The U.S.
government has been seriously corrupted by money-politics: for the wealthy and the powerful, especially
large corporations. As a decisive step in taking our country back, I
believe we should quickly move to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
To these ends, I have written the following letter to
my congressional representatives. Please send this letter or your own words
to your
congressional representatives. At the end of this letter, I will provide an
easy way on how you can do this.
Please contact
anyone and everyone you can think of about this subject. We must each take
responsibility to use our collective efforts and contacts to take our country
back: even seemingly small steps can result in a massive cumulative effect.
Don’t underestimate your or our personal power—we hold the votes and that is an
exceedingly difficult thing to deny on a large scale in our country, at least
presently…
Here is my
letter.
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As a United
States citizen, and as called for by the United States Constitution, which, as
a congressional representative, you have sworn “to support and
defend,” I
demand the swift and decisive impeachment of both George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney.
Our Constitution
is very clear: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the
United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction
of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Even disregarding the evidence of bribery, if Bush and Cheney have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, they must be impeached. They have—as the following seven categories listed below make all too obvious.
1. CONTEMPT OF LAW
Bush frequently
signs laws with “signing statements” that indicate his administration will not
abide by the law. This is a contravention of the very basis our country: our
Constitution, its prescribed procedures, and our country’s laws. In our
country, as Thomas Paine once said, “the law is king.” Our representative
republic is of laws, not of men. These signing statements are lawless,
unconstitutional, monarchical, and treasonous.
2. NATIONAL DECEPTION
The Bush and
Cheney administration deceives our nation by misrepresenting bills and acts.
For example, the “healthy forests initiative” allows logging companies to cut
down trees in our national forests. The “Medicare prescription drug,
improvement, and modernization act” was pushed by drug lobbyists (funded by
over a hundred million dollars a year) and was seriously more expensive than
the numbers given to Congress for their vote. The “patriot act” is antithetical
to the basic principles and protections specified in our Constitution—the very
basis of our country.
3. OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
The Bush and
Cheney administration does not allow the Justice Department, the Attorney
General, or the Surgeon General to do their jobs impartially. Rather, the
administration treats them as if they should be cronies of the administration.
Take, as evidence, the U.S. attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico. He
reported that he was pressured by government officials to indict prominent
Democrats before the 2006 elections. After he rejected this pressure, the
administration approved his firing.
Further, the
Bush and Cheney administration pardons itself, as shown by the case involving
of Scooter Libby, a member of the administration. Such self-pardoning gives the
administration an incentive for their own secret, unaccountable, and limitless
corruption. All the administration members have to do is to not say a word;
thwarting even congressional investigations becomes as easy as just saying
something inane, like “presidential privilege.”
“We the
people…do ordain and establish government”—“of the people, by the people, for
the people.” Transparency is the United States’ constitutional spirit, not
Bush’s preposterous privilege. We the people have a right to know. We the
people pay the salary of our government; it is accountable to us. We the people
ultimately decide if what our government is doing is appropriate and wise. We
the people have a representative republic, not a secretive monarchy.
4. UNWARRANTED SEARCHES AND SEIZURES
The Bush and
Cheney administration has allowed itself to spy on United States
citizens—on
their Internet activities, their e-mails, their phone calls, their standard
mail, their library records, their bank accounts, their schooling records,
their hotel and hospital records, and their credit card records—without a court
order or a warrant.
This is an
obvious violation of our Constitution, as clearly specified in the Bill of
Rights: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.”
5. UNCONSTITUTIONAL IMPRISONMENT
The Bush and
Cheney administration has declared that it can seize and indefinitely imprison
United States citizens without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of the
charges, without notifying their families, without even as much as allowing
them to make a phone call.
This, again, is
in direct contradiction to our Constitution. The Bill of Rights is clear:
“No
person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, …nor be deprived of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.
Winston
Churchill spoke about such abuses: “The power of the executive to cast a man
into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly
to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the
foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”
6. TORTURING HUMANS
The Bush and
Cheney administration has directed the United States—at Abu Ghraib, at
Guantanamo, and at secret prisoncamps in foreign countries—to torture people,
the majority of who, the Red Cross has reported, were mistakenly rounded up:
they are innocent. Attempting to evade national and international law, the
administration has labeled prisoners as “unlawful enemy
combatants” (another
wily chimera of deception conjured by the administration’s house of smoke and
mirrors).
