The Case for Impeachment 2005-8
Andrew Johnson-Blocks Reconstruction Dick Nixon-Watergate Break-in Bill Clinton-Grand Jury/Monica
-Conviction shy 1 vote in Senate- -Resigned- -Lost license before the Bar-
Former Defendants…Under Constitutional Provisions
Bush & Cheney—Article #4: Breeching oaths of office against the Constitution by persistently subverting the US requirement for the separation of powers.
High Crimes
Attorneys Speak Out…..
Michael Ratner , S. Kadidal , & William Goodman, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Bob Barr, BARBARA OLSHANSKY
Center for Constitutional Rights 2006 New York City, Michael Ratner , S. Kadidal , & William Goodman
In ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH, the experts at one of our nation's leading institutions of constitutional scholarship, the Center for Constitutional Rights, set out the legal arguments for impeachment in a clear, concise, and objective discussion. In four separate articles of impeachment detailing four separate charges--;warrantless surveillance, misleading Congress on the reasons for the Iraq war, violating laws against torture, and subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers--; it is, say the CCR attorneys, a case of black letter law, with abundant evidence.
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH details that evidence, the relevant laws and the legal precedents
July 24, 2006 PBS News Hour President's Use of 'Signing Statements' Raises Constitutional Concerns RAY SUAREZ: The president's veto of a stem-cell research bill last week was the first of his presidency. But more often than other presidents, George W. Bush has claimed the constitutional authority to ignore, reject, or interpret bills after signing them into law. He's done so by issuing "signing statements" with many of the bills he's signed... Bruce Fein, you were on the task force that looked at this for the American Bar Association. In your view, does a presidential signing statement have the same force as the law that it accompanies?...
Bruce Fein: ...the president issued a staining statement saying, "I will interpret this as being advisory only."
So these are not questions of interpreting ambiguous statutes; it's a question of the president unilaterally declaring that provision he has just signed into law is unconstitutional and that he won't enforce it. The Constitution envisioned the president use his veto power if he thought the Congress was overstepping its bounds, and then Congress could override the veto or Congress could delete the offending provision, but that was what the Constitution envisioned.
Indeed, King James II was overthrown in Great Britain because he exerted what he called the suspending or dispensing power, where he would refuse to enforce laws enacted by parliament without his consent. And it was that history that caused the founding fathers to write into the Constitution an obligation of the president to faithfully execute the laws...
Now, the fact is, when presidents have vetoed bills that they've thought were unconstitutional, once and perhaps twice in 217 years has Congress ever overridden the veto. So the fact is, when the president finds a bill that he thinks is unconstitutional in part, he vetoes it, Congress will remove the offending provision if it's really urgent and important.
And that is what history honors. There's nothing in the Constitution that says, "Oh, the president can cut corners if he wants to, if he thinks the bill is too long." Congress is equally accountable to the American people. And if they hold up a bill because they're frivolously pursuing an unconstitutional provision, they will pay for it. And that's why Congress has not attempted to override presidentially-motivated vetoes, where the Constitution has been at issue...
RAY SUAREZ: I have to ask you before we go, the ABA has released its report. Are the Senate and House trying to wrest back some of this power? Is there legislation about signing statements in the offing?
BRUCE FEIN: Well, I'm working right now with Senator Specter's office. I submitted a draft bill today. And I think he's eager to move forward. The House side is more dormant.
July 25, 2006 MSNBC Sen. Specter preparing bill to sue Bush Republican committee chairman fighting against 'signing statements - A powerful Republican committee chairman who has led the fight against President Bush’s signing statements said Monday he would have a bill ready by the end of the week allowing Congress to sue him in federal court.
“We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will...authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president’s acts declared unconstitutional,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.
Specter’s announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action.
December 1, 2007, Boston Globe Staff / Signing statement is president's first since 2006, Had used tactic often before power shift in Congress By Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON - President Bush this month issued his first signing statement since the Democratic takeover of Congress, reserving the right to bypass 11 provisions in a military appropriations bill under his executive powers.
