[AGL] a case for impeachment

[Harry Edwards]

The March issue of Harpers is conducting a forum called "Is There a 
Case for Impeachment?" Below is an excerpt from Lewis Lapham's essay:

[Essay]

The Case for Impeachment

Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush

Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006. An excerpt from an essay in the 
March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis H. Lapham.
A country is not only what it does—it is also what it puts up with, 
what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky
HARPER'S MAGAZINE PRESENTS

IS THERE A CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT?

A PUBLIC FORUM FEATURING:

Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine

Rep. John J. Conyers (D., Mich.), ranking member, U.S. House Judiciary 
Committee

Michael Ratner, president, Center for Constitutional Rights

Elizabeth Holtzman, member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during 
Watergate

John Dean, White House Counsel to President Nixon and author of Worse 
Than Watergate

Moderated by Sam Seder, host of "The Majority Report" on Air America 
Radio

Thursday, March 2, 8:00 p.m.

Town Hall
123 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10063

$10

Tickets are available at The Town Hall box office or through 
Ticketmaster

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) 
introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it 
to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent 
to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of 
pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, 
retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding 
grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days 
previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal 
surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or 
no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, 
some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the 
websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete 
silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in 
mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few 
propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president 
whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of 
the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last 
forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the 
Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much 
less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of 
democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by 
President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman 
intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what 
did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early 
January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter 
recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn't know.” So that two 
or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, 
Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush 
Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the 
license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present 
can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it 
escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a 
supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account 
for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of 
supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next 
November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the 
President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him 
nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow 
Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, 
their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man 
home to Texas. Conyers said:


“I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration 
can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you 
have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands 
and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I 
can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to 
be front-page news.”
Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635—not a 
high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 
pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six 
months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush 
Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime 
against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on 
evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of 
credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, 
journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and 
foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, 
the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, 
secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same 
time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from 
the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the 
report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its 
inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of 
the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen 
as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the 
absurd. Entitled “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street 
Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups 
in the Iraq War,” the Conyers report examines the administration's 
chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the 
compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal 
DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen 
of its characteristic dishonesty.

* * *

That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of 
invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of 
himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about 
seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to 
“kill my Dad,” he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre 
of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald 
Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At 
the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 
2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of 
preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon 
circulates a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field 
Contracts”; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to 
various European governments and American corporations. Six months 
later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising 
from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff 
to fetch intelligence briefings (the “best info fast...go massive; 
sweep it all up; things related and not”) that will justify an attack 
on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. 
Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, 
encounters President Bush, who tells him to “see if Saddam did this.” 
Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the 
President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, 
that “when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”

By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in 
Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs 
of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't 
convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council 
meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, “What have you got in terms of 
plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it 
secret.”

The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq 
until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of 
Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam. 
We're taking him out.” At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same 
month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled 
company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will 
attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't 
bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in 
progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to 
know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on 
New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass 
destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime 
destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the 
United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four 
batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the 
British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to 
support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international 
terrorism; “even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much 
advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons 
fronts...” A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth 
between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in 
Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of 
inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush 
Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds 
the interested parties in Washington fixing “the intelligence and the 
facts...around the policy.” The American enthusiasm for regime change, 
“undimmed” in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.

Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that 
Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs “legal 
justification” for the maneuver—something noble and inspiring to say to 
Parliament and the British public. No justification “currently exists.” 
Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which 
eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government 
currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only 
option the “wrong-footing” of Saddam. If under the auspices of the 
United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to 
show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to 
comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such 
weapons.[5]

Over the next few months, while the British government continues to 
look for ways to “wrong-foot” Saddam and suborn the U.N., various 
operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend 
to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi 
informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, 
proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned 
vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]

By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in 
its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to 
come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq 
Group hits upon the phrase “mushroom cloud” and prepares a White Paper 
describing the “grave and gathering danger” posed by Iraq's nuclear 
arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold—to magnify the fear of Saddam 
Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the 
American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the 
country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled 
patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional 
elections.[8]

* * *

The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the 
administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the 
last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva 
Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture 
individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but 
conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the 
President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have 
expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was 
either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why 
we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in 
the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and 
reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks 
to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who 
engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the 
world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth 
on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host 
of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be 
dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in 
California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen 
from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls 
strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being 
sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

* * *

The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the 
March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Notes
1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a 
matter of public record—newspaper accounts, television broadcasts 
(Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), 
magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review 
of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of 
Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George 
Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, 
David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph 
Wilson. As the congressman had said, “Everything in plain sight; it 
isn't as if we don't know.” [Back]

2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The 
Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding 
members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding “the 
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power” with a strong-minded 
“willingness to undertake military action.” Together with Rumsfeld, six 
of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first 
administration—Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national 
security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 
2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard 
Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul 
Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert 
Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded 
to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress 
appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the 
borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for 
the New American Century issued a document noting that the “unresolved 
conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification” for the 
presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]

3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in 
the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, 
remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: “From the very 
beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person 
and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it.” 
[Back]

4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense 
for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the 
September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting 
terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps 
deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]

5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as “The 
Downing Street Minutes,” were published in the Sunday Times (London) in 
May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. 
[Back]

6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and 
the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a 
well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a 
reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer 
responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, 
“The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, 
distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to 
seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I 
can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a 
President distorting critical classified information.” [Back]

7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political 
strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security 
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney's 
chief of staff. [Back]

8. Card later told the New York Times that “from a marketing point of 
view...you don't introduce new products in August.” [Back]