Torturing
people has long been known to produce false confessions and bad intelligence.
It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Convention
Against Torture, our own laws against torture, and even our
Constitution’s Bill
of Rights, which does not appear to limit itself to just our citizens, it
reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor
cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
The
administration’s policy of torturing people has injured not only the reputation
and standing of the United States but also its very spirit. And consider this:
If even the United States tortures prisoners, what will happen to our soldiers
when they get captured?
7. DERELICTION OF DUTY
The Bush and Cheney administration is guilty of several
horrendous derelictions of duty. Take,
for example, the administration’s duty regarding Hurricane Katrina. Three years
before this hurricane, the Bush administration was warned by James Lee Witt,
the director of FEMA, that the administration’s policies were making FEMA so
weak that it would not be able respond in the event of a catastrophe.
Three days
before Hurricane Katrina hit, the administration was sent dire warnings that if
the hurricane followed its projected path, the levees protecting New Orleans
could break, flooding the city and risking the lives of thousands of people.
After the administration’s appalling response to the Hurricane Katrina
catastrophe, Bush said: “Nobody could have predicted that the levees would
break.”
Another example
is the administration’s duty regarding the events that led up to 9/11. FBI
director Thomas J. Pickard repeatedly gave John Ashcroft, Bush’s chief law
enforcement officer in charge of counterterrorism, reports in the summer of
2001 about several warning signs (related to the attacks of 9/11) that were
being picked up by the FBI. One of these warning signs was that Osama bin Laden
had Islamic extremists training in commercial flight schools in the U.S. Thomas
Pickard even testified that Ashcroft angrily told him he did not want to hear
this information anymore.
The CIA was
also frantically trying to communicate warnings that an attack on the United
States by al-Qaeda was imminent. George Tenet, the director of the CIA, said
that these warnings were blown off by Bush’s national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice. Going directly to the President, the CIA gave Bush a report
with the clear and present danger obvious in even its title: “Bin Laden
determined to strike in U.S.” According to journalist Ron Suskind,
Bush’s
response to the CIA briefer personally handing Bush this report was: “All
right. You’ve covered your ass now.” Bush did not even ask any follow-up
questions or bring the FBI and CIA together to collaborate about all these
extraordinary warnings—at least, not until after the tragedy of 9/11.
The above
evidence seems to suggest a complicity between Bush and Cheney’s administration
and 9/11’s planning.
As horrific as
9/11 was, however, it was not as horrendous as the downstream results of the
administration misleading our country into the War on Iraq. Well before this
war, our intelligence community made it clear to the administration that Iraq
was actually hostile to al-Qaeda and primarily harmless to our national
security. Further, the intelligence community told the administration that a
war in Iraq would likely increase support for Islamic fundamentalism, make deep
divisions in Iraqi society, create high levels of internal violent conflict,
and produce guerrilla warfare against our soldiers.
Disregarding
this intelligence, the Bush and Cheney administration went on to produce
erroneous and misleading propaganda. In 2002, Bush alleged: “You cannot
distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam. … The true threat facing our country
is an al-Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam.” Cheney said “there is
overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi
government.” And Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations,
claimed a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist
network.”
These claims,
combined with the administration’s constant assertions of Iraq’s nuclear
ambitions and “weapons of mass destruction,” gave the American people but
little choice than to acquiesce: the Bush and Cheney administration purported
to have a monopoly on all the relevant information. Beset by all the propaganda
spewing forth from the Bush and Cheney administration, our country was misled
into the War on Iraq.
Based on July
2007 data, the cost of this war has been staggering. The cost to U.S. citizens
has been more than four hundred billion dollars (if not trillions of dollars in
the long term). The cost to the people of Iraq has been the destruction of
their country, an untold number of wounded, and over half a million dead. The
cost to our soldiers has been more than 26,000 wounded and 3,600 dead. And all
these costs are continuing to escalate.
