[dauterman]

Hi, Yes, Bush needs to be impeached in order to preserve democracy in America.
I am going to cut-and-paste the Executive Summary of the book "Constitution in Crisis" minority report by the US House Judiciary Committee. The full text can be obtained from:

Raw Story
House Judiciary Democrats issue report alleging gross misconduct by Bush over Iraq
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')xecutive Summary: This Minority Report has been produced at the request of Representative John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee. He made this request in the wake of the President’s failure to respond to a letter submitted by 122 Members of Congress and more than 500,000 Americans in July of this year asking him whether the assertions set forth in the Downing Street Minutes were accurate. Mr. Conyers asked staff, by year end 2005, to review the available information concerning possible misconduct by the Bush Administration in the run up to the Iraq War and post-invasion statements and actions, and to develop legal conclusions and make legislative and other recommendations to him.

In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration.

There is at least a prima facie case that these actions by the President, Vice-President and other members of the Bush Administration violate a number of federal laws, including (1) Committing a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making False Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of Government Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other individuals; and (7) federal laws and regulations concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence.

While these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable misconduct, because the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have blocked the ability of Members to obtain information directly from the Administration concerning these matters or responding to these charges, more investigatory authority is needed before recommendations can be made regarding specific Articles of Impeachment. As a result, we recommend that Congress establish a select committee with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war detailed in this Report and report to the Committee on the Judiciary on possible impeachable offenses.

In addition, we believe the failure of the President, Vice President and others in the Bush Administration to respond to a myriad requests for information concerning these charges, or to otherwise account for explain a number of specific misstatements they have made in the run up to War and other actions warrants, at minimum, the introduction and Congress’ approval of Resolutions of Censure against Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

Further, we recommend that Ranking Member Conyers and others consider referring the potential violations of federal criminal law detailed in this Report to the Department of Justice for investigation; Congress should pass legislation to limit government secrecy, enhance oversight of the Executive Branch, request notification and justification of presidential pardons of Administration officials, ban abusive treatment of detainees, ban the use of chemical weapons, and ban the practice of paying foreign media outlets to publish news stories prepared by or for the Pentagon; and the House should amend its Rules to permit Ranking Members of Committees to schedule official Committee hearings and call witnesses to investigate Executive Branch misconduct.

The Report rejects the frequent contention by the Bush Administration that there pre-war conduct has been reviewed and they have been exonerated. No entity has ever considered whether the Administration misled Americans about the decision to go to War, and the Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet conducted a review of pre-war intelligence information, while the Silberman-Robb report specifically cautioned, that intelligence manipulation “was not part of our inquiry.” There has also not been any independent inquiry concerning torture and other legal violations in Iraq; nor has there been an independent review of the pattern of cover-ups and political retribution by the Bush Administration against its critics, other than the very narrow and still ongoing inquiry of Special Counsel Fitzgerald.

While the scope of this Report is largely limited to Iraq, it also holds lessons for our Nation at a time of entrenched one-party rule and abuse of power in Washington. If the present Administration is willing to flaunt, if not break, the law in order to achieve its political objectives in Iraq, and Congress is unwilling to confront or challenge their hegemony, many of our cherished democratic principles are in jeopardy. This is true not only with respect to the Iraq War, but also other areas of foreign policy, privacy and civil liberties, and matters of economic and social justice. Indeed as this Report is being finalized, we have just learned of another potential significant abuse of executive power by the President, ordering the National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying and wiretapping without obtaining court approval in possible violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

It is tragic that our Nation has invaded another sovereign nation because “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” as stated in the Downing Street Minutes. It is equally tragic that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have been unwilling to examine these facts or take action to prevent this scenario from occurring again. Since they appear unwilling to act, it is incumbent on individual Members of Congress as well as the American public to act to protect our constitutional form of government.

[Pops]

I suppose it depends on whether you believe that you have the right to safety at all costs, or that the safety your rights is above all costs.
Personally I think fornicating the help is down the scale some from fornicating the Bill of Rights.

But the absence of mention in this thread of the blatant disregard of law that seems fairly obvious from his own admission that he violated article IV of the Bill of Rights indicates to me that he won’t be impeached.
Up the Doomerosity scale a few basis points.

