Bush's Impeachable Offense:

Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What's missing is the political will to impeach him.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,391808,00.html


From Information Clearing House

--------

Ivan Eland
Tue Dec 20, 2005 00:51

George W. Bush's Impeachable Offenses
December 19, 2005
Ivan Eland
http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1639

Several recent presidents could have been impeached for selected unconstitutional or illegal actions during their presidencies. But the sitting president, George W. Bush, may win the prize for committing the most impeachable offenses of any recent president.

Yet when one thinks of bad behavior leading down the road to possible impeachment, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind first. Although Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with an intern and then lying about it to a grand jury, a better case could have been made to impeach him for conducting an unconstitutional war over Kosovo without approval by Congress. The articles of Nixon’s impeachment centered on his use of illegal surveillance methods against political opponents and obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress in covering it up. His launching of an unconstitutional war in Cambodia without congressional approval was equally serious, but was left out of the articles. Curiously, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s predecessor, also used illegal surveillance activities against political rivals, but was not impeached.

Ronald Reagan, who is now a celebrated past president and icon of conservatives, justifiably feared impeachment for the Iran-Contra affair. He knowingly violated the Arms Export Control Act, a criminal statute, and sold arms to radical supporters of terrorists. His administration also unconstitutionally violated a congressional prohibition on providing money and support to the Nicaraguan Contra fighters. The Reagan administration’s violation of the Boland Amendment stuck a knife in the heart of the checks and balances system in the U.S. Constitution by circumventing Congress’s most important power—the appropriation of public monies.

George W. Bush is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, but may have left more tracks. For starters, invading another country on false pretenses is grounds for impeachment. Also, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution essentially says that the people have the right to be secure against unreasonable government searches and seizures and that no search warrants shall be issued without probable cause that a crime has been committed. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that warrants for national security wiretaps be authorized by the secret FISA court. The law says that it is a crime for government officials to conduct electronic surveillance outside the exclusive purviews of that law or the criminal wiretap statute. President Bush’s authorization of the monitoring of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA) without even the minimal protection of FISA court warrants is clearly unconstitutional and illegal. Executive searches without judicial review violate the unique checks and balances that the nation’s founders created in the U.S. government and are a considerable threat to American liberty. Furthermore, surveillance of Americans by the NSA, an intelligence service rather than a law enforcement agency, is a regression to the practices of the Vietnam-era, when intelligence agencies were misused to spy on anti-war protesters—another impeachable violation of peoples’ constitutional rights by LBJ and Nixon.

President Bush defiantly admits initiating such flagrant domestic spying but contends that the Congress implicitly authorized such activities when it approved the use of force against al Qaeda and that such actions fit within his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief. But the founders never intended core principles of the Constitution to be suspended during wartime. In fact, they realized that it was in times of war and crisis that constitutional protections of the people were most at risk of usurpation by politicians, who purport to defend American freedom while actually undermining it.

The Bush administration’s FBI has also expanded its use of national security letters to examine the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans who are not suspected of being involved in terrorism or even illegal acts.

Apparently the president is also taking us back to the Vietnam era by monitoring anti-war protesters. Information on peaceful anti-war demonstrations has apparently found its way into Pentagon databases on possible threats to U.S. security.

Finally, the president’s policies on detainees in the “war on terror” probably qualify as impeachable offenses. The Bush administration decided that the “war on terror” exempted it from an unambiguous criminal law and international conventions (which are also the law of the land) preventing torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. An American president permitting torture is both disgraceful and ineffective in getting good information from those held. Furthermore, the administration concocted the fictitious category of “enemy combatants” to deprive detainees of the legal protections of either the U.S. courts or “prisoner-of-war” status. The administration then tried to detain these enemy combatants, some of them American citizens, indefinitely without trial, access to counsel, or the right to have courts to review their cases.

All of these actions are part of President Bush’s attempt to expand the power of presidency during wartime—as if the imperial presidency hadn’t been expanded enough by his recent predecessors. President Bush usually gets the Attorney General or the White House Counsel to agree with his usurpation of congressional and judicial powers, but, of course, who in the executive is going to disagree with their boss? According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration describes the president’s war making power under the Constitution as “plenary”—meaning absolute. The founders would roll over in their graves at this interpretation of a document that was actually designed to limit the presidential war power, resulting from their revulsion at the way European monarchs easily took their countries to war and foisted the costs—in blood and treasure—on their people. Conservative Bob Barr, a former Congressman from Georgia who was quoted in the Post, said it best: “The American people are going to have to say, ‘Enough of this business of justifying everything as necessary for the war on terror.’ Either the Constitution and the laws of this country mean something or they don’t. It is truly frightening what is going on in this country.” Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Director of the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1639


Rep. John Lewis Congressman calls for Bush impeachment
http://www.house.gov/johnlewis/index.shtml


http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=96804;show_parent=1



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo

http://www.boxer.senate.gov/news/record.cfm?id=249975

Tue Dec 20, 2005 01:17

Senator says she's asked for opinions on Bush impeachment

RAW STORY
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Senator_says_shes_asked_for_opinions_1219.html

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has become the first in the Senate to raise consideration of impeachment of President George W. Bush for authorizing spying on Americans without warrants, RAW STORY has learned.

