Tag: impeachment

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

President Barack Obama took this oath on January 20, 2009 as prescribed by the US Constitution, Article II, Section 1:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

That includes a legal obligation to enforce the laws of this country and prosecuting the criminals who break those laws, even if that criminal is another President.

Rachel Maddow tiptoed around a bit when she that Bush-era torture was “probably a war crime,” while discussing the recently released memo by Philip Zelikow, a former Bush counselor. I suspect she did so as to not find herself on the unemployment line.

Rachel Maddow relays the news that the original Philip Zelikow memo advising the Bush administration that waterboarding is torture and such, illegal, has been found despite Bush administration efforts to destroy every copy. Will new proof that the Bush administration did not act in good faith when it tortured detainees push the Obama administration to prosecute? Will the Republican Party, once principled against torture, outflank Obama and call for prosecutions?

It was probably a war crime, not to put a fine point on it. And that is something we are legally obligated to prosecute in this country. This opens the whole question of legal liability for torture that was administered by the previous administration. The Democratic Party will be split by this, because the White House politically doesn’t want to deal with this, even if it’s wrong and even if they know it’s wrong. And the Republican Party still has to figure out who it is. Is the Republican Party still the party of John McCain, which now has the opportunity to outflank the president on a matter of principle here? Where the Whit house knows what the right thing to do is, but they don’t want do it. Or is the Republican Party still the party of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney who think torture is OK?

Gaius Publius at AMERICAblog  doesn’t think this is going away. He also wonders why the Obama administration didn’t pursue it and links to an article written by Andrew Kreig, executive director of Justice Integrity Project, on September 13, 2011:

President-Elect Obama’s advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would “revolt” and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama’s top transition advisers.

University of California at Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama’s administration, revealed the team’s thinking in moderating a forum on 9/11 held by his law school (also known as Boalt Hall)[..]

When a citizen, Susan Harmon, who opposed torture, questioned Dean Ederly on the inclusion of Professor John C. Yoo, former Bush Justice Department attorney who authored a memo justifying torture, to Boalt Hall’s faculty, this is what happened:

Harman’s account of her actions at the Boalt Hall forum, which focused on such goals as human rights and the rule of law:

“I said I was overwhelmed by the surreality of Yoo being on the law faculty . . . when he was single-handedly responsible for the three worst policies of the Bush Administration. They all burbled about academic freedom and the McCarthy era, and said it isn’t their job to prosecute him.

Duh.

Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he’d been party to very high level discussions during Obama’s transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they’ve done anyhow).”

Harman says that she approached Edley privately after the forum closed and said she appreciated that Obama might have been in danger but felt that he “bent over backwards” to protect lawbreakers within the Bush administration. She recalled, “He shrugged and said they will never be prosecuted, and that sometimes politics trumps rule of law.”

The last I checked waterboarding was still considered torture and torture was still a crime. Obama could well become a target for impeachment proceedings should the Democrats lose control of the Senate and more seats in the House. So long as the Obama administration refuses to prosecute former Bush administration officials, as well as, Bush and Cheney, they themselves are complicit in war crimes as per established laws and treaties of this country and the oaths that they took to uphold those laws and the Constitution.  

This is the panel the Dog has been waiting for! Torture and accountability. On the panel we have Vince Warren,. Rep. Jerry Nadler, Marcy Wheeler and Melisa Goodman. The Dog is going to try to live blog this for those playing our home game.  

Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s on going letter writing campaign for accountability and the rule of law for the apparent Bush Era torture programs. The premise of this campaign is the Dog will write a letter to one of the key decision makers (with carbon copies to others) and provide the links to reach these worthies. Your job, gentle reader, is to either use the letter as a jumping off point for your own letter, or just cut and paste the letter and send it off under your own signature.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

Whew.  Can't believe I just wrote that headline. 

 For all this time, we have been told to keep our powder dry.  That he's on our side, got our best interests at heart.   For all this time, the focus and outrage has been directed to Bush/Cheney. There is plenty of evidence he's doing the bidding of the military industrial complex, and not the bidding of his constituents. 

Obama has been in office for just over 4 months.   In that time, he has had the time to:

1) Extend warrantless wiretapping, and even extend his claim to that power

2) Defend government secrecy – even exceeding Bush's claims of executive power.

3)  Publish evidence of Bush era war crimes

4) Declare theintention not to prosecute said war crimes

5) Close, then not close GTMO

-calling the detainees 'too dangerous to let go'

6) Reinstall military commissions for 'dangerous terrorists we CAn prosecute'

 7) Continue unabated the TARP program, while doing little to save people's homes from foreclosure.

8) Bail out giant carmakers without requiring the money be used to support jobs at home.

9) Kept key Bushies like Gates on – keeping the previous military structure in place so propaganda can leak out just like before. 

10) Asserted the intent to keep Don Seigelman in jail.

How on earth does this look different, other than the party label, than the last 8 years? 

