Harpers Magazine: The Case for Impeachment; Why we can no longer afford George W

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Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:29:10 -0800 (PST)

Harpers Magazine: The Case for Impeachment; Why we can no

longer afford George W. Bush

 

 

We need to get our Senators on board with this one, not to mention all

our Congress-critters.

 

If Harpers can say this, we all can. Just say, " Bush is WORSE than

Nixon. "

 

John Dean did, two years ago....

 

 

 

http://harpers.org/TheCaseForImpeachment.html

 

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 does—it 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 press—nothing 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 635—not 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 witnesses—government officials both extant and former,

journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and

foreign—the 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 maneuver—something 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-fold—to 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 years—misuse 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 criminal—known 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 record—newspaper 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

administration—Elliott 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

 

And if you happen to be in NYC:

 

HARPER'S MAGAZINE PRESENTS: IS THERE A CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT?

 

A PUBLIC FORUM FEATURING:

 

- Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine

- Rep. John J. Conyers (D., Mich.), ranking member, U.S. House

Judiciary Committee

- Michael Ratner, president, Center for Constitutional Rights

- Elizabeth Holtzman, member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee

during Watergate

- John Dean, White House Counsel to President Nixon and author of

Worse Than Watergate

- Moderated by Sam Seder, host of " The Majority Report " on Air America

Radio

 

Thursday, March 2, 8:00 p.m.

Town Hall

123 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10063

$10

Tickets are available at The Town Hall box office or through

Ticketmaster

 

 

 

 

Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot

U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup.

" Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent

revolution inevitable. " - JFK

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm

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