Robert Scheer
A Firm Basis for Impeachment Robert Scheer Los Angeles Times
Wed Jul 16 21:43:28 2003
208.152.73.2

A Firm Basis for Impeachment Robert Scheer Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 15 July 2003

Does the president not read? Does his national security staff, led by
Condoleezza Rice, keep him in the dark about the most pressing issues of
the day? Or is this administration blatantly lying to the American people
to secure its ideological ends?

Those questions arise because of the White House admission that the charge
that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was excised from a Bush speech in
October 2002 after the CIA and State Department insisted it was unfounded.
Bizarrely, however, three months later - without any additional evidence
emerging - that outrageous lie was inserted into the State of the Union
speech to justify the president's case for bypassing the United Nations
Security Council, for chasing U.N. inspectors out of Iraq and for invading
and occupying an oil-rich country.

This weekend, administration sources disclosed that CIA Director George
Tenet intervened in October to warn White House officials, including deputy
national security advisor Stephen Hadley, not to use the Niger information
because it was based on a single source. That source proved to be a forged
document with glaring inconsistencies.

Bush's top security aides, led by Hadley's boss, Rice, went along with the
CIA, and Bush's October speech was edited to eliminate the false charge
that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger to create a nuclear
weapon.

We now know that before Bush's January speech, Robert G. Joseph, the
National Security Council individual who reports to Rice on nuclear
proliferation, was fully briefed by CIA analyst Alan Foley that the Niger
connection was no stronger than it had been in October. It is inconceivable
that in reviewing draft after draft of the State of the Union speech, NSC
staffers Hadley and Joseph failed to tell Rice that the president was about
to spread a big lie to justify going to war. On national security, the buck
doesn't stop with Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and
his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence
data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA's
concerns were backed by the State Department's conclusion that "the claims
of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious."

For her part, Rice has tried to fend off controversy by claiming ignorance.
On "Meet the Press" in June, Rice claimed, "We did not know at the time -
no one knew at the time, in our circles - maybe someone knew down in the
bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts
and suspicions that this might be a forgery." On Friday, Rice admitted that
she had known the State Department intelligence unit "was the one that
within the overall intelligence estimate had objected to that sentence" and
that Secretary of State Colin Powell had refused to use the Niger document
in his presentation to the U.N. because of what she described as
long-standing concerns about its credibility. But Rice also knew the case
for bypassing U.N. inspections and invading Iraq required demonstrating an
imminent threat. The terrifying charge that Iraq was hellbent on developing
nuclear weapons would do the trick nicely.

However, with the discrediting of the Niger buy and the equally dubious
citation of a purchase of aluminum tubes (which turned out to be
inappropriate for the production of enriched uranium), one can imagine the
disappointment at the White House. There was no evidence for painting
Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.

The proper reaction should have been to support the U.N. inspectors in
doing their work in an efficient and timely fashion. We now know, and
perhaps the White House knew then, that the inspectors eventually would
come up empty-handed because no weapons of mass destruction program existed
- not even a stray vial of chemical and biological weapons has been
discovered. However, that would have obviated the administration's key
rationale for an invasion, so lies substituted for facts that didn't exist.

And there, dear readers, exists the firm basis for bringing a charge of
impeachment against the president who employed lies to lead us into war.
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Constitutional Basis for Impeachment
... Basis | Constitutional Basis for Impeachment The US Constitution is the ... be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason ... the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall ...
Description: Quotes from the Constitution and a brief interpretation.
http://www.impeachbush.tv/impeach/basis.html
 
Preemptive impeachment
"We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression," says International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By contrast, Prof. Boyle wants merely to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft for their plans to invade Iraq and create a police state in America.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Ramares010403/ramares010403.html