-Caveat Lector- Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 10:49:58 -0600 From: Neil Sapper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Posted by Ray Stephens) Friends, I was drawn into a cocktail conversation yesterday evening about "the trial." As with all of the talking head shows on TV, I listened to the usual litany about sex and non-impeachable offenses and I made an ineffectual response. I still do not know where I come down on this matter. However, sitting in my In Box here at home was a piece by the New Left historian Howard Zinn, but I hadn't digested it and I was unable to cite it as a rejoinder to the cocktail party expert on impeachment. Further, last week, the venerable Gus Seligmann offered one interpretation of the effort to convict and remove William Jefferson Clinton as President of the United States on both H-Texas and H-Survey. Unfortunately, I do not know the provenance of the Zinn statements. Possibly they are the stuff of urban legend on the 'Net (Kurt Vonnegut's "commencement speech"), but Zinn's observations (I think) are another view of the Clinton presidential legacy. If a listmember can offer a source or a correction to the attribution to Howard Zinn, that would be a good thing. In the meantime, here is another take on President Clinton that I have not seen elsewhere. Neil Sapper Amarillo College _______________________________ Ten Real Reasons to Impeach Clinton by Howard Zinn We all seem to have lost our sense of proportion. Why are the political leaders of the United States and the major media talking of impeaching Bill Clinton for lies about sex, surely not the most important sins of his administration? If Clinton is to be impeached, why do it for frivolous reasons? I can think of at least ten reasons to impeach him, for acts far more serious than his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky or his lies to Kenneth Starr. I am speaking of matters of life and death for large numbers of people. 1. Clinton approved, very early in his first administration, an armed attack on the compound of a religious sect in Waco, Texas, under circumstances which clearly did not warrant losing patience with negotiations and choosing a military solution. As a result of the attack, eighty-one people died, including men, women, and children. 2. Also in that first year in office, in June of 1993, he sent bombers over Baghdad, claiming it was in response to a planned assassination of former President George Bush, visiting the Middle East. The "evidence" came from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police. The U.S. claimed to be aiming at "Intelligence Headquarters", but the bombs fell on a suburban neighborhood in Baghdad. At least six people were killed, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband. 3. While land mines strewn around the world continue to kill or cripple thousands of people each year, and although fifteen retired generals endorsed an immediate ban on all antipersonnel mines, the Clinton Administration refused to go along with a Canadian proposal for such a ban. 4. In Somalia, in June of 1993, with the country in a civil war, and people desperate for food, Clinton ordered a military operation to capture a popular Somali leader, General Adid. The result was a thousand Somali casualties, soldiers and civilians, and a number of American Rangers. On June 15, according to the Associated Press, a U.S. helicopter fired a missile into a residential area of Mogadishu, wounding 12 Somalis. Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley later said the military operation was "an unfortunate policy decision". 5. The Clinton Administration continued the embargoes on Cuba and Iraq, causing widespread misery in Cuba for lack of food and medicine, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq according to U.N. statistics. When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked if the goal of putting pressure on Saddam Hussein was worth the lives of large numbers of Iraqi children, she responded: "we think it is worth it." 6. Claiming that he was introducing "welfare reform", President Clinton in the summer of 1996 signed a law to end the federal government's guarantee, created under the New Deal, of financial help to poor families with dependent children. The Los Angeles Times reported: "As ... families battle a new five-year limit on cash benefits...health experts anticipate a resurgence of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases...." 7. The Clinton Administration continued to spend $250 billion a year for the military, putting into jeopardy the lives and health of large numbers of Americans. Clinton was willing to spend two billion dollars each for the "stealth bomber" (the total cost would be 42 billion dollars) while putting perhaps a million people in jeopardy by taking away their federal benefits. 8. With millions of people either homeless or living under desperate conditions and needing low-cost housing, the President in 1996 signed the "Crime Bill", which allocated eight billion dollars to build new prisons. 9. Early in his first term Clinton signed legislation cutting funds for state resource centers that supplied lawyers to indigent prisoners. The result, according to Bob Herbert writing in the New York Times was that a man facing the death penalty in Georgia had to appear at a habeas corpus proceeding without a lawyer. 10. More recently, this summer of 1998, Clinton, wanting to react to the terrorist bombing of American embassies in Africa, bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan. He claimed that the Sudanese target was a plant producing nerve gas, but could not produce convincing evidence for this. Almost immediately, it became clear that the plant, contrary to the American claim, had been producing half the medicines used in Uganda. People there would die as a result of that bombing. I am not seriously proposing to impeach Clinton for these actions, because they are not different in essence, from the policies of almost all American presidents, especially since the second World War when the United States became a military state. Both parties, Democratic and Republican have gone along with such policies. I simply wanted to put the cries for impeachment into a wider perspective, to restore a sense of proportion to our indignation, and to throw light on matters far more important than the president's sex life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States" and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. [END] DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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