US Diary: here are 5 good Bush-bashings (which seems fit to become the national US sport)

1. Impeachable Offenses -- by Todd Buchanan

In summer 1973, my parents' work habits slackened noticeably. They took extended lunch breaks, glued to the television sometimes for two hours. What captivated them was no ordinary soap opera, but the hearings of Sen. Sam Ervin's select committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Some months later, President Nixon narrowly survived a student-wide vote at Boulder High on the question of impeachment. Though I was disappointed at the results, in hindsight it is clear that the Boulder High vote was the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency.

Three decades and some change later, the Board of Trustees of Nederland is considering an impeachment resolution, this time for allegations that George W. Bush has knowingly violated domestic law and international treaties. This would upgrade the town's unique reputation.

Citizens equally concerned with the crisis in United States foreign policy as well as constitutional government will disagree on the wisdom of impeachment. Advocates say it behooves Americans to defend constitutional government against any usurper and to demonstrate to the world that Americans are not united in an overreaching foreign policy. Opponents counter that impeachment is divisive, when the opportunity may exist to build a strong, centrist opposition to the policies in question.

Without going any further into this cost/benefit debate, I would like to argue that impeachable conduct by the president, amounting to a gross abuse of power and a violation of the public trust, has occurred. A case for impeachment does not depend on specific violations of law; impeachment is equally or more concerned with political crimes. Proceeding "from the misconduct of public men," Alexander Hamilton explained, political offenses "relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself" (The Federalist, #65). In the 21st century, the reckless pursuit of war should qualify. What should be done about it in the case of George W. Bush, I will not try to answer.

Serious constraints bear down on leaders in international politics. One result can be dysfunctional group behavior. It is partly because of those elusive but persistent forces pushing down on leaders that we try to build safeguards into our system. One of those safeguards is the distinction between policymaking and intelligence processing. The administration's subversion of that process was a clear abuse of power. What makes it clear is no smoking gun per se, but an undeniable pattern of pressure, some subtle and some not, that the administration applied to the intelligence community to produce the only results the administration would accept. In these circumstances it is no surprise that CIA director George Tenet would cave and then become a fall guy.

The public trusts that war will be a last resort. The administration's insistence on war and the "intelligence" to justify it violated that trust.

Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the CIA from 2000 to 2005, describes just how the administration turned "upside down" the intelligence process in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. "If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," Pillar writes. Official intelligence analysis was not relied on in the decision to go to war; instead, selective intelligence — including "raw" (and suspect) intelligence — was "misused publicly to justify decisions already made."

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence," Pillar writes, "but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data — 'cherry picking' — rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

Pillar notes that on its own initiative the intelligence community tried to anticipate the complications of war in Iraq. These complications included guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces, a significant prospect of violence between Sunnis and Shiites, and an uphill fight for democracy. More likely than a successful implant of democracy, "war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives — and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East," Pillar writes. Journalist James Fallows reported that Defense Department employees participated in the first of several CIA war game sessions, but when their superiors found this out, the Pentagon participants were "reprimanded and told not to participate further." We can only speculate why.

The awful costs of this ill-considered war will accumulate for some time yet. Meanwhile, our champion of moral clarity and the undaunted Dick Cheney may not be finished with their foolishness. Whether or not impeachment is the answer, Congress needs to lay down the law. Citizens must demand it.

(Todd Buchanan lives near Nederland, Colorado but keeps a safe distance.)


2. Why Our Small Town Called for Bush to be Impeached
The worst failing of any nation is for its citizens no longer to scrutinize their government.
By Dan Dewalt

On March 7, the townspeople of Newfane, Vt., crowded the 19th-century Union Hall for their annual town meeting -- one of America's last expressions of direct democracy. As the wood stove warmed the old hall, the voters dealt with town matters, and then turned to a resolution of national importance. When the debate ended, the Newfane citizens overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush -- a vote also passed by four other Vermont towns that day.