Due to the War
on Iraq, the international stature and military readiness of United States has
been steadily decreasing while the international stature and power of al-Qaeda
has been steadily increasing. The War on Iraq, in fact, is a bonanza for
al-Qaeda. This war has distracted our military and political focus from
al-Qaeda’s headquarters, which used to be their one and only significant
concentration. In Iraq, a new, huge, and evolving breeding ground for
terrorists has been created by the War on Iraq—by far, the most powerful
recruitment devise ever found by al-Qaeda.
(In spite of
such warnings and costs, we were fooled into the War on Iraq. Could there be a
reason, a motive, why? Spookily, due to this war, Halliburton has gained over
10,000,000,000 dollars worth of no-bid government contracts, has more is than
50,000 employees in Iraq, where billions of U.S. dollars in the hands of U.S.
authorities have somehow gone unaccountably missing, and has had connections
with the Bush family and fellow Bonesmen as well as with Dick Cheney, who, just
prior to becoming the U.S. Vice President, was Halliburton’s CEO and who has
received substantial money from Halliburton since. Also, since oil prices have
roughly doubled during the War on Iraq, the oil industry has seriously
benefited, which is Bush’s family business. ExxonMobil, for example, who
provides Bush with major donations and most of his information on climate
change, made more profit in 2006 than any corporation in U.S. history.)
Let me try to
summarize the above categories. The administration has shown their contempt of
law by unconstitutional “signing statements”. The Bush and Cheney
administration has pushed bills and acts in the interest of corporate lobbyists
by deceiving Congress and the American people. The administration has
obstructed the justice done not only by their administration but also by the
checks and balances our Founding Fathers intended to protect against secrecy,
lawlessness, and corruption from within the administration. The administration
has violated the Bill of Rights by allowing the spying on and the imprisonment
of United States citizens without a warrant. The administration has violated
national law, international law, and our Constitution by allowing the torturing
of humans to take place in the name of the United States. And, finally, the
administration has been derelict of duty by their actions and inactions in the
events leading up to Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the War on Iraq.
Bill Clinton
was impeached because he lied about his sex life. The case for impeaching Bush
and Cheney is obvious, overwhelming, and undeniable.
I know that
Bush has tried to hide behind his military role of Commander in Chief,
but don’t let that fool you.
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was very clear about this: “No penance
would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a President
can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming his military
role. Our government has ample authority under the Constitution to take those
steps which are genuinely necessary for our security. At the same time, our
system demands that government act only on the basis of measures that have been
the subject of open and thoughtful debate in Congress and among the American
people, and that invasions of the liberty or equal dignity of any individual
are subject to review by courts which are open to those affected and
independent of the government which is curtailing their freedom.”
And President
Theodore Roosevelt was a little more succinct: “No man is above the law, and no
man is below it.”
Bush and Cheney
have squandered and disrespected the executive branch of our country for far
too long. The result has been a waking nightmare for the American people. Bush
and Cheney must be held accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors
against our country, against our Constitution, and against the American people.
The President
of the United States is supposed to be a representative of the American people,
not their dictator. He must present objective and balanced facts for us to
judge fairly: that is what a democracy is all about. Giving one-sided,
misleading, and erroneous propaganda in order to manipulate the Congress and
the American people is the sure mark of a demagogue and is treason against our
country.
Bush and
Cheney’s brazen abuses are happening on your watch: you must respond. You must
advocate and push for impeachment. The highest office of our country must not
be left secret, unaccountable, and lawless.
We need to move on and try to clean up the catastrophic messes that Bush and Cheney have created. If allowed to continue, Bush and Cheney would only make things worse. Rather, to start to regain the respect of the world, we must impeach both Bush and Cheney.
Please do all
in your power to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Please fulfill the
oath of office that you swore to uphold: to support and defend the Constitution
of the United States. We the people, we need your help.
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Resources:
•
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07132007/watch.html
•
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/video_popups/pop_vid_impeachment1-1.html
•
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/video_popups/pop_vid_impeachment1-2.html
To find and
contact your congressional representatives. Put in your zip code or a
representative’s name (like Pelosi, Obama, or Clinton) at the left of the http://www.vote-smart.org/ web page.
Then, click on their name and, at the middle-right in their personal page,
click on their “Washington, D.C. Webmail” link. Just cut and paste the above
letter or write your own.
We must each take responsibility and act: to take our country back.