There are so many grounds for impeaching George Bush that any practical attempt to do so would necessarily have to forgo addressing most of them. The
Center for Constitutional Rights drew up
a list of four, including: 1)
Unauthorized spying on American citizens; 2)
Unlawfully taking our country to war; 3)
Unlawful abusive treatment of prisoners of war; 4) Failure to execute the laws of our country (via “
signing statements”).
Congressman Conyers, before Speaker Pelosi took impeachment “off the table”, authored an investigative report, “
The Constitution in Crisis”, that also described four clearly impeachable offenses, including numbers 1, 2, and 3 above, plus the unlawful intimidation and silencing of numerous whistleblowers. And I’ve discussed the issue many times, including in
this post, where I discuss the above noted offenses plus four more:
Covering up of global warming; politicizing our justice department by
firing federal prosecutors for doing their job;
corruption in the reconstruction of Iraq, leading to the loss of billions of dollars, and;
gross negligence in the provision of medical care to our veterans. There are also numerous others that that have been noted, especially the Bush administration’s
gross negligence in responding to Hurricane Katrina.
Manipulation of our judiciary system for unlawful purposes is a serious crime. When perpetrated by the President of the United States it is a much greater crime than when other people do it. And when done by the President of the United States in an attempt to mislead and scare the American people in order to increase the President’s powers to tyrannical proportions, it becomes a crime so reprehensible that it is too scary for most people to contemplate. Perhaps that’s why this issue as a reason for impeachment has not much been discussed in our country.
Therefore, I would like to consider this issue in this post by means of discussing what I think we should have learned from the circumstances surrounding three well known cases that either came before the U.S. Supreme Court (in two of the three cases,
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) or almost did so (in the third case,
Rumsfeld v. Padilla).
Hamdi v. RumsfeldYasir Esam Hamdi was captured by the Northern Alliance in November 2001 and turned over to the U.S. military in Afghanistan (probably for a large
bounty), then sent to Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant” and a suspected terrorist. After the U.S. military discovered that Hamdi was a U.S. citizen (having been born in Louisiana), he was transferred to a U.S. Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, still classified as an “enemy combatant”, where he remained, in isolation, for the next two and a half years. His father claimed that he was a humanitarian relief worker, not a terrorist.
As with virtually every other of its so-called “enemy combatants”, the Bush administration claimed that it had the right to keep Hamdi locked up indefinitely and without charges or trial or access to an attorney, in clear violation of our
Fifth and
Sixth Amendment rights to due process and a fair trial. The rationale for these repeated violations of our Constitution was and remains that the terrorists (actually,
suspected terrorists is a much more accurate term, since they are rarely convicted of anything) pose such a threat to our national security that even offering them a trial would put our nation in grave danger.
Nevertheless, several criminal defense attorneys, concerned about the trashing of our Constitution by the Bush administration, filed suit on Hamdi’s behalf. After working its way through lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case on June 28, 2004. Though the Bush administration tried to spin the decision as a victory for them, eight of the nine justices agreed that the Executive Branch does not have the right to indefinitely hold a U.S. citizen without basic due process protections. Constitutional lawyer Cass Sunstein summarizes the main finding in his book, “
http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dradicals%2Bin%2Brobes%2Bsunstein%26btnG%3DSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail">Radicals in Robes”, by noting that the court
said that an enemy combatant must be supplied with notice of the factual basis for his classification and a fair opportunity to rebut the government’s factual assertions before a neutral decision maker. The plurality did not deny the possibility that the constitutionality could be met by a military tribunal.
Explaining the decision, Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, said that “… We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”
What this meant was that now the Bush administration had to either provide Hamdi with access to a lawyer and some sort of hearing on his case or else release him. Faced with that choice, three months later it
decided to release him back to Saudi Arabia.
Deliah Lithwick comments on the absurdity of the situation:
So the Bush administration's decision to release Hamdi is stunning, given that only months ago he was so dangerous that the government insisted in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and the world that he could reasonably be locked up for all time, without a trial or criminal charges….
He was slammed into solitary on some flimsy assertions contained in what's known as the two-page "
Mobbs Declaration." … swearing that Hamdi was an enemy combatant, because, according to his captors from the Northern Alliance, he was "affiliated with a Taliban military unit." Any other American suspect, including serial killers and Timothy McVeigh, would have been given an opportunity to dispute that bare claim; to tell his side of the story – which, according to Hamdi's father, was that Hamdi was in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons. But we never heard that story and we never will. Yaser Esam Hamdi was evidently too dangerous even to set foot in a courtroom.
On May 8, 2002, Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody by the FDA and locked up as a “material witness”. On June 10, four days after
Colleen Rowley testified to Congress about the failure of the FBI to respond to her pre-9-11 warnings of an impending attack, Attorney General John
Ashcroft made an announcement to the nation about Padilla. Referring to him as “a known terrorist” who had been plotting to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States, Ashcroft announced that the FBI foiled the plot by capturing Padilla. The previous day, George Bush had classified Padilla as an “enemy combatant” and had him sent to a Navy brig in South Carolina, where he remained for three and a half years and was
repeatedly tortured.
