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a
matter of public recordnewspaper accounts, television broadcasts
(Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.),
magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review
of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of
Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George
Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh,
David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph
Wilson. As the congressman had said, "Everything in plain sight; it
isn't as if we don't know." [Back]
2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The
Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding
members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding "the
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" with a strong-minded
"willingness to undertake military action." Together with Rumsfeld,
six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's
first administrationElliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy
national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of
state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the
U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001
to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to
2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President
Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act,
for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine
operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September
2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document
noting that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification" for the presence of the substantial American force in
the Persian Gulf. [Back]
3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in
the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury,
remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: "From the very
beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person
and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it."
[Back]
4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense
for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the
September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting
terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or
perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]
5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as "The
Downing Street Minutes," were published in the Sunday Times (London)
in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British
government. [Back]
6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon,
and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a
well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to
a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department
officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear
proliferation, said, "The American public was seriously misled. The
Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way
that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq
threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in
a democracy than a President distorting critical classified
information." [Back]
7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political
strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's
chief of staff. [Back]
8. Card later told the New York Times that "from a marketing point of
view...you don't introduce new products in August." [Back]
This is The Case for Impeachment by Lewis H. Lapham, published Monday,
February 27, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
Written By
Lapham, Lewis H.
Permanent URL
http://harpers.org/TheCaseForImpeachment.html
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