October 06, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

WHAT DOES IT TAKE?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table." I keep wondering why there isn't an immediate series of impeachment hearings for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. This administration makes the Nixon administration look law abiding by comparison. We learn once again that Bush lied, this time about torture. While publicly claiming that torture wasn't being used against U. S. detainees, the administration was still using torture and once again showing contempt for Congress, the American people, and the world community. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

Now, President Bush has slapped the Democrats in the face again by misleading them on his continuing policy of allowing harsh interrogations (that many would call torture) of terror suspects. Bush apparently is confident that the Democrats will swallow whatever humiliation he serves up.

The New York Times revealed on Oct. 4 that the Bush administration only pretended to repudiate earlier legal opinions that Bush had the right to abuse and torture detainees. Secret memos from 2005, which reaffirmed that right, were kept from Congress.

“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ‘abhorrent’ in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations,” the Times reported.

“But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

BUSH WANTED WAR NO MATTER WHAT

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave George W. Bush a report saying that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, which Bush dismissed as "worthless." Bush had already determined he was going to attack Iraq, kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people, stretch the U. S. military, and bleed our treasury even though Iraq did not present a threat. This commentary comes from Skeeter Sanders at www.skeeterbitesreport.com:

As millions of people around the world staged massive anti-war rallies in the streets in February 2003, President Bush vowed to push ahead with plans to invade Iraq and "get rid of" dictator Saddam Hussein "by the end of March" -- no matter what the rest of the world thought, according to secret transcripts obtained and published by a Spanish newspaper.

The president made his decision five months after he rejected as "worthless" a top-secret intelligence report -- presented to him personally by then-CIA Director George Tenet -- that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, instead relying on contrary information from a source who was later found to be unreliable, according to a new book scheduled to be published next week.

El Pais, the largest-circulation newspaper in Spain, published on September 26 what it said were previously secret transcripts of a conversation between Bush and then-Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain about the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq, while Anzar was on an official visit to the U.S. in February 2003.

The conversation took place on February 22 as Bush hosted Anzar at his Crawford, Texas ranch. The Madrid daily did not say how it obtained the previously-confidential transcripts, but did report that they were prepared by Javier Ruperez, the Spanish ambassador to the U.S.