In a release issued this evening, Boxer said she's asked "four presidential scholars" for their opinion on impeachment after former White Housel counsel John Dean -- made famous by his role in revealing the Watergate tapes -- asserted that President Bush had 'admitted' to an 'impeachable offense.'

Boxer isn't the first congressmember today to float the word. Earlier today, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said Bush should be impeached if he broke the law in the spying program. The liberal California senator has tangled with Bush before -- earlier this year, she challenged the president's Ohio electoral votes.

Boxer's statement, acquired by RAW STORY, follows.

BOXER ASKS PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARS ABOUT FORMER WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL’S STATEMENT THAT BUSH ADMITTED TO AN ‘IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE’

Washington, D.C.– U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today asked four presidential scholars for their opinion on former White House Counsel John Dean’s statement that President Bush admitted to an “impeachable offense” when he said he authorized the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

Boxer said, “I take very seriously Mr. Dean’s comments, as I view him to be an expert on Presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future.”

Boxer’s letter is as follows: #

On December 16, along with the rest of America, I learned that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge. President Bush underscored his support for this action in his press conference today.

On Sunday, December 18, former White House Counsel John Dean and I participated in a public discussion that covered many issues, including this surveillance. Mr. Dean, who was President Nixon’s counsel at the time of Watergate, said that President Bush is “the first President to admit to an impeachable offense.” Today, Mr. Dean confirmed his statement.

This startling assertion by Mr. Dean is especially poignant because he experienced first hand the executive abuse of power and a presidential scandal arising from the surveillance of American citizens.

Given your constitutional expertise, particularly in the area of presidential impeachment, I am writing to ask for your comments and thoughts on Mr. Dean’s statement.

Unchecked surveillance of American citizens is troubling to both me and many of my constituents. I would appreciate your thoughts on this matter as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

US SENATOR BARBARA BOXER
http://www.boxer.senate.gov/

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=96807;show_parent=1



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo

http://tinyurl.com/96r5e



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo

December 19, 2005 MEDIA ALERT: BRILLIANT FOOLS Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media

Introduction - Factory Labels

The most effective way to control people is to control their assumptions about the world. The task of propaganda is to apply power-friendly labels and make them stick - it is the key to everything. The labelling factory par excellence - the machine that applies the right labels in the right way over and over again - is the mass media system.

Activists have lambasted governments, corporations, whole industries for decades, but they are swimming against a relentless tide. As has been demonstrated so clearly in Iraq, governments and businesses can do pretty much what they like just so long as the media factory is on hand to label it better: to label away the crimes, the lies, the outrage, the desperate need for change.

The media are, and always have been, the supreme obstacle to change. But you would not know it because all media corporations apply the same potent label to such a thought: 'Unthinkable.' Who Does John Le Carré Think He Is?

Naturally enough, high-profile reputations within the mainstream tend to attract negative media labels to the extent that an individual is honest in exposing the crimes of power. This becomes particularly striking when widely celebrated talents choose to focus their energies on political dissent. Then, suddenly, the brilliant become brilliant fools - egomaniacs whose craving for yet more attention lures them into realms of inquiry beyond their competence. Expert wordsmiths become childish scribblers. Sophisticated storytellers become gauche and witless. Even world-renowned scientists are suddenly unable to grasp the most elementary principles of scientific inquiry. The power of labelling appears to be without limit.

This labelling does not involve mere disagreement. As teachers of meditation have instructed for thousands of years, the mind is most effectively trained by constant repetition reinforced by emotion. If labelling is to be effective, it is important that embarrassment, revulsion and even disgust be generated in the public mind. This ensures that the required label is fixed both intellectually and emotionally, and recalled every time the target individual is remembered, seen or heard.

An example is the novelist David Cornwell, who writes under the pseudonym John Le Carré. For decades, Le Carré received exuberant praise for his spy novels - until he started to direct fierce criticism at US-UK foreign policy.

In reviewing Le Carré's novel Absolute Friends, the Sunday Telegraph wrote:

"The poor fellow harangues us about globalisation, about George Bush, about Washington neo-conservatives... With small sense of the ridiculous, he gives us a popular novel which nods gravely at the names of such as Noam Chomsky... including, yes, John Pilger.