[0mar]

Impeaching Bush would solve exactly nothing.
If Kerry or Gore were in office, the exact same orders would have been signed. Clamoring for impeachment is treating the symptoms, without treating the underlying disease. The public will be placated, and our march towards facism and 1984 will continue.

[Ludi]

He should be impeached, but he won't be.
Not a chance in hell.

("impreached"?)

[Kingcoal]

The Afghan and Iraqi actions where approved by congress as required by the constitution. Where Bush has legal problems is with the illegal spying inside the US. Searches and seizures require due process of law - no exceptions. The Judiciary must approve each and every instance. The Executive branch does not have the power to act alone. One other president had this problem - Nixon.

However, Federal agencies have been famous for pushing the envelope right to the very edge, often implicating naive local law enforcement officials. I do think that Bush is dumb enough to leave a paper trail back to his office, though.

[Jenab6]

Well, yeh. Impeach him. Then throw rotten tomatos as he swings in the breeze. You could sell tickets and tomatoes both. People would love the chance to play "Plaster the traitor."

The man is complicit, at least passively, in an attack against both civilian and military targets within the territory of the United States, the WTC and the Pentagon, and in the murder of thousands of Americans. He's guilty of taking the United States to war on false pretexts, killing innocent foreigners and trashing America's reputation in the world. He's guilty of adhering to the interests of a foreign state to the detriment of the interests of the United States. There's no need to invent fancy chains of cause and effect to find him guilty of treason many times over.

George Bush is also guilty of moving to overthrow the Constitution with bogus foreign threats, with illegal new federal departments, with unconstitutional laws, with criminal law enforcement practices, and with a (further) corruption of due process in jurisprudence.
Clinton was a slimy embarrassment. Bush is a ego-maniacal menace. An honest dictatorship would be better than what we have now, since at least we would know where we stood, and the taxpayers would be spared the expense of what the government spends now keeping the herd duped.

Who should be President? Well, me. Or you. I'd go with you on the theory that if you're a Peak Oil regular you probably aren't actively employed by the forces of evil, as many career politicians seem to be. Elections are controlled by the media in such a way that they always produce a worse leader than what we might reasonably expect from a random lottery.
Jerry Abbott

[MicroHydro]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('0mar', 'I')mpeaching Bush would solve exactly nothing.
If Kerry or Gore were in office, the exact same orders would have been signed. Clamoring for impeachment is treating the symptoms, without treating the underlying disease. The public will be placated, and our march towards facism and 1984 will continue.

[Novus]

Bush is only doing what the American people want him to do. The American way of life is still unnegotiable. America does not want another Carter telling them to turn their thermostats down or lower the speed limits back to 55 mph. We would rather fight ileagal wars to keep the go juice flowing. That is why Bush is in power and his abuses are tollerated.

[LadyRuby]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ''')'This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law...The other road is the path of least resistance'' in which ''we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us...[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking...and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system.'' Tom DeLay, 1998.

[savethehumans]

The truly amazing thing is that DeLay could say all that truth with a straight face!

[shakespear1]

Cheney as President

[0mar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('shakespear1', 'C')heney as President

[gg3]

The CBS item referenced above is actually an article from _The Nation_, which after all is well known for its liberal views and opposition to the Bush Admin in general. So this is not the same thing as a CBS editorial, it's more like an op-ed piece.
The impeachment issue is however being taken seriously on both sides of the aisle in Congress, for one obvious reason: Bush's recent claims that he has the legal authority to order NSA to conduct domestic SIGINT (signals intelligence) activities, rest on an arguement for expanded executive powers that would render Congress largely irrelevant.

That is, if a President truly has inherent authority under Article II as Commander in Chief, to bypass Congress, the law, and the courts (the FISA Court that handles this type of surveillance request), then in effect a President rules as sovereign: an elected monarch. Congress becomes irrelevant.
And, interestingly enough, there is no need for a Patriot Act or any other enabling legislation.
Congress does not like being made irrelevant, not only for the usual partisan and self-interested reasons, but because this contravenes a fundamental principle of American government back to day one. Speaking of "original intent" and "what the Founders had in mind."

