27 of 35 Bush Articles of Impeachment Apply to Obama
When Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of
impeachment against President George W. Bush on June 9, 2008, the 35 had
been selected from drafts of nearly twice that many articles.
President Obama has accumulated his own massive list of high crimes
and misdemeanors that were unavailable for Bush's list (thing's like
openly murdering U.S. citizens, launching massive drone wars,
selectively and abusively prosecuting numerous whistleblowers as spies,
holding Bradley Manning naked in isolation, attacking Libya without so
much as bothering to lie to Congress, etc.).
Nonetheless, it is instructive to review the
35 Bush articles
in the Obama age. It quickly becomes apparent that Obama has either
exactly duplicated or closely paralleled most of the 35.
Here's what I
mean:
Article XXVI
Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements.
Click the link to read the article introduced against Bush. Obama
campaigned against this abuse and has routinely engaged in it as
president. Worse, he has established the policy
of silently relying on previous Bush or Obama signing statements rather
than restating his intention to violate laws each time such intention
is relevant to a bill he is signing.
Article XXII
Creating Secret Laws.
Obama similarly uses Department of Justice arguments to reverse the
commonly understood meaning of laws (bombing Libya is neither war nor
hostilities, for example). And he similarly uses arguments that are
kept away from public sight. While the United Nations, foreign nations,
and human rights groups have questioned the legality of drone strikes,
Obama has not provided his legal defense or even felt obliged to make
any assertion as to which victims were intended and which were
"collateral damage." This week the ACLU sued for release of such
information. In addition, Obama announced in 2009 that he would review
all of Bush's signing statements and decide which ones to keep as law
and which to discard, but the public has never been told the outcome of
that review.
Article XVII
Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives.
Obama did this from day one, proclaimed it in front of the
Constitution in the National Archives, formalized it in an executive
order, signed it into law this past New Year's Eve, and expanded the
practice at Bagram.
Article XXIII
Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Obama has continued each abuse detailed here and added to them,
including through his use of the military to keep journalists away from
the BP oil disaster and in an effort to break a strike at the ports of
the Pacific Northwest.
Article XIX
Rendition:
Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to "Black Sites"
Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture.
Obama has publicly claimed the power to continue this practice, in
fact continued this practice, maintained black sites despite announcing
an end to them, and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his
predecessor.
Article XX
Imprisoning Children.
Obama has continued this practice and added to it the murdering of
children, refusing to say that Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki was not
intentionally targeted or that he, Obama, does not have the legal power
to murder U.S. children. Non-U.S. children continue to die in
significant numbers from drone strikes and by other means (including
intentional targeting from helicopter) as part of Obama's escalated war
on Afghanistan.
Article XVIII
Torture:
Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against
Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official
Policy.
Obama has claimed the power to torture, worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor, and continued to allow torture. He has also pressured other nations, including Spain, to drop prosecutorial investigations of U.S. crimes of torture.
Article XXIV
Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment.
Obama has continued these practices and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor.
Article XXV
Directing
Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional
Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American
Citizens.
Obama has continued these practices and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor and guilty corporations.
Article XXI
Misleading
Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and
Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of
Overthrowing the Iranian Government.
Obama has continued these practices. In his most recent State of the
Union speech he said, "America is determined to prevent Iran from
getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to
achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still
possible . . . if Iran changes course." When Iran recently took down a
U.S. drone, Obama simply asked that it be returned.
Article XVI
Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors.
Obama's Pentagon is no more audited or accountable, nor the routine
scandals involving misplaced millions or billions of dollars less
frequent. No-bid contracts have increased. Privatization has
increased. Secrecy has increased. The use of Special Forces in secret
non-war wars has spread to more nations. The permanent stationing of
U.S. troops has spread to more nations. Secret agencies, including the
CIA, have been given larger war-making roles. And Obama continued the
war on Iraq long beyond the date by which he had promised to end it, and
continues to maintain thousands of mercenaries in Iraq, and to use
drones in the skies of Iraq. He has also worked to coverup and protect
related crimes by his predecessor.