"What turned this much-loved entertainer into a cosmic prophet? What's eating him? Who does 'John Le Carré' think he is?" ('Unsmiley person - a new book shows the skilled thriller-writer slipping still further into the slough of gravitas,' Sunday Telegraph, December 7, 2003)

The reviewer concluded: "It is sad, but scarcely tragic... The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will be read when most of today's polemics, including those of angry old David Cornwell, are quite forgotten."

The Sunday Times commented:

"Le Carré's anger comes across as a bit too raw to work as fiction, its rhetoric more in line with a Harold Pinter column than a Graham Greene novel.

"I finished Absolute Friends hoping that this greatest of all spy novelists writes for decades more, not only so he can keep creating characters like Mundy and Sasha, but also so that he can gain a more incisive perspective on our troubling times." (Stephen Amidon, 'Dispatches from an angry old man,' Sunday Times, December 14, 2003) Swallowing Pinter's Bile

Another example is the British playwright Harold Pinter, who was this month awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature. Pinter is the first British winner since VS Naipaul in 2001.

Pinter has long been equally admired for his dramatic work and reviled for his political activism. Introducing his Nobel acceptance speech, playwright David Hare said:

"The theatre is what the British have always been good at. And nobody has so come to represent the theatre's strengths, its rigours, and its glories, as Harold Pinter." (Harold Pinter: Nobel prize speech, More4, December 10, 2005)

Reviewers speak in near-mystical terms of Pinter's brilliance. Leading theatre critic Michael Billington observed in the Guardian:

"Although he is best known as a dramatist and screenwriter, Harold Pinter is an equally remarkable director... As an actor, Pinter also possesses weight, authority and presence... Pinter's production of Joyce's Exiles was a masterpiece of psychological insight and dramatic timing." ('High-octane Harold,' The Guardian, February 5, 2005)

Pinter's use of sparse, menacing language in his drama is deemed the stuff of genius. But the labels applied to Pinter's anti-war poetry are different. These poems are "ludicrous, crass, offensive, second-rate, obscure-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness", Daniel Finkelstein declared in the Times: "The great dramatist has the right to intervene in politics, just as anyone else has. But he doesn't have the right to be taken seriously. Pinter simply has nothing interesting to say." (Finkelstein, 'Warning: what you are about to read is f****** poetic,' The Times, March 9, 2005)

Poet Don Paterson dismissed Pinter in the Guardian:

"To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how crap the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest living playwright. Because anyone can do that." (Chalotte Higgins, 'Pinter's poetry? Anyone can do it,' The Guardian, October 30, 2004)

We at Media Lens cannot say if it is true that Pinter's use of words is brilliant in his plays but absurd in his poems. But we are reminded of the treatment meted out to Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Journalists everywhere deferred to Roberts as one of the world's leading epidemiologists when he estimated millions of deaths in the Congo in 2000 and 2001. But he was judged a fool guilty of schoolboy errors when estimating 100,000 civilian deaths since the March 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq.

Simon Heffer wrote in the Daily Mail of Pinter:

"I don't begrudge Harold Pinter his Nobel prize. I have never seen why someone's political views - which in Pinter's case are verging on the barking - should disqualify them from acclaim in any field of the arts." (Heffer, 'David, don't be scared of the truth,' Daily Mail, October 15, 2005)

In The New York Times, James Traub declared that "Pinter's politics are so extreme ... they are almost impossible to parody." (Traub, 'Their Highbrow Hatred of Us,' New York Times, October 30, 2005)

Traub added, "it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would not choke on Pinter's bile".

The Times wrote that Pinter's recent output has consisted "almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict. In his anger, Pinter is as spare with logic as he once was with language". ('... The Nobel Prize...for Literature...to Harold Pinter...Hmmm...,' Pause For Thought, The Times, October 14, 2005)

Tony Allen-Mills lamented in the Sunday Times:

"Among this year's Nobel laureates are several American scientists who are being rewarded for brilliant work. Yet their achievements appear destined to be overshadowed by a rant from a bolshie Brit." (Tony Allen-Mills, 'This Pinter guy could turn into a pain,' Sunday Times, November 6, 2005)

The Mirror reported Pinter's Nobel prize speech with the headline: "Pinter rant at 'brutal' US policy." (Mirror, December 8, 2005)

In the Independent, Johann Hari wrote an article titled: 'Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize - The only response to his Nobel rant (and does anyone doubt it will be a rant?) will be a long, long pause.' (Hari, The Independent, December 6, 2005)

It is significant that Hari described Pinter's speech as a "rant" before it had even been delivered - the label exists independently of the work, indeed of the author, in question. To subject power to serious, rational challenge is by definition to "rant". Hari commented:

"Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he has been relentlessly contrarian, kicking out violently against anything that might trigger his rage that day."

