November 22, 2007
McClellan's Dish Impeachment is Back on the Table By DAVE LINDORFF
The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his
behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in
front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and
publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove
and Scooter Libby.
There was one problem. It was not true.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest
ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove,
Libby, the Vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President
himself.
--Excerpt from Scott McClellan's forthcoming book "What Happened"
(Public Affairs Books, due out in April 2008)
With that one little statement, released on the Public Affairs Books website
this week, all excuses for not impeaching President Bush and Vice President
Cheney, not to mention indicting Cheney (who of course has no immunity from
prosecution while in office), have evaporated.
Here is rock-solid evidence from a man who, as press secretary, was privy to
the inner workings of the White House, of a vile conspiracy involving the two
top men in the Bush/Cheney administration, as well as their top three
staffpeople, to expose the identity of an important CIA undercover operative,
Valerie Plame, and then, when caught, to obstruct a criminal investigation by
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, into that crime.
Forget for a moment the administration's other high crimes and misdemeanors
and acts of bribery and treason, though many, like defying laws passed by the
Congress, or violating the Nuremburg Charter, are surely far more egregious.
This particular set of crimes--conspiracy, obstruction of justice, lying, and
of course the underlying crime of abuse of power and perhaps treason (since
Plame's responsibility as a high-rankiing CIA operative was preventing the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly in the Middle
East!)--is serious enough.
There is no way that American democracy can continue to survive, even in its
current truncated form, if the Congress continues to duck this issue and
pretend that it has "more important things to do," as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
her retinue of "leaders" in the House have continued to claim for an entire
year in control of the Congress.
To keep impeachment "off the table," knowing that the president and vice
president brazenly lied to the American people and to the Special Counsel's
office about such a serious offense, is to make a mockery of the Constitution
and the law.
Bush and Cheney must be impeached at this point if only to save school
districts across the nation the cost of having to buy all new American history
and civics texts, revised so as to remove all discussion of the notion of
Constitutional checks and balances and the word "impeachment."
It is of course possible that the political reality is that Republicans in
Congress have become such an antidemocratic conglomeration of authoritarian
yes-men that they would defend their political leaders no matter what their
crimes, and that thus impeachment would be a dead end, either in the House or
certainly in the Senate. This, however, is no excuse for not calling the
president and vice president to account in impeachment hearings in the House,
where Democrats have a solid majority.
An impeachment hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, with full
subpoena power granted to that committee, would lead to revelations and
exposures far beyond that of Scott McClellan's, though putting McClellan under
oath on national TV in such a hearing promises to be as enlightening and
entertaining as was the testimony in 1974 before the same panel by Nixon White
House attorney John Dean.
The critical importance of such hearings to the future of American democracy,
and to public understanding of the nature of the coup that has been undermining
that democracy should be obvious. It wouldn't matter what the vote was
following such hearings. Certainly articles of impeachment would be voted out
of the committee and sent to the floor of the House. Almost as certainly, the
House would end up having to support those articles. So Bush and Cheney would
at least stand impeached, probably with at least some Republican's voting for
impeachment. They would probably also be forced, like President Clinton before
them, to stand trial in the Senate--if Republicans didn't first succeed in
convincing them to resign to spare their party a disaster at the polls next
November.
Certainly it's possible that proponents of conviction in the Senate would not
be able to convince the 16 or 17 Republican necessary to win a conviction and
removal from office, but it wouldn't matter at that point. The Bush
administration would stand condemned for all time as a gang of criminals and
usurpers.
It's worth noting that following Clinton's impeachment and trial, which
failed to remove him from office, the Oval Office has been off-limits to
unchaperoned interns, and it is likely to be a long time before felatio is
re-enacted under the Oval Office desk. Similar action against Bush and Cheney
would make future Constitutional crimes equally unlikely for the same reason,
even without conviction.
This would be even more true if Special Counsel Fitzgerald were to do his
duty, as he clearly should, and reopen his Plame investigation with an
indictment of Cheney, and with the naming of Bush, like Nixon before him, as an
"unindicted co-conspirator."
For starters, Pelosi must take this moment to declare that impeachment is
"back on the table."
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death
Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest
book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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