Article XV
Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq.
Obama's insistence on continuing this practice not just beyond 2008
but beyond 2011, combined with the Iraqi government's refusal to agree,
resulted in Obama's decision to comply with the Bush-Maliki treaty to
end the war on Iraq by this past New Year's Eve.
Article XXX
Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare.
The details have to be changed to apply this article to Obama. The
changes are not in Obama's favor. Obama met in secret with the CEOs of
health insurance corporations and pursued a vision of healthcare reform
that they had secretly influenced. In so doing, he misled Congress and
the American people. He is quite open, in contrast, about his
willingness to slash Medicare, as well as Medicaid.
Article XXXI
Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency.
The victims of Katrina have still not been compensated, nor the
environmental and urban damage undone. Instead the BP oil disaster has
been added. Obama intentionally misled the Congress and the public,
downplaying the quantity of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. He
allowed a clean-up operation that was nothing of the sort. No real
clean-up or recovery is planned. Nor have the corporations or their
supposed regulators been held accountable.
Article XXXII
Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change.
Obama's approach to systematically undermining efforts to address
global climate change has included blocking possible global agreements
at meetings in Denmark and South Africa, while promoting "clean coal,"
"natural gas," and "safe fracking."
Article XIV
Misprision
of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And
Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson,
Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The exposing of a secret agent has not been repeated, but retribution
against whistleblowers has been taken to new heights with more
prosecutions under the Espionage Act than by all previous presidents
combined.
Article XXXIV
Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001.
We're still waiting.
Now, we come to the launching of the war on Iraq:
Article I
Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.
Article II
Falsely,
Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of
September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat
as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.
Article III
Misleading
the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed
Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.
Article IV
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.
Article V
Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.
Article VI
Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.
Article VII
Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
Article VIII
Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.
Article XII
Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources.
Article XIIII
Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries.
It was too late for Obama to exactly duplicate these offenses, as the
war against Iraq was already underway. But President Obama has
embraced the lies that launched that war. He claimed
in 2010 that the war on Iraq had been launched in order to disarm that
nation. In the news around the world on the day of Obama's most recent
State of the Union speech was the anger among Iraqis at the failure of
the United States to hold anyone seriously accountable for the 2005
massacre in Haditha. The story
was a useful reminder of how the operations of the U.S. military over
the past decade have fueled hostility toward our nation. President
Obama began his speech by claiming the opposite, asserting that the war
on Iraq has made us safer and "more respected around the world." Obama
has repeatedly used such rhetoric to pivot to promotion of his escalated
war in Afghanistan or other military operations. Similarly, President
Obama misled the nation about the purpose and nature of a war on Libya
that has left Libya, like Iraq, in worse shape, and which has left
Constitutional war powers in tatters, as the Congress declared itself
opposed to the war and the war continued. Meanwhile misleading
propaganda about Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other nations
continues to emerge from the Obama administration. The Director of
National Intelligence has just claimed that Iran is a threat to the
United States. While the Iraq War may have "ended," the Authorization
for the Use of Military Force has been kept in place allowing Obama to
use it as a legal argument for other military operations and abuses of
civil rights. Also emerging with ever greater frankness from the Obama
White House and Pentagon, including from the President, is the claim of
presidential prerogative to launch military attacks on sovereign
nations, involving deaths to both militants and civilians, without any
consideration of Congress, the Constitution, the War Powers Resolution,
the United Nations or its Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or any other
law.
There is no quantitative way to measure whether Obama's additions to
the presidential powers accumulated by Bush and Bush's predecessors
equals or exceeds those added by Bush. But measured against the
pre-Bush baseline, or against the written rule of law, Obama's power
abuses far outstrip Bush's, while in the category of immediate death
count Bush retains a significant lead.
Would Romney or Gingrich be even worse? That's quite likely. If we
continue to self-censor on these matters, Obama Part II will also be
significantly worse. A popular movement against these abuses could make
any White House occupant better than the current one, even if it's the
same individual. Remember what Howard Zinn taught: It's not who is
sitting in the White House; it's who is doing the sit-ins.