This is the standard, Soviet-style assertion that critics of power are afflicted by psychological disorder, with the concocted 'sins' of power randomly selected as a focus for neurotic ire.

Compare and contrast the above with a comparable dismissal in the Observer by Jay Rayner. The title of the article was 'Pinter of Discontent'. The subtitle read: 'Hated Pinochet; loathed Thatcher; doesn't like America; deplores Nato; is disgusted when his play doesn't get a West End run. Good old Harold - he's always bitching about something.' (Rayner, 'Pinter of discontent,' The Observer, May 16, 1999)

Rayner referred to Pinter's obsessive "bitching" nearly thirty times, using language like: "raging", "sound and fury", "growling", "outraged", "attacking", "hostility", "rowing", "ever ready to pick a fight", "yelling", "barracking", "fury" (again), "raging" (again).

Charles Spencer also pointed to the 'sickly' psychological roots of Pinter's politics:

"Right through his career, he has been fascinated by the relationship between victim and oppressor, the weak and the powerful, and his spare, clenched dialogue is full of insults, piss-takes and threats. From what one hears about Pinter the man, as opposed to Pinter the playwright, he's pretty good at menace in real life as well as on the stage." (Spencer, 'Happy birthday party for Harold Pinter,' Daily Telegraph, October 14, 2005)

Spencer lamented the influence of Pinter's "adolescent politics" on his plays.

A day later, Sam Leith also focused on Pinter's "menace" and rage:

"There has always been the permanent scowl; the finger-jabbing rage; the off-the-peg bohemianism of the uniform black polo-neck; the sense of vanity begging to be punctured." (Sam Leith, 'The childish urge to tease our greatest living playwright is much too delicious to resist,' Daily Telegraph, October 15, 2005)

One of us, David Edwards, has met Pinter several times. Below, we have provided a link to the full transcript of an interview Edwards conducted with Pinter in his London office in 1999. We invite readers to judge for themselves the truth of Pinter's "rabid", "barking", "adolescent" politics. Is he someone who "simply has nothing interesting to say"? Is he "as spare with logic as he once was with language"? Consider the claims of irrational rage, of extremist bile. Notice the rationality and precision of Pinter's political analysis. Notice the responses of one of the world's most famous writers - regularly denounced for his aggression and intolerance - to ideas and suggestions proposed by a younger and almost completely unknown writer.

To compare the above flood of insults and smears with what follows, we believe, is a revelation. To consider the robotically consistent nature of the smears - and how we find ourselves assuming that there must be something to them - reveals much about how freedom of expression is crushed in our society.

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4799#4799

Conclusion

It is a brutal fact of modern media and politics that honesty and sincerity are not rewarded, but instead heavily punished, by powerful interests with plenty at stake. It does not matter how often the likes of Pinter, Le Carré, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are shown to be right. It does not matter how often the likes of Bush and Blair are shown to have lied in the cause of power and profits. The job of mainstream journalism is to learn nothing from the past, to treat rare individuals motivated by compassion as rare fools deserving contempt.

The benefits are clear enough: if even high-profile dissidents can be painted as wretched, sickly fools, then which reader or viewer would want to be associated with dissent? Then 'normal' - conforming, consuming, looking after 'number one' - can be made to seem healthy, balanced, sensible and sane. Historian Howard Zinn made the point well:

"Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be sceptical of someone else's description of reality." (The Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.338)

The great task of propaganda is to make dissent seem unrealistic, embarrassing, and absurd.

It is worth considering the level of honesty of even those who buck this trend to some extent. Thus Mary Riddell commented in the Observer:

"On Wednesday morning, the finest living British playwright recorded, from his wheelchair, an acceptance speech for the greatest literary prize on earth. Anyone who wished to see an allusion to the talk, played in Sweden that day, would have searched BBC schedules in vain.

"He got no mention on either of the main television news programmes. Newsnight, voracious for culture, carried nothing. Pinter's speech would have been restricted to the satellite channel, More4, had Channel 4 not decided, at the last minute, to put out a midnight digest." (Ridell, 'Prophet without honour,' The Observer, December 11, 2005)

But Riddell was careful not to give the wrong impression to media colleagues and employers standing ready with their labels. She added on Pinter:

"He was disgraceful in his misreading of Slobodan Milosevic. The Stockholm speech included the puerile satire of Pinter at his worst."

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Informant: Friends

http://www.aerztezeitung.de/docs/2005/12/16/228a0204.asp?cat=/medizin/impfen


Aus: impf-report Newsletter Nr. 26/2005

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7529/1412
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/331/7529/1412#123609
http://www.healthday.com/view.cfm?id=529590


Aus: impf-report Newsletter Nr. 26/2005