Facing Impeachment, Musharraf Steps Down

clipped from www.voanews.com Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has announced his resignation, before his political opponents planned to begin impeachment proceedings against him. VOA's Barry Newhouse reports from Islamabad, where Mr. Musharraf denied any wrongdoing and said he is stepping down for the good of the country. The president scoffed at the as-yet unspecified impeachment charges against him - calling them baseless.  However, he said that contesting them could further destabilize the country.   He says he is resigning for the good of Pakistan. Pakistan People's Party Senator Raza Rabbani called the Musharraf resignation a victory for democracy. "I think this is perhaps the first time in Pakistan's political history where you have the will of the people prevailing over establishment institutions," the senator said.

Hey Nancy! You see this?

Sheehan on the Ballot Against Pelosi

clipped from www.kcbs.com Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has qualified for the November ballot opposing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sheehan's campaign collected the signatures needed to get on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress. The military mom, who is well-known for the protest she staged outside President Bush's Texas ranch after her son was killed in Iraq, has denounced Pelosi in recent months for refusing to call for the impeachment of President Bush or call for the end of the Iraq war.

If Pelosi doesn't lose this one -- and I don't think she will -- it may damage her rep enough to get the gavel away from her. For me, that'd be good enough -- as a Speaker of the House, Pelosi is blowful.

Bush Ordered Phony Letter Linking Iraq to 9/11

clipped from rawstory.com A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq. Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq's intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind's new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

The piece goes on to quote Politico's Mike Allen:

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [...]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

WI Rep. Baldwin Calls for Impeachment

clipped from www.madison.com Declaring that "there is no task more important for this Congress than to seriously consider whether our nation's leaders have violated their oath of office," Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin on Friday morning told the House Judiciary Committee, "I now firmly believe that impeachment hearings are the appropriate and necessary next step." The Madison Democrat's opening statement to the Judiciary Committee's "Hearing on Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations" was one of many pointed and at times passionate declarations delivered during an extraordinary session that saw both Democratic and Republican representatives engage in serious discussions about how best to address what committee chair John Conyers, D-Mich., referred to as "numerous credible allegations of serious misconduct by officials in the Bush administration.

Baldwin joins Florida's Robert Wexler in backing Ohio's Dennis Kucinich's push for impeachment on charges of exceeding "constitutional limitations" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It's not going to go anywhere, but it's not sure winners that are the only battles worth fighting.

Impeachment Back on the Table?

clipped from rawstory.com After insisting for nearly two years that impeachment was strictly "off the table," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be changing her tune. The Democratic leader said Thursday that the House Judiciary Committee could be holding hearings on impeachment articles introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sometime in the near future. After introducing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush last month, Kucinich is planning to introduce another single article Thursday, accusing the president of misleading the country into war with Iraq. "This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will see some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee," Pelosi told reporters. "Not necessarily taking up the articles of impeachment because that would have to be approved on the floor, but to have some hearings on the subject." Pelosi added: "My expectation is that there will be some review of that in the committee."

Better late than never, but this is really late. Is Pelosi throwing the base a bone to get them off her back? She sure needs to -- she's may be the worst dem speaker to ever wield the gavel and almost no one is happy with her.

Maybe she figures that the clock will run out on this before it finishes. If so, what she doesn't reckon on are criminal charges for Bush after he leaves office. Once you're out of the White House, you're not automatically off the hook.

Kucinich Uses July 4 to Call for 'Rule of Law'

clipped from rawstory.com Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has been at the forefront of the attempt to push for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and last month presented 35 articles of impeachment to Congress. Now Kucinich has released an Independence Day message which invokes the words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to urge support for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law. "Some Democratic leaders say impeachment's off the table," Kucinich begins. "So let's set a new table for our nation, upon which we place the Constitution, and where we demand that all those who've taken an oath to defend it keep their promise and protect our nation from the threat within. Please go to kucinich.us now and sign the petition which calls for impeachment. This is the one petition that will make a difference because I will be personally delivering it to your member of Congress."

Good on him. CNN put out a poll today showing that 69% think "the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed by the way the nation has turned out overall."

Seems to me there's a way to fix that.

Rule of Law? What Rule of Law?

Big news. Last night, Rep. Dennis Kucinich presented articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Thirty-five counts in all. Big, big news...

