Impeach Cheney

The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped

By Bruce Fein

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president’s insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney’s multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.Take the vice president’s preposterous theory that his office is outside the executive branch because it also exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the president, who also exercises a legislative function in signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney’s bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish the importance of the legal question at issue.

The nation’s first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common fate.” Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: “The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” In modern times, vice presidents have generally been confined to attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after earthquakes.

Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion’s share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president’s commander in chief powers in confronting international terrorism. Let’s review the record of his abuses and excesses: Read more

House defeats bid to defund Cheney’s VP office

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly defeated a Democratic amendment to deny funds to operate Vice President Dick Cheney’s office next year in a feud over his handling of classified documents.

By a vote of 217-209, the House defeated legislation designed to rebuke Cheney for refusing, over objections by the National Archives, to comply with an executive order that set government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information.

Debate on the measure also gave Democrats another chance to mock Cheney’s recent contention that he was exempt from the rule on executive-branch documents because he also serves as president of the Senate, part of legislative branch. He has since stepped back from that argument.

“The vice president must know that no matter what branch of government he may consider himself a part of on any given day or week, he is not above the law,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who wrote the amendment to a bill funding White House salaries and expenses next year. Read more

Why Bush Will Nuke Iran

By Paul Craig Roberts

The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East. The U.S. has lost the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Generals in both war theaters are stating their need for more troops. But there are no troops to send.

Bush has tried to pawn Afghanistan off on NATO, but Europe does not see any point in sacrificing its blood and money for the sake of American hegemony. The NATO troops in Afghanistan are experiencing substantial casualties from a revived Taliban, and European governments are not enthralled over providing cannon fodder for U.S. hegemony. Read more

Bush Directive for a “Catastrophic Emergency” in America: Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran?

By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

“Another [9/11 type terrorist] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking today to retaliate against some known targets” (Statement by Pentagon official, leaked to the Washington Post, 23 April 2006)

06/25/07 “Global Research}– - June 24, 2007 — The US media consensus is that “the United States faces its greatest threat of a terrorist assault since the September 11 attacks” (USA Today, 12 February 2006) The American Homeland is threatened by ” Islamic terrorists”, allegedly supported by Tehran and Damascus.

America is under attack” by an illusive “outside enemy”.

Concepts are turned upside down. War becomes Peace. “Offense” becomes a legitimate means of “self-defense”. In the words of President Bush:

“Against this kind of enemy, there is only one effective response: We must go on the offense, stay on the offense, and take the fight to them.” (President George W. Bush, CENTCOM Coalition Conference, May 1, 2007)

The intent is to seek a pretext to wage a preemptive war.

A “terrorist attack on America” could be used to justify, in the eyes of an increasingly credulous public opinion, on “humanitarian grounds”, the launching of a major theater war directed against Iran and Syria.

Allegedly supported by Iran, the terrorists are said to possess nuclear capabilities. They are supposedly planning to explode “radiological dispersion devices” (RDD) or “dirty bombs” in densely populated urban areas in the US. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had already forewarned in 2003 that, “It would be easy for terrorists to cook up radioactive ‘dirty’ bombs to explode inside the U.S. … How likely it is, I can’t say…” (10 February 2003).

The sheer absurdity that Al Qaeda might have advanced capabilities to wage a nuclear attack on America is, nonetheless, pervasive in US media reports. Moreover, numerous drills and exercises, simulating a terrorist attack using nuclear devices, have been conducted in recent years, creating the illusion that “the threat is real”:

“What we do know is that our enemies want to inflict massive casualties and that terrorists have the expertise to invent a wide range of attacks, including those involving the use of chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. … [E]xploding a small nuclear weapon in a major city could do incalculable harm to hundreds of thousands of people, as well as to businesses and the economy,…(US Congress, House Financial Services Committee, June 21, 2007). Read more

Take Action Now

The US Senate is trying to force states to adopt a National ID card: it’s time to stop them. As part the debate on immigration legislation, the states will be forced to become REAL ID compliant.

What is REAL ID?

The REAL ID Act is a national ID card scheme that was passed by Congress back in 2005. It turns drivers licenses into national ID cards. There was no debate whatsoever on REAL ID as it was tacked onto a must-pass appropriations bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Learn more over at unrealid.com

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