Now as calls for impeachment begin to be heard across America, some, especially those in the elite media establishment, belittle our efforts, writing them off as merely political, spurious or at best premature. They ask, what right do small Vermont towns have to weigh in on a question of such magnitude? Who are we to cast our sights beyond the demands of our roads, bridges or annual school budget? As a Vermont citizen and a Newfane town selectman, I'd like to respond.

Vermonters are asking a different set of questions. We see boys and girls, men and women from across our state, falling one by one, to come home for somber burial or partial rehabilitation. We see that the torture of captives has become official administration policy, and as a result our nation is now reviled and despised across the globe. We see an administration that spies upon our Quaker pacifists in the name of fighting "terror." We see a crumbling national infrastructure, inept and underequipped to respond to natural disasters, and heavier financial burdens placed upon those who can least afford it, all because of the hundreds of billions of dollars being drained by this administration's failing effort to place its crusading imprint upon an unwilling people who had nothing to do with the terrorism that has been visited upon us.

A growing number of patriotic Americans from coast to coast have joined Vermonters in asking: If it's not a crime to lie to the nation about Iraq's ties to 9/11, and use those lies to instigate a war, contrary to international law, what is? If warrantless wiretapping of Americans, in direct violation of the FISA Act of 1978, is not a crime, what is? If breaking our treaty obligations with respect to the treatment of military and civilian prisoners -- obligations which, according to our Constitution, are to be the supreme law of the land -- is not a crime, what is?

We ask how any American loyal to the Constitution and the laws that make us a nation could not call for a complete congressional investigation into the alleged crimes of this administration. How can any American with a sense of morality, anyone who professes to adhere to religious principles, not insist that the deceit and the violence must cease?

Every day, our moral standing in the eyes of the world is further debased. Every day that we acquiesce to these actions of our government, we debase ourselves and make ourselves unfit to be called Americans.

The worst failing of any nation is for its citizens to no longer scrutinize their government. Today, whether because of apathy, distraction or exhaustion, we are not paying attention. It will be at our peril if our awakening comes only after the government has consolidated its hold on power, and we find that scrutiny is no longer an option.

(Dan DeWalt is a woodworker and selectboard member in the town of Newfane, Vt. (pop. 1,680), and the author of a successful town resolution calling for the impeachment of President Bush.)


3. Lies Lurk Behind U.S. Terror Policy
by Robyn E. Blumner

President Bush once famously stumbled over the phrase "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It was a Freudian slip. Bush knew just how often he's put one over on the American people. Why rub it in?

Slowly this country has come to the realization that nothing the president and his minions say is believable, yet they still want us to just trust them. There hasn't been a more dangerous combination of incompetence, mendacity and arrogance since Lansford Hastings encouraged the Donner Party to diverge from the Oregon Trail and take his "short-cut."

Bush recently dropped a whopper by telling veteran journalist Helen Thomas that he never wanted to go to war, even as insider memos keep popping up detailing Bush's early intention to attack Iraq. But nowhere has the bald-faced lying been as fierce as in the "war on terror." Here, Bush has raised prevarication to national policy. From the president's disingenuous proclamations that all prisoners are treated "humanely" to the administration's laughable claim that it couldn't disclose the names of those swept into detention after 9/11 because it would violate their right to privacy, there is nothing this crew won't say to avoid accountability.

The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is perhaps America's biggest international black eye and moral morass. We have been told by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that only "the worst of the worst" are incarcerated there, when that isn't remotely true.

In an analysis of the Defense Department's court files on 132 of the more than 500 prisoners, the National Journal found that more than half the group were "not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States" and only eight were found to be tied directly to plans for terror attacks outside of Afghanistan. Oddly, two of those eight men have since been sent to their home governments, where they were released.

A different analysis, done by attorneys for two of the Guantanamo detainees in association with Seton Hall University School of Law, found that only 8 percent of the 517 prisoners in Guantanamo were characterized as al-Qaida fighters. The analysis was conducted using the government's own data and documents.

