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PREFACE

[All rights reserved]

Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips

The Bush/Cheney administration and the radical right wing forces that it represents constitute an extraordinary threat to the world. As events unfold this becomes painfully ever more evident: the appalling debacle of Katrina, the disastrous and immoral occupation of Iraq with no end in sight, murder of prisoners by American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo and covert rendition of prisoners to nations known for torture, Bush’s admission that he secretly and illegally authorized spying on Americans and his brazen declaration upon being caught that he will continue to do so, and on and on. Their corruption, incompetence, criminal activity, and disregard for human rights and the law seem endless. The White House has become increasingly embattled due to these events, but it will take unprecedented popular action to end this regime. Governments do not fall of their own weight; they must be driven out.

* * *

In 1960 social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a now famous experiment. He planned to pilot test his study with Americans, and then take it to Germany. His object? To explore what it was about Germans that made them so willing to obey Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. His hypothesis? Fascism came to power because Germans were somehow more obedient and compliant than others. His experiment consisted of asking subjects to administer what they thought were progressively more and more severe electrical shocks to someone in another room when that person gave incorrect answers to a test. The shock scale went from 15 volts up to 450 volts. Several stops prior to the 450 volts the scale was labeled “Danger: Severe Shock.” The person answering the questions—a study collaborator not actually hooked up for electrical shocks—began to scream in agony as the test proceeded, declaring that he had a heart condition, and then, eventually, as the shocks continued, he stopped making any sounds, with only ominous silence coming from the room he was in.

            Milgram expected that only a small number of subjects would carry out the shocks to the very end of the scale. He was astonished to discover that his American subjects, Yale University students, were all too willing to go all the way. Milgram never did take his experiment to Germany because the answer was right here at home: obtaining obedience to authority was as easy among Americans as it had been among Germans.

            America today under Bush and Cheney is the Milgram Experiment writ large. The experimental subjects this time are each and every one of us. Unlike the Germans under Hitler, however, who claimed that they didn’t know that Jews, communists, trade unionists, homosexuals and other political opponents of the Third Reich were being incinerated in concentration camps, none of us can claim that we did not know that torture was going on in our name. The news coverage, partial and abbreviated as it has been, has made this clear.

            More shocking, however, than finding our government now openly endorsing and practicing torture is how easily they have accomplished this—and so many other egregious things—and how paltry and ineffectual the opposition has been to these crimes by our political institutions and media.

            The National Security Agency spying scandal illustrates this graphically. In an April 20, 2004 speech in Buffalo, New York, Bush reassured Americans that “a wiretap requires a court order.” He said this knowing that since 2002 he had secretly ordered the government to spy on tens of thousands (subsequently revealed in 2006 to be in the hundreds of millions) of Americans without a court order. Because of a whistle-blowing NSA official, this warrantless spying came to light in 2005. Now no longer able to pretend that he wasn’t violating the 1978 Federal Intelligence Security Act law that Congress had passed to prevent exactly this scenario, Bush fired back that the real crime was the person who blew the whistle on this and that his administration was going to continue to spy.

            What did Congress do about this singular declaration of a felon declaring in essence that he was above the law—i.e., a dictator? A few cried foul, but within a short time, with the exception of a literal handful of Congresspeople who tried their best to act against this, Congress decided to set up a seven member panel to “oversee” the spy program. In other words, an administration declared that it was doing something far worse than what had forced Nixon out of office, declared that it was not subject to any laws passed by Congress, and Congress looked the other way.

            We face a situation today in which political institutions, public officials, the two major parties, the mainstream and right wing media are more out of touch and at odds with the public than at any other time in this country’s history. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersch in his recent book Chain of Command put it this way: “How did eight or nine neoconservatives . . . redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?”

            How indeed? The central problem here is that truth and facts have been barricaded off from reaching most of the American people. If Americans truly knew exactly what was going on in their names, they would mass outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, scale the gates, haul these perpetrators out of the White House by their shirt collars and put them on trial immediately for crimes against humanity. This has yet to happen because the right wing has been resoundingly successful in the plans it laid beginning in the early 1970s to dramatically alter the political landscape. Through the very deep pockets of people like Rupert Murdoch, Adolph Coors and the “Four Sisters,”^[1] they have invested tens of billions of dollars in establishing their own media empire such as Fox News and Clear Channel, their own think tanks, publishing houses, their heavy subsidy and cultivation of right wing scholars and writers, and so on. From these pulpits they have bullied, lied and twisted. Their media empire’s impact cannot be overestimated. They have cowed the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. Like the shadow cast by the immense alien ship in the movie Independence Day, Bush/Cheney and the radical right have generated a black cloud over this country. We wrote this book to help to dispel this.