I should say here what I think of the present controversy.
IMHO, a President in wartime could legitimately claim the right to order domestic SIGINT activities under a time-limited emergency declaration that was specifically intended only to obtain the time needed to file for warrants under FISA. Normally, FISA allows filing warrants for up to 72 hours after the onset of the SIGINT activities in question. I would say that the post-9/11 wartime conditions give grounds to legitimately claim an extension. Perhaps to six months. A year at the absolute most. During which time the President would have to compile the information needed to obtain proper warrants; or alternatively to get Congress to change the law (about which more below).

However this is not what happened. Instead, President Bush claimed authority to renew those executive orders *indefinitely.* This to my mind contravenes the spirit of the law, as well as the letter. It exceeds the need to stretch the legal boundaries: it stretches the law past the breaking point: in other words, it breaks the law.
And that, by any other name, is a crime. And that in turn raises legitimate grounds to begin an impeachment inquiry.

The case could be made that the type of SIGINT activities needed in these times were not originally contemplated or included within FISA (the Foreign Intel Surveillance Act). FISA after all calls for warrants to issue pertaining to specific individuals who are suspected of criminal activities or of acting on behalf of a hostile foreign entity (government or terrorist group). SIGINT does not work this way; it is more like a Google search that becomes more narrow as it proceeds toward a goal.

NSA infrastructure is designed to harvest vast volumes of communications data and then search for specific patterns. Names can be included in the search criteria. However, SIGINT is at its best when it starts with something like, "all telephone numbers placing or receiving calls between Manhattan and Afghanistan within one day of a terrorist event," and then follows this with narrower criteria based on profiles of known terrorist activity. This type of search will first produce lists of telephone numbers (origin and destination), which can be narrowed further, and ultimately lead to a short list of defined targets that can be placed under actual surveillance (i.e. with a live human listening to intercepted communications). This is one example based on one type of data; there are plenty more and I'm not going to divulge specifics in a public forum.

So, there is a legitimate basis to argue that FISA should be expanded to include not only specific names, but "search strings" and search criteria generally. This gets into some difficult Constitutional territory regarding "general writs," but there is already good legal precedent with respect to police agencies obtaining "John Doe warrants" to capture suspects whose names are not yet known but who are otherwise identifyable.

The Administration arguement that the debates attendant to changing FISA would tip off the terrorists, is bunk.
First of all, Bush and his people have been talking about "picking up terrorist chatter" since 9/12/2001, and "picking up chatter" means, quite obviously and transparently, "intercepting communications." Everyone knows this. And as a result, Al Qaeda no longer uses electronic communications, but relies on couriers passing messages by hand. So the Administration has already let that particular horse out of the barn so long ago that talking about closing the barn door at this point in time is not only meaningless but abjectly hypocritical in the worst way.

Second, the necessary changes in FISA could be worded in such a manner as to minimize the risk of terrorists understanding their meaning or implications. For example, "...such persons as may be named, and/or such other measurable characteristics of communications that can be described verbally and/or algorithmically in a manner that can be subject to relevant minimization criteria." There you go, I've just written your FISA expansion for you, now please take it to Congress. NSA lawyers could consult with Congress to develop equivalent or better language.

With that, a President could take broad-spectrum SIGINT requests to FISA Court and get legal warrants. There might still be ground for vigorous debate about the extent to which those powers should be used or the extent to which the Court should approve the requests. But at least we would not be treading on the thin ice of monarchical executive powers. We did after all rebel against that sort of thing, 229 years ago.

[Gary]

My guess is that GWB will not take the fall for the massive ongoing war crime we are perpetrating in Iraq.
Too many people around the world have seen through the phony "WMD" and "Ridding the world of Saddam" and "spreading democracy in the Middle East" spin-doctoring all along.

