Is Treason An Impeachable Offense?
Is Treason an Impeachable Offense?
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story...1/26/1969/6007
By Bill Hare
11/26/2007 07:06:09 PM EST
Okay, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, you have spent all this time demeaning the idea of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as a form of absurd distraction.
Should you now consider the relevance of impeachment in view of Scott McClellan's latest comments and what they, along with other available evidence, portend for the future of this nation?
Think of what has been ignored thus far. The team of Cheney and Bush has been permitted to attack another nation in direct violation of international law America propounded at the Nuremberg Trials.
This violation occurred when America attacked Iraq on unfounded claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons that he was preparing to use against the United States. Such an attack against Iraq was therefore allegedly predicated on self-defense.
Saddam Hussein was a dictator our CIA helped install, and someone to whom the Reagan Administration, of which Cheney was a member, provided armaments.
Included amid these deadly bequests was the wherewithal to develop poison gas, which was accomplished. Saddam Hussein then used this deadly poisonous gas against Iraq's Kurdish population as well as Iran in the mutually destructive eight year war between those nations.
The American shock and awe attack came after a rush to judgment in which Cheney and Bush defied international law once more by refusing to allow a UN weapons inspection team led by Hans Blix of Sweden to complete its efforts.
At the same time that these efforts were ongoing Saddam Hussein was destroying missiles in an attempt to convince Cheney and Bush that he did not possess the nuclear capability they alleged and should not be attacked.
An estimated 600,000 to 1 million lives have been lost as a result of the American attack and occupation of Iraq. Some 2 ½ million Iraqis have been displaced and become refugees in that same process.
The U.S. military action as well as the subsequent occupation of Iraq was based on unproven and invalid claims.
As a result the Iraq War and subsequent actions relating to it are illegal under international law and constitute preventive war rather than the pre-emptive label that the Bush Administration supplied and that the mainstream media has persistently and incorrectly used.
This gross misuse of power was not thought sufficient by the Democratic leadership in Congress to warrant impeachment. Neither apparently was the trashing of the U.S. Constitution by Cheney and Bush through a series of Bush signing statements that eliminated habeas corpus and numerous protections initiated by the Bill of Rights.
Jefferson and Madison clearly do not figure in the neoconservative scenario being carved out by Cheney and Bush. For instance, it used to be that, based on protective constitutional liberties, a citizen could not be picked up and detained without charges being preferred and at the same time deprived of the right to counsel.
Those protections have now vanished and America has been invested with prevention detention. Preventive detention is a frequent product of a police state dictatorship.
Preventive detention was one of the major criticisms America and other democratic nations leveled at pre-Nelson Mandela South Africa. Now, thanks to Cheney and Bush, preventive detention is an accepted and practiced procedure on and off American soil as the Patriot Act is tendered to invalidate such acts. Torture becomes an acceptable practice at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detention centers.
Where impeachment is concerned we ignore a blatant act of preventive war launched in the midst of an almost completed UN inspection that would have determined the basis for launching that same war was unfounded. We do not seek to hold the provocateurs accountable for their acts of destruction and deception.
When it comes to replacing the U.S. Constitution and particularly its valuable first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, with a series of George Bush signing statements necessitated, it is claimed, by 9/11, concerning which there has still not been an independent investigation, we shrug that off as well.
So now we come to treason. This offense has from the inception of this nation been considered the most heinous and despicable of crimes. The name of Benedict Arnold has redounded in America through the centuries in many ways with a seething distaste that eclipses even that of King George III.
Now we have the act of outing through a column by reliable right wing hack journalist Robert Novak a CIA agent working in the clandestine and delicate field of nuclear weapons investigation.
Valerie Plame was outed through a Bush Administration cabal because she happened to be the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose investigation revealed that the claim of Saddam Hussein seeking yellow cake for purposes of enriching Uranium nuclear capability from the nation of Niger was false.
In any correct or decent context Joseph Wilson would be considered a hero for uncovering information that could prevent a nation for going to war based on false evidence.
In the Bush Administration, however, where spin, political intrigue, and neoconservative global domination prevail, Joseph Wilson became a hated symbol as the seething neocon provocateurs planned revenge.
So the Cheney-Bush adventurers sought to get back at Wilson by exposing his wife to death, along with individuals with whom she was in contact in her CIA undercover activities.
To out a government agent under these circumstances clearly fits the definition of treason under any reasonable standard.
So what do we do now, Reid and Pelosi?
Do we let treason pass as well or do we finally take action as should have been done long ago against the Cheney-Bush neoconservative reign of terror that has disrupted America while the Constitution was replaced with the "I am the state" dictate delivered by Napoleon Bonaparte?