            These times call for nothing less than that the people take extraordinary measures to repudiate these “leaders.” An unprecedented mass popular upheaval is what must occur.

* * *

The “high” in “high crimes and misdemeanors” refers to the high office of the one being impeached. As ex-president Gerald Ford once put it, impeachable offenses are whatever Congress decides they are. The chapters in this book make a painstakingly meticulous case for the plethora of reasons present for impeachment. But the ultimate issue is one of political will. We hope to encourage a movement that shakes this country to the core. A movement so potent that Congress is compelled to act, no matter who is in Congress at the time or what their party affiliation. Nixon, it should be recalled, did not want to pull out of Vietnam. The Vietnamese people’s resistance and the anti-war movement forced him to do it.

            Many of the acts discussed in these chapters constitute grounds not only for impeachment, but grounds for criminal prosecution. Every single day that this regime is allowed to continue in office means that numerous crimes against humanity will continue. As you read these words, numerous people in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Uzbekistan are being beaten till they cannot walk, water boarded until they drown, electro-shocked in their genitals, and suffocated with sleeping bags wrapped around their heads “like yo yos.”

            Chapter 1: Impeachment: The People’s Nuclear Option by constitutional attorney Judith Volkart surveys the history of past impeachments and describes how impeachment is the Constitution’s safeguard of last resort for holding federal officials accountable for misconduct that subverts our constitutional government.

            Chapter 2: Never Elected, Not Once: the Immaculate Deception and the Road Forward by Dennis Loo. After the 2004 presidential election, millions were stunned by Bush’s win and suspected that something was deeply awry. Drawing upon overwhelming evidence, Loo shows how the theft of the 2000 and 2004 elections was accomplished. He analyzes how the GOP has fabricated the impression of majority popular support for their policies. Loo further accounts for why the Democratic Party and mainstream media have co-operated with this deception and what this means for the future.

            Chapter 3: Dahr Jamail’s in The ‘Free Fire Zone’ of Iraq recounts first hand (and with photographs) his experience as an unembedded reporter in Iraq witnessing US troops’ systematic commission of war crimes under White House military and political strategists’ direction. He documents collective punishment, illegal weapons (e.g., cluster bombs used against civilian populations), disrupted medical care, press censorship and torturing of Iraqis, which are express violations of international law. He looks especially at the siege of Fallujah, declared a “free fire zone” by the US military. Jamail witnessed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 for which those convicted can be subject to the death penalty.

            Chapter 4: War Crimes Are High Crimes by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. The tyranny that sparked the American Revolution characterizes the Bush administration like no other in US history. Bush/Cheney have asserted that they have the authority to attack other countries that have not attacked the US; to operate death squads engaged in killings not sanctioned by law; to engage in cruel abuse of prisoners without legal oversight; and to unilaterally annul the Geneva Conventions and other treaties authorized by Congress.

            Chapter 5: Dennis Loo’s Defending the Indefensible: Torture and the American Empire links Bush/Cheney’s anti-rational worldview to the neo-cons’ wild ambitions of unrivaled world dominance to explain their open embrace of torture—an extremely ominous development. He further shows that the administration’s and its apologists’ justification for torture doesn’t wash on either ethical grounds or practical grounds. Indeed, he points out the startling similarities between Bush/Cheney and Al Qaeda.

            Chapter 6: Iraq: Phase Two In An Unbounded War On The World by Larry Everest exposes the underlying rationale for the war on both Iraq and the entire Arab world. The US government openly debated and actually attempted to overthrow the Hussein regime a decade before 9/11, and not because Iraq posed a military threat or was linked to Al Qaeda. Instead, the US administration felt Hussein’s regime was undermining its control of the Middle East and impeding its global ambitions. The decision to invade Iraq was made by November 2001, nearly a year before the US attempted to secure the UN’s approval of the invasion in the fall of 2002.

            Chapter 7: The Downing Street Memos, Manipulation of Pre-War Intelligence and Knowingly Withholding Vital Information from a Grand Jury Investigation by Greg Palast features the first US publication of the full-text of Matthew Rycroft’s July 23, 2002 Downing Street Memo that proved that Bush’s WMD rationale was bogus. “Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has ‘IMPEACH HIM’ written all over it.” Palast, considered by many the top investigative journalist in the US, and a former racketeering investigator, recounts how the smoking gun was dismissed both by Congress and mainstream US journalism as not worth a second look.

            Chapter 8: Propaganda Lies and Patriotic Journalism by Nancy Snow. Snow knows propaganda when she sees it. She was a Presidential Management Fellow for the US Information Agency. Snow describes how 9/11 was a potent gift to any propagandist, especially to this administration which purposely and cynically manipulated public opinion to anchor misperceptions about Iraq, 9/11, and Al Qaeda’s role, and was generously helped along in this process by a patriotic, unquestioning mainstream media.