Democratic political leaders -- Kerry, Pelosi, and others -- will stand with Republican political leaders to protect themselves. These Senators and Congresspersons had to know what was going on, but voted to support Bush out of political fear. Senator Byrd was a lonely voice in the Senate for quite awhile, but he was right. The few who spoke out against the war and against torture all along have some integrity. The rest of the leadership is severely compromised.
If Bush is impeached there will be some outcry around the world to have him tried for war crimes, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz. If anyone scratches the surface very deeply, they will see compliance on the par of political leadership who should have known better -- and almost surely did know better. (Note that Blair in England is again getting more heat about the trumped up reasons for invading Iraq.)

Another interesting take on this is that if Bush were impeached and the world felt that the people of the USA regretted the War On Iraq, people might start asking questions about the sanctions and other issues under Clinton. The questions could (should?) go back to the USA's support of Saddam under Reagan (chemical weapons, foreign aid, intelligence info to help Hussein know where to use the chemical weapons, and so forth). Of course most people in the USA prefer not to ask challenging questions of this sort, even when we desparately need to find answers so that we can change course.
These questions will be suppressed by Republicrats who just want to go forward with the occupation and to extend the global war for resources more aggressively in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Columbia, Equador, Nigeria......

The "I-word" can go around and around, but where it stops, nobody knows.
In my dreams, the Bush administration is removed, and somehow a way is found to get Carter to assemble an adminsitration to fill the rest of the term. Carter immediately begins to address poverty, the energy crisis ("powerdown"), and global warming in a clear and constructive way. People decide it is time to listen to President Carter, and the world averts total extinction. It's a nice dream...

[LadyRuby]

Nice discussion of the issues gg3, and nice dream Gary!

[The_Toecutter]

Actually, I think Americans would rather be able to keep driving 75 and 80 mph while consuming half the fuel or less, WITHOUT making their cars smaller or more expensive. They'd like to be able to keep the temperature at 80 degrees in the winter, 60 in the summer, but pay much less to do so(thus requiring greater efficiency). I think they'd rather not need to rely on the expensive juice anymore, especially if it would mean their kids would have to get drafted to fight for it.

Can we do all those things today? You damn well bet. Will industry allow it? Nope. Those things aren't as profitable as the status quo. Greater efficiency and less consumption to get the desired result brings in less money to industry, especially those of the auto, oil, and electric power variety. Even if it takes illegal wars to keep the juice going, industry will still want it to flow because its consumption is how they make money.

Your average American just doesn't want to have to sacrifice, in the meantime. If viable alternatives are not offered to them for sale, they simply will not use them and will continue their wastyeful ways. And if the technology is there, I don't think they should have to sacrifice one damn bit. But there are greater forces at work in this crisis other than the American public, even if the American public are not blameless.

[gg3]

Thanks. I tend to think the probability of an impeachment is low, but the probability of voters solving this issue at the ballot box is high (plus or minus Diebold).
What also sucks bigtime, and pisses me off majorly, is that Bush has just made another mess at yet another intelligence agency. The damage to CIA from the Plame outing and political pressure on analysts was bad enough, but then we get the Iran Crypto Leak, the "picking up chatter" item, and the present handful of gravel thrown into the gears at NSA.

What other intel agency is he going to screw up next? DIA, NGA, and NRO: take your choice and take your chances.
If America is at war, truly at war, we need a President who has actual military experience on the ground during a war. Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, anyone with that kind of background. What we've got right now is sheer incompetence backed up with hubris. This is not the way to win a war.
Would you trust this Administration to win World War Two...?

[dauterman]

More news coming out:
DOMESTIC SPYING MORE EXTENSIVE THAN BUSH ADMITS:

AlertNet

Domestic Spying
NY Times: Domestic spying widespread
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')EW YORK (AP) -- The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls -- without court orders -- than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported.
The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times, citing unidentified current and former government officials.
The story did not name the companies.

Since the Times disclosed the domestic spying program last week, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al Qaeda.
But the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the paper said, quoting an unnamed official.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dauterman', 'B')ut the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.

[Specop_007]

Nice outlay there GG3. I didnt think you Californians were so clear minded.....
And Gary, i was right with ya till that "poverty" word. Welath redistribution is nothing more then theft. I havent a clue why anyone supports it. As such, your dream is my nightmare. Lets hope it doesnt happen.