Also, 164 prisoners, almost a third, were deemed enemy combatants because of links to groups the Defense Department designated as terrorist organizations that were not al-Qaida or the Taliban. What's interesting about this is that 52 of the 72 organizations that the Defense Department named as terrorist groups do not appear on either the Patriot Act Terrorist Exclusion List or two separate State Department terrorist lists, according to the Seton Hall study. These are the lists used to keep terror suspects from entering our country.

That means the Defense Department is justifying indefinite incarceration of prisoners due to their associations with groups whose members are not even considered dangerous enough to be barred from visiting the United States.

It is no wonder the administration has vigorously argued that Guantanamo prisoners should be denied access to American courts. For a chunk of the men held there, the administration cannot possibly justify their continued incarceration.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that two of the men in Guantanamo, Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna, are not under suspicion of having broken any law or of planning attacks. Rather they have been held since November 2002 because we want them to be paid CIA informants on a radical Islamic cleric they know, and the men have so far refused. We are apparently holding them until they change their mind.

It doesn't matter how blatantly lawless things get, the excuse is always that the president has the inherent authority to defend our national security.

Bush justifies his warrantless domestic spying program by saying: "If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why." It sounds so sensible, until you peel back the statement just the slightest bit and realize that the president is undermining 200 years of checks and balances, claiming that he is not answerable to the nation's courts.

And why should we trust that only phone calls with al-Qaida operatives are being surveilled? This is the same government that told us Jose Padilla was planning to detonate a radiation bomb in an American city. But that allegation disappeared when charges were actually filed. This is the same government that held American Yaser Esam Hamdi incommunicado as an enemy combatant, declaring him too dangerous for due process. But when the Supreme Court said to give Hamdi access the courts, the administration sent him back to his home in Saudi Arabia instead.

If there is one consistent theme running through Bush's war on terror, it is that the administration's public claims turn out to be a smoldering heap of nonsense. Yet for some reason we keep buying it. Shame on us.

(Robyn Blumner appears Sundays in the Times Perspective section.)


4. American Caesar
by Ralph Nader

In the name of fighting stateless terrorism, George W. Bush is looming as the American Caesar running roughshod over the civil liberties of the American people who have turned against him in ever larger majorities.

In the name of fighting terrorism, George W. Bush fabricated numerous excuses for illegally invading Iraq and occupying it for now over three costly years in ways that are magnets for the recruitment and training of ever more stateless terrorists. His own CIA Director, Porter Goss, made exactly this point in testimony before the U.S. Senate in February 2005. So too have many retired intelligence and military specialists including those who recently worked for George W. Bush.

More and more evidence of the workings of Caesar Bush are coming to public light. Just this week, in court filings by the prosecutor against the indicted I. Lewis Libby Jr., Dick Cheney's right hand man, another thunderbolt came forth. Mr. Libby testified that, in the words of The New York Times, "Mr. Bush, who has long criticized leaks of secret information as a threat to national security" himself approved Libby leaking just such information to the press in order to rebut a critic.

Democratic Senate Leader, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said that "in light of today's shocking revelation, President Bush must fully disclose his participation in the selective leaking of classified information," calling the President "the leaker in chief."

Not that the Democrats will do anything about this latest outrage, but the Republicans in the Congress are reaching certain limits to their self-censored sycophancy toward Caesar Bush. Also this week, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told a House Committee that the President may have the legal authority even to wiretap communications between Americans inside the United States without a court order. When pressured for his authority behind such breathtaking outlawry, he fell back on his usual Caesarean mantra - "his inherent [the President's] role as commander in chief." Sounds like the modern version of the "divine right of Kings".

This was too much even for the House Judiciary Chair, Republican F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wisconsin), who accused the Bush administration of "stonewalling".

Unbridled Presidential authority is un-American whether in peacetime, wartime or fighting a gang whose exaggerated power has served Bush and Cheney very well politically. How better to silence the Democrats, stifle or chill public dissent, distract attention from domestic necessities, until their post-Katrina debacle, enrich their donating corporate buddies with military contracts and concentrate more lawless power in the White House at the expense of the courts and Congress than by breaking our constitutional system of separation of powers?