            Chapter 9: Barbara J. Bowley’s The Campaign for Unfettered Power: Executive Supremacy, Secrecy and Surveillance shows how Bush has become the “first dictator of the Information Age” through presidential fiat and massive, illegal surveillance. Given the complex and covert nature of how Bush/Cheney have accomplished much of this, Bowley compiles and chronicles this process in a highly readable and immediately understandable and actionable way.

            Chapter 10: Bush/Cheney’s War on the Enlightenment by Mark Crispin Miller is a wide-ranging piece that explains how the Bush/Cheney regime’s most dangerous aspect is their imperial crusade for total power. Miller describes how the war on terror is not only unending, unlike all prior wars in human history, but an unprecedented national crusade to wipe out all the world’s evil. The Bush enterprise is conjointly headed by apocalyptic Christianists, eager for worldwide theocracy, and an influential network of Straussian neo-conservatives, who have made an unholy alliance with the Christian right in an effort to create a docile populace.

            Chapter 11: Denying Disaster: Hurricane Katrina, Global Warming, and the Politics of Refusal by Kevin Wehr shows graphically and convincingly how global climate change represents a clear, present and dire danger that Bush/Cheney have continued to remain oblivious to, imperiling the planet. Wehr links this to the Katrina disaster, showing that Katrina was a social, not natural disaster, and was preventable, not inevitable. He recounts Bush/Cheney’s incredible malfeasance prior to, during and after the hurricane. Wehr shows why Bush/Cheney’s continued misleadership on these urgent, life and death issues can be tolerated no longer.

            Chapter 12: Ignoring Peak Oil: Beyond Incompetence by Richard Heinberg outlines how world oil production’s peaking presents the US and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem and the Bush/Cheney administration’s inaction constitutes dereliction of duty on a global scale.

            Chapter 13: The Other Regime Change: Overthrowing Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by Lyn Duff and Dennis Bernstein documents the Bush administration’s illegal overthrow of democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Duff and Bernstein’s report covers how portions of 20,000 M-16 semiautomatic assault rifles with 20 round magazines shipped by the US to the Dominican Republic ended up in the hands of Haitian rebels. They uncover how the US funded the Haitian political opposition, blocked military assistance to the government, kidnapped Aristide, and established a highly repressive regime.

            Chapter 14: The Global Dominance Group: A Sociological Case for Impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton, Lew Brown, and Andrew Sloan documents the oligarchical nature of US politics, showing the incestuous relationships between the neo-cons, corporate media and the military-industrial complex. The chapter lists 240 global dominance advocates who have been the primary promoters and beneficiaries of the war on terrorism before and after 9/11 and how these advocates dominate the US government today.

           Chapter 15: Beyond Impeachment: Rebuilding a Political Culture by Cynthia Boaz and Michael Nagler argues that impeachment isn’t enough. Advertising culture’s promotion of private comforts and feel good narcissism, the authors point out, provides fertile ground for the neo-cons finessing accountability to truth or to justice. Challenging that private comforts culture thus needs to occur to set things right.

            Chapter 16: What Can Be Done? by the Editors recommends steps that can be taken to carry forward the fight for impeachment.

* * *

We stand at a crossroads. Will we obey and be “good Germans?” In the years preceding Hitler’s naming to the German Chancellorship many German Jews and others kept telling themselves that it can’t possibly get any worse and it can’t possibly go any further. Except that it did. The 1933 Reichstag Fire, set by Herman Göring and the Nazis but blamed on the communists,^[2] was the Nazis’ excuse to suspend civil liberties and freedom of the press entirely. It was the German equivalent of our 9/11.

* * *

Impeachment advocates are widely mobilizing in the US. As of March 2006 over 1,000 letters to the editors of major newspapers were printed in the preceding six months calling for impeachment. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette letter writer George Matus said, “I am still enraged over unasked questions about exit polls, touch-screen voting, Iraq, the cost of the new Medicare . . . who formulated our energy policy, Jack Abramoff, the Downing Street Memos, and impeachment.” David Anderson in McMinnville, Oregon penned to the Oregonian, “Where are the members of our congressional delegation now in demanding the current president’s actions be investigated to see if impeachment or censure are appropriate actions?” William Dwyer’s letter in the Charleston Gazette said, “Congress will never have the courage to start the impeachment process without a groundswell of outrage from the people.”