Except it's not. Flipping through the channels this morning, I saw nothing about this. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, it never happened. We watch crime after crime after crime revealed, but holding the criminal accountable is completely out of the question.

The Democratic leadership likewise looks the other way, declaring impeachment "off the table" for political reasons. Far from holding the administration accountable for their undeniable crimes, the media would rather pretend they don't exist and cover the horse race of the election, while congressional leadership pretends that hearings without consequences and empty expressions of outrage are punishment enough. The truth is, that's not punishment at all. Bush and the rest of the bloodsoaked neocon crew, with shreds of the Constitution still hanging from their fingers, are going to get a stern talking-to, believe you me Buster and no two ways about it. They won't avoid the wagging congressional finger, the Harry Reid letter of miffedness, the Nancy Pelosi statement of irk, but any actual lasting consequence for their actions is completely out of the question. At this point, it could be revealed that Bush and Cheney have Iraqi children for breakfast every morning and all that would happen would be that they receive a letter respectfully asking them to stop -- please, if they feel like it.

Although not criminal in any legal sense, one issue where the Bush administration's moral criminality is most apparent is on the 21st Century GI Bill. Bush and Cheney are constantly hiding behind soldiers and veterans, constantly telling us that disagreeing with their stupid and pointless war in Iraq is somehow abandoning the troops. Bush is the military, any criticism of Bush is magically transformed into "not supporting the troops."...

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Griper Blade: The Campaign for Change is Broader than You Think

During an election year, we tend to follow the horserace. This year, maybe more than any other, the people want change and there is no incumbent. You could argue that the race is anyone's to win or lose. There's some optimism, some pessimism, some healthy skepticism, and a near universal agreement that the future really couldn't be any worse than our present. At least, in the leadership category.

So, in our excitement and trepidation, we look toward 2009 and treat this year as merely the road we take to get there. But this road is twelve months long and we still have to travel it. On our way to 2009, we have to live in 2008.

It's easy in our interest with the future and our fixation on change to ignore the present and the reason for that fixation. The reason we've fixated on tomorrow is that we don't like today. And the King of this Status Quo is George W. Bush.

So, we're yanked back into the present, which we really shouldn't be ignoring anyway, with an op-ed in the Washington Post by George McGovern titled Why I Believe Bush Must Go (Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse).

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice...

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Griper Blade: The Road to Impeachment

There are times when you have to think like a politician. And it says a lot about our system that these thoughts are generally unpleasant. In a world where a large percentage of political players are self-interested and more than a little corrupt, the "art of compromise" becomes the "art of compromise with real scum."

Today, the Congress will begin debating a FISA bill that includes immunity for telecommunications companies. When Bush asked these telcoms to participate in warrantless wiretapping, he was asking them to break the law. The fact that the White House is insisting on the immunity is contrary to their claims that the program was entirely legal. If the telcoms are golden, there's no reason for the immunity.

There's some question as to whether or not they'll get the cover. Sen. Russ Feingold writes:

Unfortunately, the bill we are going to be considering is the one reported out by the Senate Intelligence Committee in October, S. 2248. It did not have to be this way. Thirteen Senators joined me last week in asking the Majority Leader to instead bring up a bill that includes the changes approved by the Judiciary Committee last month. That bill, while not perfect by any means, was the product of an open process and heeded the advice of many experts and advocates to provide greater protection for the international communications of innocent Americans. And, unlike the Intelligence Committee bill, the Judiciary bill does not provide automatic, retroactive immunity for companies alleged to have cooperated with the administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Whether the bill Feingold and company want to advance is the one that will go forward is an open question. And there's more than one reason to think it won't be -- because there's more than one reason why many want to give the telcoms immunity. While no one will say it, investigating the legality of the warrantless wiretap program would be much more difficult without the honest testimony of telcom execs. And those executives aren't very damned likely to be honest if that testimony amounts to the admission to a crime...

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Griper Blade: The Law and Pelosi -- Total Strangers

Bad news for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Not only is she catching heat for taking impeachment "off the table," but she's now been exposed as being complicit in one of the Bush administration's crimes.

Washington Post:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," WaPo quotes an unnamed "U.S. official present during the early briefings" as saying. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.'"

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until our current period of madness has passed -- if we give up everything we stand for to protect ourselves, we'll be protecting nothing. We need freedom. We need to protect human rights. We need to rely on the rule of law, regardless of how powerful the lawbreaker is.

