The Time for Impeachment Has Come
Sherwood Ross
www.virtualcitizens.com
2007-02-14

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/The_Time_for_Impeachment_Has_Come

Editor’s note:  While the Washington Press Corps and Congress sleeps, people outside the Beltway are moving on impeachment.  Whether they hold rallies in LA or bring articles of impeachment in their state legislatures, the people are moving.  A number of books and articles show that the case for conviction for High Crimes and Misdemeanors (crimes against the state and the people) is a slam dunk.  The Libby trial is only the latest event which repeats what we know and what Bush has said, they lied about intelligence, they knew Iraq had no WMDs and was not involved in 9/11, that he gave orders to torture and conduct illegal wiretaps.  Impeachment is not a sign of a Constitutional crisis, but a regular and expected Constitutional process!  Impeachment is a Congressional duty.  It’s in the tool kit, get it on the table.

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AMERICA! IF YOU WILL NOT IMPEACH THIS TYRANT WHO WILL YOU IMPEACH?

If you, my fellow Americans, will not demand the impeachment of the worst president in American history, a man who is a traitor to our Constitution, an instigator of unjust wars, a destroyer of worlds, a strutting global tyrant, and a threat to the very survival of human life on this planet, whom will you impeach?

G. W. Bush, this wastrel, this smirking twister of truth, this volcano of lies, this heinous torturer, this killer of innocents, this Thief-of-Baghdad, this mass murderer, this open sewer of aggressive militarism, this blot on the name of America, must be compelled by Congress and the American People to answer for his alleged and apparent crimes.

He, and every culpable member of his cabal, must be impeached and made to stand trial before the Senate for the Genocide of Iraq and countless other criminal acts.  One of the least of his crimes, ordering wiretaps without court order in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, entitles him to a five-year incarceration at Leavenworth for trampling the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure.  His most heinous crime, the War of Aggression upon Iraq, violates the United Nations Charter and other covenants to which the U.S. is signatory, a war that then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan denounced as "illegal."

Surely, Americans who are too timid to sign a petition for impeachment might well consider there are 650,000 Iraqis and thousands of nameless dead in Afghanistan who, had they lived, could have written their signatures in their own blood.  Far from being the war of self-defense it was claimed, the war on Iraq is a crime of aggression since exposed as a mechanism for stealing Iraq's oil wealth, and a war that has brought about the destruction and dismemberment of an innocent nation.  Oil and gas contracts to certain American companies have grown out of the installation of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.  Is anyone surprised?

In October, 2005, an Ipsos Public Affairs poll found 50% of the public agreed with the statement, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."  A year later a Newsweek Poll found a majority favored impeachment.  Now, thanks to the Scooter Libby trial, as new evidence comes to light each day documenting how Bush and his aides lied this nation into a criminal war of aggression, yes, just as Hitler lied when he invaded Poland, just as Stalin lied when he invaded Finland, just as Mussolini lied when he invaded Ethiopia, just as Japan lied when it invaded China, the numbers of Americans who want George W. Bush impeached is swelling by the millions.  Passively favoring impeachment, though, is not the same as actively demanding it of the Congress.

At the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia, Ben Franklin insisted on the inclusion of the impeachment provision in the name of fairness, to give the president an opportunity to defend against charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors."  Otherwise, Franklin said, the only way to remove an errant president would be to assassinate him.  Today, Americans have more urgent reason to remove Little King George from office than the Colonists had for overthrowing King George III and founding this nation.  The crimes of King George III, against the Colonists, were as nothing compared to the damage this wannabe King has visited upon Americans and the Middle East.

Abuses Exacted by a King 

Though he is not a king, George W. Bush conducts himself as one.  He has arrogated to himself sweeping kingly powers, powers seized in secret, powers stolen in the dead of night without debate, powers aggrandized with the compliance of a lied-to Congress, powers to arrest any citizen, fling the individual in jail, and then throwing away the key; powers to listen in on any private conversation; powers to order Pentagon spying on anti-war protesters and the clergy; powers to enter any home and search and seize without a warrant; powers to open and read anyone’s mail without a court order; powers to invade our library records, medical records and our financial papers; powers to nullify the Acts of Congress; powers to reach around the globe and kidnap any foreigner off any street in any country and to remove him without trial to some remote dungeon for torture; powers to scrap binding treaties; powers to invade other countries with great armies on lies and pretexts, to make war upon them, and to dragnet arrest their citizens; powers to tear people away from their native lands and their families and to remove them to distant, secret prisons without recourse to the most primary principles of law, without lawyers, without trials, without habeas corpus, without Red Cross visits, and to detain them forever and there to torture them until bodily disintegration, suicide, or death.

The faux president must also be impeached for the mass roundup and arrest of foreigners living in the United States; for the military incarceration of U.S. citizens; for violating the First Amendment rights of Americans; for violating the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions; for reinstitution of the notorious "COINTELPRO" spy program; for violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; for violating Article II of the UN Charter by crimes against peace; for violating what the UN Committee on Torture last May declared was the "ill-treatment" of detainees in violation of the international Convention Against Torture; for violating the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare; for violating the Nuremberg Charter banning the wanton devastation of a city or area; for violating the Genocide Convention by turning Iraq into a charnel house; for violation as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army Field Manual Regulation 27-10 against conspiracy to commit war crimes; for usurping the power to imprison people arbitrarily for indefinite periods by making himself judge and jury; for creating illegal secret prisons by executive order; for lowering a shroud of secrecy over the operations of the U.S. government; for willful noncompliance with the Freedom of Information Act; for failure to execute the laws including Article VI of the Constitution that holds U.S. treaties "shall be the supreme law of the land"; for resuming work on nuclear devices and reinitiating a nuclear arms race in defiance of the nuclear arms treaty; for terrorizing Iran with the threat of nuclear war; for using illegal weapons against Iraq such as white phosphorus, depleted uranium ammunition and a new type of napalm; for launching an aggressive campaign to militarize space in order to dominate the earth; for violating the Bacteriological Warfare Covenant by engaging in germ warfare research including the restoration of long dead pathogens that imperil the planet, and for the creation of delivery systems for such sinister pathogens.

Consider Our Constitutional and Moral Duty 

It is for all these reasons, and likely for treacheries and treasons yet undiscovered, the American people must stand up to their sacred obligation to demand that Congress impeach George W. Bush now!  If the American people will not do it for themselves, in the name of their sons and daughters being slain in this holocaust, we are morally obliged to do so in the name of the people of Iraq, upon whom this Sadist in the White House has hurled down a hellish rain of brimstone.

If we do not impeach this tyrant, we will deserve the low esteem that is now the veritable universal opinion about America.  If we do not impeach, we will go on living as oppressed subjects, unworthy of the name "citizens," people whose Federal government has turned us into a nation of patsies, stooges, victims, sheep, and dupes, people who make no outcry when our blood, our treasure, our time, our precious liberties, and even our dreams for a world of peace are stolen from us by this menace to humanity, this George W. Bush, this most dangerous and despicable human being ever to occupy public office in America.

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(Sherwood Ross is an American journalist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com).

Sherwood Ross
www.virtualcitizens.com