John Kerry to call for impeachment of George Bush

I got this from Al-Jazeera so take it for what it's worth. However, Air America, Newsmax.com and Rush Limbaugh have all been talking about the same story. In addition, John Conyers, D-Mich., is leading the charge calling on President Bush to answer questions about a secret U.S.-UK agreement to attack Iraq arranged around 2002. The scuttlebutt is that if Congress begins the impeachment process against Bush and Cheney now and the Democrats barnstorm back into their former congressional seats of power in the mid-term elections, then we could see Bush and Cheney impeached close enough to the 2008 presidential election that it would handily deliver a Presidential victory to whomever (Hillary Clinton) is on the ticket.

My opinion is this, I supported the war in Iraq based on it's strategic importance in the Middle East. I believe that a large, on-going American presence smack dab in the middle of the Middle East puts pressure on the regional leadership to pick a side between us and the terrorists whom they've been financing while two-facedly courting a strategic and trade partnership with the US (Saudi Arabia). I believe our mere heavy handed prescence there is a catalyst for change toward liberal democracy and free trade that would be severely retarded or not happening at all if we were not there to put pressure on the regional governments. However, if it is the right of Congress to enact an impeachment trial and subsequently it is found in a fair trial that Bush and Cheney did indeed break the law by fixing intelligence and leading America into an "illegal" war, then my higher alliegance is to the exact letter of the law and not to any political party nor certainly to any single politician. If said events occur then I say throw the bum out.

However Bush has Wall Street on his side as do most Republicans and if he's impeached it's almost assured that the markets will suffer and lots of folks who make large donations to the GOP will lose gobs of money. That being said I highly doubt a full impeachment trial will ensue. Somebody somewhere will be shown enough green by the right CEO or CEO's and this whole affair will slowly fall off the tracks...much to the chagrin of Randy Rhodes and the cast of muckrakers at Air America.

Here's the story from Al-Jazeera:

John Kerry announced Thursday that he intends to present Congress with The Downing Street Memo, reported last month by the London Times. The memo purports to include minutes from a July 2002 meeting with Tony Blair, in which Blair allegedly said that President Bush's administration "fixed" intelligence on Iraq in order to justify the Iraqi war.

The Downing Street Memo is the leaked secret British document that details the minutes of a 2002 meeting between top-level British and American government officials. The memo states that George Bush "was determined" to attack Iraq long before going to Congress with the matter, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

So far neither government has disputed the accuracy of the memo.

The memo caused an uproar in Britain and made a significant impact in the British national elections, but has recieved little attention in American news.

The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader, Tuesday, in which Nader also called for President Bush's impeachment. The story is being carried on Michael Moore's website and the Democratic Underground.

Failed presidential candidate Kerry advised that he will begin the presentation of his case for President Bush's impeachment to Congress, on Monday.

Kerry said of the memo: "When I go back [to Washington] on Monday, I am going to raise the issue. I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."

He questioned Americans' understanding of the war and the idea that criticism equals disloyalty, saying, "Do you think that Americans if they really understood it would feel that way knowing that on Election Day, 77 percent of Americans who voted for Bush believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found and 77 percent believe Saddam did 9/11? Is there a way for this to break through, ever?"

House Representative John Conyers has written to the President regarding the memo:

"...a debate has raged in the United States over the last year and one half about whether the obviously flawed intelligence that falsely stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was a mere 'failure' or the result of intentional manipulation to reach foreordained conclusions supporting the case for war. The memo appears to close the case on that issue stating that in the United States the intelligence and facts were being 'fixed' around the decision to go to war."

There is a growing movement on the internet and in Congress for a "Resolution of Inquiry" into issues surrounding the planning and execution of the Iraq war, especially in regard to the Administration's handling of intelligence.

John Dean, a key Watergate figure, wrote in a June 2003 column for a legal website, that, "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked... Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause."

However, in practical terms impeachment in the U.S. Senate requires a 2/3 majority for conviction, which is unlikely given that 55 out of 100 Senators are Republican.

When asked about the Downing Street Memo on May 23, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "If anyone wants to know how the intelligence was used by the administration, all they have to do is go back and look at all the public comments over the course of the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and that's all very public information. Everybody who was there could see how we used that intelligence.

"And in terms of the intelligence, it was wrong, and we are taking steps to correct that and make sure that in the future we have the best possible intelligence, because it's critical in this post-September 11th age, that the executive branch has the best intelligence possible."