That's the whole damned point of America. It's the point of the US Constitution -- the first national constitution ever written, anywhere in the world. The whole damned point of America is that it's all about rationalism and the law. It's all based on a single series of laws. It is a logical and legal construct. It's designed to keep us free and protect our rights...

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Griper Blade: Taking Impeachment Off the Table

Once again, I find myself all worked up over a political issue with no one to yell at. Like everyone else, I've got one House member. Unlike most, mine pretty much rocks. Not only did Rep. Tammy Baldwin vote to debate the impeachment of Dick Cheney, but she was a cosponsor of the resolution introduced by Dennis Kucinich yesterday.

I'll send her my support, but it'd be more entertaining and emotionally satisfying to fire off an email that contains the phrase "what the Hell is wrong with you?" to a holdout congress critter. Oh well, I guess I'll have to settle for good government.

The general feeling so far is that the Cheney impeachment will be buried in committee and never again see the light of day. It's hard to see what the majority's reasoning was here for their votes-- dem or GOP. It was the Republicans who voted to keep the resolution alive and the Democrats who finally decided to send it to committee for review before a floor debate. GOPers apparently feel that the resolution would hurt Democrats with voters. That's hard to figure. Maybe they're so close to it that they think the average voter knows all about Dick Cheney's various abuses and are fine with it.

But the fact is that the big story on any given day is almost never the newest abuse by the White House. Yesterday wasn't the day that a historic impeachment resolution for Cheney was brought to the House -- not in the mainstream media, anyway. For most outlets, yesterday was the Hollywood Writers' strike, day 2. Maybe Republicans have bought their own "liberal media" rhetoric and have forgotten how successful they've been at keeping most White House scandals to page three...

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Griper Blade: The Pelosi and Reid Stamp of Approval

Say what you like about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, she's a woman of her word. After saying that "impeachment is off the table" -- before the dems had even taken the majority -- she seems to have made this the guiding principle of her party. The House Democrats, under Pelosi, are committed to investigating the living crap out of everything and anything, expressing their outrage over what they find, then doing absolutely jack about it.

Yay for checks and balances.

I always say that you can't shame the shameless, so a campaign of embarrassing the White House is a bootless effort. They don't care. You could catch President Bush engaging in white slavery, Dick Cheney sacrificing babies to whatever ancient Babylonian devil he owes his power to, and that exposure would not stop them from continuing. I'd like to say that they don't care because they don't have to worry about re-election, but the FISA wiretap scandal broke before the dems came into power -- the fact is that they don't care because they're shameless.

If you want the White House to stop committing crimes, you have to stop the White House from committing crimes. Seriously, they obviously don't care if something's legal or not. When caught wiretapping without warrants, Bush basically said, "Yeah, we're going to keep doing that." Exposed for all the world, Bush just didn't give a crap. Shamelessness is a defense in itself -- it's a moral and ethical nihilism that allows Bush to continue doing whatever he wants, no matter what anyone might think of it. Other opinions aren't wanted; the Bush White House suggestion box goes straight into the office shredder. They think this is what "strong leadership" means -- lawlessness, contempt for constitutional principles, and a middle finger in the air for anyone who criticizes them.

Taking impeachment off the table is the same as telling them, "Do whatever the hell you want." Taking impeachment off the table is consent...

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Griper Blade: Will Congress Declare Itself Irrelevant?

In a damning piece in Salon, Sidney Blumenthal reports that Bush was told that Iraq had no WMD before the war, but blew off the info.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

The intelligence came from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister. According to Blumenthal, "the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war."

We know what happened then, Blair played along, despite the fact that he knew "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

One of Blumenthal's sources put it more bluntly, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."...

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A Bad Week Ahead for Bush

Scooter Libby's commutation is working out about as well for the White House as you might expect. For a president already no more popular than a swift kick in the head, an action with such predictable negative consequences can only be seen as an act of desperation.

The war's been going south -- along with public support for it -- for years now, the Bush administration has been the subject of scandal after scandal for nearly as long, Congress has changed dramatically, and Dick Cheney seems to have finally snapped. On top of all this, it looks like the White House is coming into a real bad week...

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Griper Blade: George the Mad

There are a lot of ways to put this. Crazier than a cork anchor, squirrellier than a walnut grove, not firing on all cylinders, just one oar in the water. But, of course, the correct diagnostic term is 'nuttier than a cheese log.'