From The People’s E-mail Network (“The Pen”):

Congress Must Debate The Implications Of A Bush Self-Pardon

Many people have been asking us, “Could Bush actually pardon himself?”.  Would it be despicable?  Sure it would.  Would it be shameless and cowardly?  Yes, that and that too.  But all those adjectives fit Bush like O.J.’s glove before it shrunk from being soaked completely in blood.  Which means he is absolutely is planning on doing it.

And only impeachment could stop it.  We need to talk about this.  We need Congress to talk about this.  And Congress is in session this week, so we need you to speak out this week while there is still time.

Impeach Now Action Page:  

Tens of thousands of you submitted the action page on this last week.  Do it again.  Please speak out again while we still can.  There is already a drum beat in the right wing media calling on Bush to pardon his whole administration.  Only our voices can raise the price of such action so that there would be real consequences.

We have not given up, and will never give up hope on justice.  We will be taking delivery of another huge shipment of the “Impeach Both!!!” caps that are still so popular.  But this might be the last batch.  So if you want to demonstrate your support for impeachment, please request yours now from the return page of the action page submission.

Impeach Now Action Page

Will Congress now act?  That is not the yardstick of the worth of our activism.  We speak out because we must speak out, whether we are heeded or not.  Let history record that we spoke out until the last minute to the eternal shame of those who did not.  Because when enough of us speak out at once, the worst thing that can possibly happen is that we are building the progressive base for the REAL change of the future.

So Bush most certainly is planning on pardoning himself.  And all the right wing lock down ideologues in the corporate controlled media will call it “healing”.  Let’s all make nice with war criminals?  Shall we all make nice with the gang rape of our economy, our environment and our Constitution?  We think not.

And one more thing.  You know that come January 20th the right wing will start calling for the impeachment of our new president, over a endless litany of the most ridiculous of trivial trifles.  In fact it has already started even though he has not even taken office.  If they are so hot on impeaching someone, let them speak out now, when it truly is called for, or shut the hell up in 65 days.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

There’s more!  

A comment by Shahryar

my fantasy remains this….  

“I, Barack Obama…..blah blah blah….so help me God”

pause….Obama turns and points to Bush and Cheney and says “Arrest these men!”

This ‘fantasy’ is, By the Blessed Blinded Eyes of Justice, what SHOULD happen.

The President of The United States has broken the Law, and we are (in theory) a Nation of Laws, not a Nation of Men. Justice should know no boundaries of rank or privilege. True justice does not.

Be we do not live in a world of true justice. We live in a world of conditional justice, where there is one form of ‘justice’ for the poor and disadvantaged and differently colored, and another justice for the rich and privileged and connected.

I shall not address here, the ridiculous claim that one commenter med that there have been no crimes committed or no evidence fit to present for prosecution. Our President is guilty. Guilty of domestic spying by his own admission, and guilty of torture by his signed authorizations. Retroactive immunity passed by a cowardly and complicit Congress does not alleviate that guilt, it merely adds accessories. Corrupting the Department of Justice to the point of your henchmen, minions and co-conspirators there to the point that they will not allow even an investigation by serving subpoenas does not obliterate his guilt, it merely obscures it.

Or…perhaps…he is not. Perhaps the aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation in direst contravention of the Nuremberg accords was…an accident. Perhaps they really believed that attaching electrodes to a prisoners genitals or beating them to death while they were chained and helpless was just…a misunderstanding. perhaps the treasonous exposure of an entire CIA counter-terrorism unit for spite and politics was ….hmmmmm, even my imagination can’t come up with anything for that.

But….This is why we have TRIALS.

Of all of the egregious acts committed by the Bush Administration, there is one that stands out as a symbol of every wrong turn our nation took in his blessedly ending era. The use of the word Homeland to describe the Land of the Free. The unmistakable fascistic overtones simply ring of despotism and tyranny. The mind almost inevitably hears the echoes of Hitler’s Fatherland and Stalin’s Motherland. Though of course we only flirted with that level of jingoistic totalitarian reality, the fear based propaganda that took hold after 9/11 was shocking in its depth….and in the way it was embraced…here in the greatest democracy ever established. Here in the Land of the Free. We were asked…no, we were TOLD that we were required to give up our individual Constitutional Rights for the good of the State. There are many names and terms for that requirement, for that abrigement of our hard won rights. None of them contain the word Freedom.

Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act. All direct assaults on our freedom, on what America stands for, on what our veterans fought for. The fight for the rights of the individual in opposition to all forms of tyranny. That is the founding principle of America. America IS the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, it IS The Declaration of Independence…from tyranny.

With the election of Barack Obama, we can now see the light through the trees on the road back to the Land of the Free, but we are far from out of the woods yet.

When people talk of the crimes and excesses of the Bush Administration now, they talk in the past tense. But these crimes and excesses are still here. We still live under them, we still live with them, every day. The rights that were abridged under the Patriot Act are still abridged. The para-military powers that were given to the intelligence agencies and agencies like ICE and the DEA are still in effect. The government can still search your home without a warrant and without even notifying you. They can still search your medical and financial records without you knowing as well.

YOUR Government is still spying on YOU.

And for all we know….the CIA is STILL torturing people in our name.