As with the Hamdi case, lawyers concerned about the abrogation of Padilla’s Constitutional rights took up his case. On September 9, 2005, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled that Padilla’s detention without charge was legal. The author of that ruling was J. Michael Luttig, who was considered to be a potential Bush Supreme Court nominee. Padilla’s lawyers then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but before the Supreme Court made a decision on whether or not to take the case the Bush administration made the case moot by rescinding Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and agreeing to prosecute him in a civilian court. But the charges had nothing to do with the original allegations about plots to explode a “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil. Rather
the new charges were “providing – and conspiring to provide – material support to terrorists, and conspiring to murder individuals who are overseas.”
Luttig, the 4th Circuit Court judge who had made the prior ruling, was incensed at this about face by the Bush administration. Charlie Savage, in his book, “
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy”, describes Luttig’s reaction:
Luttig – one of the most conservative and executive power-friendly judges on the federal bench – accused the Bush-Cheney administration of manipulating the judicial process to make sure that the Supreme Court would have no opportunity to evaluate the precedent that Luttig himself had just written. The Padilla indictment, he said, raised serious questions about the credibility of the government’s statements on which the judge had relied when crafting that precedent, and “left the impression that Padilla may have been held for all these years, even if justifiably, by mistake”.
Hamden v. Rumsfeld Salim Ahmed Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and brought to Guantanamo as an “enemy combatant”. He was the personal driver of Osama bin Laden, but he claimed not to be a terrorist or even a member of al Qaeda.
In November 2004 a federal district court ruled, in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the Bush administration’s military commission trials violated the Geneva Conventions. But that decision
was overturned on July 15, 2005, by the D.C. Circuit Court, in a 2-1 decision ruling that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to war time detainees suspected of terrorism.
John Roberts cast the deciding vote in that decision, just 5 days before he was nominated as Chief Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court by George Bush. Furthermore, it later emerged during Roberts’ Senate confirmation hearings that Roberts had: met with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez 6 days prior to hearing oral arguments in the
Hamdan case; in the midst of deciding the case, met secretly with Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Andy Card, Harriet Miers and Gonzalez, and; met with Bush himself on July 15, the same day that the court handed down its decision.
In the end, the ridiculous D.C. Circuit Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5-3 decision. Roberts, though Chief Justice of the USSC by that time, had to recuse himself because the Court was ruling on his own previous decision. Two of the USSC justices who voted in the minority on the
Hamdan decision (Scalia and Thomas) were two of the same scumbags who had voted in 2000 to hand Bush the Presidency by stopping the vote counting in Florida.
In the
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld USSC decision, Justice Stevens, speaking for the majority, explained that the petitioner Hamdan was “entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Convention”, and that the “military commission convened to try him was established in violation of both the UCMJ and Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention”. Justice Kennedy further elaborated on the Geneva Convention that the USSC determined the Bush administration to have violated:
The provision is part of a treaty the United States has ratified and thus accepted as binding law… moreover, violations of Common Article 3 are considered “war crimes,” punishable as federal offenses…
What we should conclude from these cases and much moreGeorge Bush and Dick Cheney have repeatedly sought to justify their illegal and horrendous system of torture and other human rights abuses by claiming it is necessary to protect the American people in pursuit of their “War on Terror”. It has been estimated that somewhere between
8,500 and
35,000 men and boys have been victimized by this system:
at Guantanamo Bay and
in Iraq and Afghanistan; at
Secret U.S. prisons throughout the world, and; through “
extraordinary rendition”, whereby U.S. officials kidnap (or otherwise gather into their custody) men or boys and transport them to prisons in countries where few or no barriers to the most horrendous kinds of torture exist.
The vast majority of George Bush’s “War on Terror” detainees are never charged with or tried for a crime. On the rare occasions when they
are charged with a crime, the American people are afforded the opportunity to learn, if they care to, what George Bush’s “War on Terror” is really about, and to what extent he will go to manipulate our judicial system for his own political purposes: In the case of Hamdi we find, after holding him in isolation for two and a half years, that George Bush would rather set him free rather than give him a hearing to present his case, as demanded by our Supreme Court; In the case of Padilla we find, when faced with the
possibility of an adverse ruling from our Supreme Court, that Bush would rather drop his “enemy combatant” status and try him on vague charges rather than on the spectacular charges (plot to explode a “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil) that he originally used to scare the American people with, and; In the case of Hamdan, Bush found it necessary for he and his administration to secretly and repeatedly meet with the justice who was trying the case while simultaneously dangling before him the possibility of being nominated as Chief Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court – assuming that he ruled correctly, of course.
A
study of our Guantanamo Bay detainees, using our government’s own records, sheds further light on George Bush’s fake “War on Terror”. The study found that 60% of our detainees at Guantanamo were thrown into prison for an indefinite period of time without charges or trial merely because they were claimed to be “associated with” a group or groups that our government asserts to be a terrorist organization.
Thus it is clear that the dangers posed by George Bush’s thousands of detainees is grossly exaggerated, that the main purpose of their detention without charges, and torture, is not to protect us, but rather to enhance his own power, and that he is willing to go to great lengths to manipulate our judicial system to accomplish his ends. If that’s not a solid reason for holding impeachment hearings, then what is?
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