Mr. Bush gave the "Go" signal for the leak without going through a conventional declassification process to determine how such "information might compromise methods or sources," according to Professor Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) summed the leak up this way:

If the [Bush] administration believes it can tap purely domestic phone calls between Americans without court approval, there is no limit to executive power. This is contrary to settled law and the most basic constitutional principles of the separation of powers.

Still the Democrats do not have the modest fortitude to support Senator Russell Feingold's (D-Wisconsin) modest motion to censure George W. Bush. The Democrats are waiting for more incriminating material to spill out from the Executive Branch to add to the mounds of evidence already made public from U.S. and British sources.

For sure more will spill out. Whenever there are court cases like Libby's, where the defendant wants to defend only himself, there will be more damaging memos, emails, testimony and maybe confessions. When an awakened mainstream media is hungry in pursuit of such stories, you can be sure more will come out. Inside contacts and sources will increase. Retirements will increase as well to produce more whistleblowers.

If the House and Senate start exercising their constitutional rights to oversight, more power will be added to extract information from the gold mines of what Bush and Cheney did and when prior and after the invasion of Iraq.

At some point the Bush regime's luck, bred by secrecy, cover-ups and mendacity, will run out. The critical mass will be reached. And the American Caesar will fall, with or without the assistance of the pitiful Democrats.

Writing about the Democratic Primary race in Connecticut between Senator Joseph Lieberman and Ned Lamont, who calls the incumbent "Bush's favorite Democrat", Keith C. Burris of the Manchester, Connecticut Journal Inquirer declares, "Even in wartime, the power of government must be checked; even in wartime the president is not a law unto himself; even in wartime the people deserve to be informed by the free exchange of ideas. Even in wartime, the citizens may seek to change the government."

Especially during an unconstitutional, illegal war in Iraq started by George W. Bush! See http://www.DemocracyRising.US for more information.

5. Plenty of Opportunities to Impeach Bush
    By Diane E. Dees

    The United States of America has undergone three impeachment proceedings. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached because he removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his position, which was a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He was not convicted, and Kansas Senator Edmond G. Ross, who cast the vote that saved the president, is profiled in John F. Kennedy's Profiles In Courage. In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon was impeached because of the Watergate break-in cover-up, but he resigned from office before the proceedings could go forth. And in 1998-99, President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair he had with an intern. Clinton, of course, was not convicted.

    In each case, impeachment proceedings were begun because of the perception that the president had violated a law. Patriot Daily points out that Congress may ratify Bush's illegal spying with new FISA legislation so that his actions will be deemed legal and he cannot be impeached for having committed them.

    Patriot Daily goes on to say, however, that during the month of March alone, Bush violated enough other laws to make impeachment proceedings possible. The writer of the Patriot Daily piece says that, "to avoid writing a book," it was necessary to omit any violations of law committed before March 1, 2006, violations of humanitarian laws and negligence, and some of the prior laws to which there had not been additional information added.

    With these restrictions in mind, here are just a few of the March violations:

    Bush signed the spending bill, knowing that violated a Constitutional requirement that the bill must first pass in both chambers.

    He violated the material witness law by using it as preventive detention authority who could commit terrorist acts some day but for whom there is no cause for criminal charges.

    He violated the Clean Air Act by loosening emission standards for aging coal-fired power plants. The Clean Air Act makes it clear that only Congress may make such a decision.

    In a legal brief written for the US Supreme Court, Bush cited evidence from a debate by two Republican senators. There was no such debate. The evidence was manufactured by the White House.

    Bush defined "material support" for terrorists in such a distorted fashion that victims of terrorists wound up being defined as terrorists.

    He approved the ports deal, knowing that Dubai's boycott of Israel was illegal under US law.

    He failed to hand over delinquent mining company safety violation fees to the Department of the Treasury, as required by law. (He also decreased major fines, and did not collect any in half of the cases.)

    He violated the law when he secured the UAE ports deal without the required national security review.

    Bush's nuclear deal with India violates US and international nuclear nonproliferation laws.

    (Patriot Daily lists many more violations committed by the Bush administration, as well as relevant links.)