In the statement, which the White House filed in the Federal Register on Nov. 13 but which initially attracted little attention, Bush challenged several requirements to provide information to Congress.
For example, one law Bush targeted requires him to give oversight committees notice before transferring US military equipment to United Nations peacekeepers.
Bush also challenged a new law that limits his ability to transfer funds lawmakers approved for one purpose to start a different program, as well as a law requiring him to keep in place an existing command structure for the Navy's Pacific fleet.
Saturday, December 8, 2007; Page A01, Inquiry Sought On CIA Tapes, Destruction Is Said To Be News to Bush By Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writers
Democratic lawmakers yesterday angrily demanded a Justice Department investigation into the CIA's decision to destroy videotapes of harsh interrogation tactics used on two terrorism suspects.
The White House said that President Bush was unaware of the tapes or their destruction until this week, but administration sources acknowledged last night that longtime Bush aide Harriet E. Miers knew of the tapes' existence and told CIA officials that she opposed their destruction.
The Senate intelligence committee also announced the start of its own probe into the destroyed videotapes, said Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).
"We do not know if there was intent to obstruct justice, an attempt to prevent congressional scrutiny, or whether they were simply destroyed out of concern they could be leaked," Rockefeller said. "Whatever the intent, we must get to the bottom of it."
The uproar in Congress followed Thursday's disclosure by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden that the agency had videotaped the interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects in 2002 and destroyed the tapes three years later. Hayden and other officials said one of the detainees was Abu Zubaida, a close associate of Osama bin Laden.
The other was identified last night by a knowledgeable U.S. official as Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 in the United Arab Emirates. Nashiri complained earlier this year, in documents filed for his military tribunal hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been tortured into confessing to various terrorist acts and plots. Several alleged acts of torture are redacted from the document.
It is not clear which tactics are shown on the videotapes. Abu Zubaida has been identified by intelligence officials as one of three detainees subjected to waterboarding, an aggressive interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
Saturday, December 22, 2007, 9/11 panel study finds that CIA withheld tapes, Despite requests, 9/11 commission was never told of CIA interrogation videotapes,byMark Mazzetti TH NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — A review of classified documents by former members of the 9/11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of al Qaeda operatives, and it was told by a top CIA official that the agency had "produced or made available for review" everything that had been requested.
The review was conducted this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two al Qaeda operatives. seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip Zelikow, the panel's former executive director, concluded that further investigation is needed to determine whether the CIA's withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.
In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, said their reading of the report convinced them that the CIA had made a conscious decision to impede the commission's inquiry.
Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or the withholding of them from the courts and the commission was improper.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency had been prepared to give the 9/11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for them. "Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," he said. he review by Zelikow doesn't assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the CIA that sought "documents," "reports" and "information" related to the interrogations.
The memorandum recounts a December 2003 meeting at which Hamilton told then-CIA Director George Tenet that the CIA should provide all relevant documents "even if the commission had not specifically asked for them." Kean a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency's decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, "I don't know whether that's illegal or not, but it's certainly wrong."
December 23, 2007 The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal, Times by Andrew Sullivan
Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.
There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.
And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.
President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.
Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.
Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.
A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique – information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.
The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases...
December 28, 2007 7:05 PM ET Vermont group wants Cheney, Bush charged with war crimes, Associated Press Montana’s News Station.com
MONTPELIER, VT. - President Bush and Vice President Cheney may soon have a new reason to avoid left-leaning Vermont: In one town, activists want them subject to arrest for war crimes.
A group in Brattleboro is petitioning to put an item on the Town Meeting agenda in March that would make Bush - who's been to every state except Vermont as president - and Vice President Cheney subject to arrest and indictment if they visit the southeastern Vermont town.
Fifty-4-year-old Kurt Daims, a retired machinist leading the charge, says the petition is as radical as the Declaration of Independence and draws on that tradition.
But it's unclear whether the group can get the one thousand signatures necessary to get the measure on the Town Meeting Day agenda...
April 2, 2008 Pentagon releases declassified memo justifying harsh interrogation tactics
By LARA JAKES JORDAN , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture. The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas — so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.