Dallas Morning News, via Think Progress:

But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

How comforting. The president, it seems, is twisted as a corkscrew. And about as smart -- does he even know what 'destiny' means? Here's a hint, Mr. President: it's not something you can 'get out of.'

On the bright side, I've been right all along. It's more of a comfort to me than to you, but there ya go. Bush is planning on staying in Iraq until time stops. The bright side for you is that Bush is trying to outsmart his unknown successor and he's a guy who couldn't outsmart a beartrap. That'll go about as well as every other damned plan he's had so far. This is a man who could go skydiving and get lost on his way to the ground. He was once defeated in a fair fight by a pretzel...

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Griper Blade: You Call This Freedom?

The Nation writer and Capital Times associate editor John Nichols brings up a damned good question -- if the Bush administration fired federal prosecutors for not abusing their offices for political purposes, shouldn't we be more concerned about the attorneys they didn't fire than the ones they did?

What did these people do to keep their jobs?

The Capital Times:

The question of whether any of the 85 U.S. attorneys who were not fired by the Bush administration may have engaged in political prosecutions blew open Tuesday, when Wisconsin Russ Feingold and Russ Kohl joined other key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in demanding files pertaining to the botched prosecution of Georgia Thompson.

Committee Chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Feingold, Kohl and three other senators have asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for documents dealing with the case of the state employee who was tried in a case that played out during the course of the 2006 gubernatorial race in that state. Republicans used the prosecution as part of a television attack campaign aimed at defeating Democratic Gov. James Doyle.

U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic obtained an election-season conviction of Thompson on charges that she steered a state contract to a Doyle donor. But a federal appeals court last week overturned that conviction with a stinging decision that complained about a lack of evidence. One of the appeals court judges said Biskupic's case was "beyond thin."

In this case, the system worked despite the best efforts of Biskupic to pervert justice. But not before Thompson spent time in prison. Thompson's original conviction put a cloud over Jim Doyle's 2006 re-election effort. Doyle was marked as one of the most vulnerable democratic governors in that cycle and the only reason he won was because his opponent, former congressman Mark Green, refused to see that being a Bush clone wasn't exactly the best way to go. While Green tried to make hay with Doyle's supposed 'corruption,' Doyle only had to point to Green's voting record.

Biskupic was a prosecutor who'd apparently passed the Justice Department's political purity test. Is he typical?

That's what a few in congress would like to find out...

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Griper Blade: Is Team Bush Collapsing?

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is really feeling the heat. What I love about all of this is that it's not the attorney purge that's coming back to bite the administration in the ass, so much as it is the fact that they tried to hide the purge. In fact, had it not been for all the lying that went into the covering up the firings, this whole thing might've gone nowhere. As things are now, Gonzales is bailing on press conferences before anyone can ask him any questions.

Chicago Tribune (via Think Progress):

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dashed out of a Chicago news conference this afternoon in just two and a half minutes, ducking questions about how his office gave U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald a subpar rating.

Gonzales, who increasingly faces calls for his resignation, was here to promote a new ad campaign and had planned a 15-minute press availability. He left after taking just three questions over a firing scandal consuming his administration.

Before leaving, Gonzales said he wanted to "reassure the American people that nothing improper happened here."

You know what they say about heat and kitchens -- Gonzales couldn't take it, so he got the hell out. And this was fun:

Agence France-Presse:

The noose tightened Tuesday around beleaguered US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, after a top aide, fearing criminal prosecution, refused to testify in a scandal over the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors.

Questions about what role Gonzales might have played in the affair intensified, after senior aide Monica Goodling invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid potential self-incrimination and declined to answer lawmakers' questions about the firings.

"The hostile and questionable environment in the present congressional proceedings is at best ambiguous," her lawyer John Dowd said in a statement.

"More accurately, the environment can be described as legally perilous."

Nice spin, but you don't plead the fifth if everything's above board. Goodling believes she's committed a crime and can't answer questions honestly without penalty. IMO, they ought to give her immunity. That alone would be enough to make the entire Bush administration crap their pants.

There's obviously something to hide here. If the fact that Goodling pleaded the fifth isn't smoke enough, there's the fact that the White House was using non-government email accounts to discuss the firings. That way, they wouldn't have to keep records of the emails. But, once again, the cover up comes back to bite them in the ass -- they probably won't be able to claim 'executive privilege' to keep the emails private...

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