- 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 dlindorff@mindspring.com
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