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- From: Gregory_Whitfield@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 10:43:39 -0700
This letter to the editor from Maine is a very good summation of why the
Downing Street Memo is the smoking gun which "should" lead to impeachment.
Pass it on--the story is finally getting legs in the main stream media.
Gregory
Administration's offenses impeachable
Thursday, June 02, 2005 - Bangor Daily News
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Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:
A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of
the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with
the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the
England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove
briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to
attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists,
that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush
was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around
the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the
product of whole cloth fabrication.
So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological
weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to
Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't.
We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired
generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in
the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb
their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe.
Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.
It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But
here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred
trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his
administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the
American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of
American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000
Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its
environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a
mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history,
tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation
that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and
empire, in the first place.
What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be
impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins
and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate
impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are
thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they
stand up now for the truth.
Richard Nixon was impeached for a cover-up of a two-bit break-in. William
Cohen, a young Maine Republican, played an important role for the
prosecution in those proceedings. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying
about sex with an intern. Now we have the irrefutable evidence that George
W. Bush lied about the reasons for taking the United States to war. The
intelligence wasn't flawed. The weapons weren't hidden. Our elected leaders
were lying.
Democracy, like any sound relationship between people, is built on trust.
We trust our leaders to tell the truth so that the consent that we give
them is honestly informed. If the consent is won through manipulation,
propaganda, fear, or lies, the basis of our democracy has been subverted.
It is no longer democracy at all, but we continue to call it that because
we have not the courage or stamina to demand its overhaul.
We live a lie when we fail to hold leaders accountable for their lies. By
not calling now for impeachment, we are saying that we condone hypocrisy,
pseudo-democracy, and murdering thousands of Americans and Iraqis for
strategic control of energy resources that we have no right to. Patriotism
demands that we insist on the ideals of democracy, not that we support the
"leaders" who cynically destroy them.
What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out.
Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to
continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think
they can lie to history, too. Do they think that this little Iraq problem
will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United
States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do
they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy
consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying
about them?
We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age upon which
may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one's
future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to
come to terms with what we know is true: America's president lied to
America's people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and
Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment
proceedings. It's really no more or less than their duty. It's also the
first step toward restoring America's integrity.
Robert Shetterly is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville.
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Bangor Publishing Company
www.bangornews.com/
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