Nation Campaign to Impeach President George W. Bush

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)

The National Campaign to Impeach President George W. Bush

by Professor Francis A. Boyle

Since the U.S. Supreme Court's installation of George W. Bush as
President in January of 2001, the peoples of the world have witnessed a
government in the United States of America that demonstrates little if
any respect for fundamental considerations of international law,
international organizations, and human rights, let alone appreciation of
the requirements for maintaining international peace and security. What
the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault
upon the integrity of the international legal order by a group of men
and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian in their perception of
international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and
domestic affairs. This is not simply a question of giving or withholding
the benefit of the doubt when it comes to complicated matters of foreign
affairs and defense policies to a U.S. government charged with the
security of both its own citizens and those of its allies in Europe, the
Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific. Rather, the Bush Jr.
administration's foreign policies represent a gross deviation from those
basic rules of international deportment and civilized behavior that the
United States government had traditionally played the pioneer role in
promoting for the entire world community. Even more seriously, in many
instances specific components of the Bush Jr. administration's foreign
policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well-recognized
principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, and in
particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the
Nuremberg Principles.

Depending upon the substantive issues involved, those international
crimes typically include but are not limited to the Nuremberg offenses
of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well
as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1907
Hague Regulations on land warfare, torture, disappearances, and
assassinations. In addition, various members of the Bush Jr.
administration committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these
substantive offenses that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and
Principles were international crimes in their own right: viz., planning,
preparation, solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt,
aiding and abetting, etc. Of course the great irony of today's situation
is that six decades ago at Nuremberg, representatives of the U.S.
government participated in the prosecution, punishment and execution of
Nazi government officials for committing some of the same types of
heinous international crimes that members of the Bush Jr. administration
currently inflict upon people all around the world. To be sure, I
personally oppose the imposition of capital punishment upon any person
for any reason no matter how monstrous their crimes: Bush Jr., Tony
Blair, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Putin, Ariel Sharon,
my former client John Wayne Gacy, etc.

Furthermore, according to basic principles of international criminal
law, all high-level civilian officials and military officers in the U.S.
government who either knew or should have known that soldiers or
civilians under their control committed or were about to commit
international crimes, and failed to take the measures necessary to stop
them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible
for the commission of international crimes. This category of officialdom
who actually knew or at least should have known of the commission of
such substantive or inchoate international crimes under their
jurisdiction and failed to do anything about it typically includes the
Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Director of Central
Intelligence, the National Security Adviser, the Attorney General, the
Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional CINCs, and presumably the
President and Vice President. These U.S. government officials and their
immediate subordinates, among others, were personally responsible for
the commission or at least complicity in the commission of crimes
against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as specified by
the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles - at a minimum. In
international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should be
viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under
international criminal law.

Consequently, on Tuesday 11 March 2003, with the Bush Jr.
administration's war of aggression against Iraq staring the American
People, Congress and Republic in their face, Congressman John Conyers of
Michigan, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee (which has
jurisdiction over Bills of Impeachment), convened an emergency meeting
of forty or more of his top advisors, most of whom were lawyers. The
purpose of the meeting was to discuss and debate immediately putting
into the U.S. House of Representatives Bills of Impeachment against
President Bush Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft in order to
head off the impending war. Congressman Conyers kindly requested that
Ramsey Clark and I come to the meeting in order to argue the case for
impeachment.

This impeachment debate lasted for two hours. It was presided over by
Congressman Conyers, who quite correctly did not tip his hand one way or
the other on the merits of impeachment. He simply moderated the debate
between Clark and I, on the one side, favoring immediately filing Bills
of Impeachment against Bush Jr. et al. to stop the threatened war, and
almost everyone else there who were against impeachment for partisan
political reasons. Obviously no point would be served here by
attempting to digest a two-hour-long vigorous debate among a group of
well-trained lawyers on such a controversial matter at this critical
moment in American history. But at the time I was struck by the fact
that this momentous debate was conducted at a private office right down
the street from the White House on the eve of war.

Suffice it to say that most of the "experts" there opposed impeachment
not on the basis of enforcing the Constitution and the Rule of Law,
whether international or domestic, but on the political grounds that it
might hurt the Democratic Party effort to get their presidential
candidate elected in the year 2004. As a political independent, I did
not argue that point. Rather, I argued the merits of impeaching Bush
Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft under the United States
Constitution, U.S. federal laws, U.S. treaties and other international
agreements to which the United States is a party, etc. Article VI of
the U.S. Constitution provides that treaties "shall be the supreme Law
of the Land." This so-called Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution
also applies to international executive agreements concluded under the
auspices of the U.S. President such as the 1945 Nuremberg Charter.

Congressman Conyers was so kind as to allow me the closing argument in
the debate. Briefly put, the concluding point I chose to make was
historical: The Athenians lost their democracy. The Romans lost their
Republic. And if we Americans did not act now we could lose our
Republic! The United States of America is not immune to the laws of
history!

After two hours of most vigorous debate among those in attendance, the
meeting adjourned with second revised draft Bills of Impeachment sitting
on the table.

Certainly, if the U.S. House of Representatives can impeach President
Clinton for sex and lying about sex, then a fortiori the House can,
should, and must impeach President Bush Jr. for war, lying about war,
and threatening more wars. All that is needed is for one Member of
Congress with courage, integrity, principles and a safe seat to file
these currently amended draft Bills of Impeachment against Bush Jr.,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and now Attorney General Albert Gonzales, who bears
personal criminal responsibility for the Bush Jr. administration torture
scandal. Failing this, the alternative is likely to be an American
Empire abroad, a U.S. police state at home, and continuing wars of
aggression to sustain both-along the lines of George Orwell's classic
novel 1984. Despite all of the serious flaws demonstrated by successive
United States governments that this author has amply documented
elsewhere during the past quarter century as a Professor of Law, the
truth of the matter is that America is still the oldest Republic in the
world today. "We the People of the United States" must fight to keep it
that way!

[Francis A. Boyle is a Professor of Intrnatinal Law and a human rights
attorney. He is the author of "Destroying World Order" (2004, Clarity
Press).]

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