Bangor Daily News: Administration's offenses impeachable

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Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:00:13 -0700

We are living in an age of no accountability.

 

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Bangor Daily News

Administration's offenses impeachable

Sat Jun 4, 2005 20:40

 

 

Administration's offenses impeachable

Bangor Daily News

 

Thursday, June 02, 2005

 

Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:

 

A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo

was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard

Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was

the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23,

2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush

was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S.

intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger

to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war,

" Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy. " " Fixed "

means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole

cloth fabrication.

 

So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger,

biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the

phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't

have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of

dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the " news "

shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media

afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners

who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.

 

It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a

lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has

taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

 

So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his

administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to

the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands

of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least

100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned

its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars,

made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course

of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an

insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no

plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.

 

What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration

should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and

Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should

call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president,

voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the

American people unless they stand up now for the truth.

 

Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in.

William Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for

the prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for

lying about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence

that George W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United

States to war. The intelligence wasn't flawed. The weapons weren't

hidden. Our elected leaders were lying.

 

Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on

trust. We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that

we give them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through

manipulation, propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy

has been subverted. It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue

to call it that because we have not the courage or stamina to demand

its overhaul.

 

We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their

lies. By not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we

condone hypocrisy, pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of

Americans and Iraqis for strategic control of energy resources that we

have no right to. Patriotism demands that we insist on the ideals of

democracy, not that we support the " leaders " who cynically destroy them.

 

What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point

this out. Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they

content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands?

Do they think they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this

little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous

resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush

the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises

facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species

extinction - can be solved by lying about them?

 

We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age

upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One

should not bet one's future on people who abjure responsibility. The

first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true:

America's president lied to America's people to create an unnecessary

war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take

that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It's really no more or less

than their duty. It's also the first step toward restoring America's

integrity.

 

Robert Shetterly is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville.

 

:: Article nr. 12287 sent on 03-jun-2005 08:19 ECT

 

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