            City councils, boards of supervisors, and local and state level Democrat central committees have voted for impeachment. Arcata, California voted for impeachment on January 6, 2006. The City and County of San Francisco, voted Yes on February 28, 2006. The Sonoma County Democrat Central Committee (CA) voted for Impeachment on March 16, 2006. The townships of Newfane, Brookfield, Dummerston, Marlboro and Putney in Vermont all voted for impeachment the first week of March 2006. The New Mexico State Democrat party convention rallied on March 18, 2006 for the “impeachment of George Bush and his lawful removal from office.” Texas Democrats called for impeachment on April 9, 2006 joining other pro-impeachment Democrats from Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The national Green Party called for impeachment on January 3, 2006. Op-ed writers at the St. Petersburg Times, Newsday, Yale Daily News, Barrons, Detroit Free Press, and the Boston Globe have called for impeachment. It was as if the call for impeachment was emerging from a national collective consciousness when The San Francisco Bay Guardian (1/25/06), The Nation (1/30/06), and Harpers (3/06) each published cover articles calling for impeachment within weeks of each other.

            Stephen T. Jones threw one of the first punches in his article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian January 25, 2006, “The Case for Impeachment: It’s Not Just for Radicals Anymore.” Jones describes how Nancy Pelosi held a town hall meeting in San Francisco mid-January 2006 where she was confronted by “a new political reality.” Jones described the meeting and how “the real eruption came when a questioner listed several war-related Bush misdeeds and asked, are these not high crimes and misdemeanors?” The room went “nuts,” Jones wrote, with sustained applause and chants of “Impeach, Impeach.”

            The irascible long-time editor of Harpers Lewis Lapham wrote, “The Case for Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush” for their March 2006 edition. In the article Lapham applauds Rep. John Connors (D. Michigan) for introducing on December 18, 2005 into the House of Representatives a bill to investigate grounds for impeachment. Lapham pens,

            The Nation contributor and former member of Congress Elizabeth Holtzman—a Congressperson during Nixon’s presidency—started her article by describing how ‘people have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush—not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress.” Holtzman advocates impeachment based on Bush’s scorn for international treaties, lies about Iraq, and violations of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (The Nation 1/30/06).

            As of March 16, 2006, thirty-two members of the US House of Representatives had signed on as co-sponsors to House Resolution 635, which would create a Select Committee to look into the grounds for recommending President Bush’s impeachment.

            The International Commission of Inquiry on the Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration met in October 2005 and January 2006 in New York City and heard wide-ranging and searing testimony documenting extensive and ongoing crimes against humanity.

            Despite all this advocacy and sentiment for impeachment, corporate media had yet to cover this emerging mass movement as of this writing. The Bangor Daily News simply reported on March 17, 2006 that former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark had set up the website Votetoimpeach.org and that other groups were using the Internet to push for impeachment. The Wall Street Journal, on March 16, editorialized about how it is just “the loony left” seeking impeachment, but perhaps some Democrats in Congress will join in feeding on the “bile of the censure/impeachment brigades.”

            The corporate media are ignoring the broadening call for impeachment—wishing perhaps it will just go away. Nothing on television news yet gives the impression that millions of Americans are calling for Bush and his cohorts’ impeachment. Despite corporate media’s inability to hear the demands for impeachment, the groundswell of outrage continues to expand. Will it be enough? Will it grow to the size of the elephant in the room that no one can afford to ignore?

            Had we a system that could protect itself against the predations and subversions of threats such as Bush/Cheney, there would be no reason for this book. Bush and his cohort would have been driven from office and put on trial for their crimes long ago. Indeed, they would never have been allowed to seize the White House in the first place. It is up to the rest of us to rouse ourselves and rouse others, to bring forth from the grassroots new social movement leaders to constitute an alternative and powerful counter-force that fundamentally alters the overall political atmosphere, providing a competing legitimate authority to the bankrupt and illegitimate authority now leading this country. The existing establishment has left us no other choice.

            Times of great peril are also times of great opportunity. What we do or fail to do at this critical juncture over the course of the next months and years will have profound ramifications for both this generation and future generations, for the people of this country, and the entire world.

            In an episode of the TV show “The Simpsons,” Homer finds himself in an alien spaceship orbiting Earth. The aliens have managed to kidnap the Republican and Democratic Party nominees for president and have them imprisoned in capsules on their ship. Hitting buttons randomly on the ship’s control, Homer inadvertently jettisons the two candidates into deep space. Doh! After this, Homer somehow manages to steer the spaceship back to Earth and upon landing in Washington, D.C. finds the two aliens, disguised as the two presidential candidates, giving campaign speeches together on the Capitol Steps. Homer unmasks the aliens, revealing them to be two very large, very grotesque, octopus-looking creatures. The crowd gasps. The aliens hesitate for a moment. Then one of them says to the crowd: “It’s a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us!” There is a pause and then someone from the crowd says: “He’s right!” ^[3]

            Is he?