CCV Special Report

The Campaign for the Impeachment of Bush and Cheney:

A Timeline

For High Crimes and Misdemeanors

 

The movement to impeach and remove President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney has grown considerably since the June 2005 revelations that came with publication of the Downing Street Memo and the report of the official commission to investigate the 9/11 2001 “attack on America”.

Here, in brief, is a short timeline revealing of some of the significant developments in the evolution of this movement. It does not purport to be exhaustive, but contains only highlights in this ongoing campaign—one in which even today new happenings are yet in the making.

 

· January 18, 2003. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark addresses a crowd estimated at almost 500,000 gathered on the Washington Mall. Clark announces a nationwide grassroots campaign for the impeachment of President Bush. The Washington Post describes this as the largest anti-war protest since the end of the Vietnam War. Websites for VoteToImpeach.org and ImpeachBush.org are launched.

· December, 2003. Publication of Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush, by John C. Bonifaz, with a foreword by Congressman John Conyers. This early study argues that President Bush knowingly violated the law by rushing to war while refusing to allow the UN inspection team to complete its search for weapons of mass destruction. At the same time Bush willfully misled Congress by distorting the facts, insisting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which compelled him to go to war in the interest of American safety. The Iraq War was illegal because it violated the terms of the UN Charter and the Geneva Accords, which had been ratified by an act of Congress, thereby becoming American law. Hence, Bush also violated the U.S. Constitution.

· January 11, 2004. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tells CBS Sixty Minutes of his two years inside the Bush Administration. O’Neill states that he was fired from his job for disagreeing too many times with Bush, and that Bush was too secretive and disengaged in White House decision making. But more important, O’Neill discusses Pentagon documents, some of them labeled “secret,” which reveal that contractors from thirty to forty countries from around the globe had approached the Bush Administration for concessions on Iraqi oil, and that planning for the postwar in Iraq included not only for peacekeeping troops and war crimes tribunals, but for the division and expropriation of Iraqi oil. According to O’Neill, from day one in the Bush regime, from the very time of the Bush inauguration if not before it, “it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime.” From the beginning of the Bush Presidency, eight months prior to the September 11, 2001 “attack on America,” the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was the number one topic of concern. “These things were laid and sealed,” said O’Neill. In the same week, O’Neill released his book, The Price of Loyalty written by Ronald Suskind, followed by the public release of thousands of pages of documents on which the book is based.

· January 2004. Publication of The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn’t Tell You, by Paul Waldman. This book is not expressly concerned with impeachment, but delves behind the image of moderate conservatism, revealing Bush as a ruthless advocate of privilege promoted by business and religious conservatives, and contemptuous of the regulatory role of government for the protection of the public. Concerned with the gulf between rhetoric and reality in the run-up to war, the book also explores the role of the media in the cover-up of Bush perfidy.

· Year 2004. A broad range of new books that are highly critical of Bush appear as the 2004 election unfolds bringing with it the possibility of a change in government. Few of these focus directly on the constitutional issues or the question of impeachment. Exceptional among these is Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency, by Senator Robert C. Byrd, which appeared in hardback through the summer. A bitter indictment of Bush, the veteran West Virginia senator focuses on the separation of powers and the cynical attempts by Bush and his advisers, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft and Perle, to usurp the legitimate role of Congress through deception, manipulation, warmongering and outright intimidation, resulting in disastrous policies that have produced a Congress “cowed, timid and deferential”.

· May 1, 2005, the London Times publishes the first of a series of documents that quickly become famous as The Downing Street Memos, a collection of classified documents written by senior British intelligence officials in the spring of 2002. The memos reveal a series of meetings with high-ranking U.S. officials in which a plan for the invasion of Iraq is discussed—prior to the invasion itself which came the following spring. Soon after this, although the release of the memos prompts little coverage within the U.S. media, Representative Conyers (D-MI), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, will write to President Bush, along with eighty-seven initial members of Congress, who call upon the President to answer the allegations within the memos that there was a coordinated attempt to “fix the intelligence and the facts around the policy” in the run up to the war in Iraq. From May until December, an ongoing investigation of the war is under way under the leadership of Conyers.

· May 2005. AfterDowningStreet.org establishes an online impeachment resource center. A nonpartisan coalition of over 200 veterans groups, peace groups, and political activist groups begins to pressure both Congress and the media to investigate whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. Its name is derived from the Downing Street Memos. Websites and impeachment groups begin to flourish, with renewed efforts toward impeachment.

· June 16, 2005. Congressman Conyers and thirty-two other members of Congress convene an historic hearing on the Downing Street documents. Investigations by Conyers and his supporters will continue until December 2005, when the report “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Cover-ups in the Iraq War" is finally released by Conyers and his staff. The report concludes that by misleading Congress in the run-up to war, by manipulating intelligence, countenancing torture and permitting retaliation against critics of the Administration President Bush has violated federal law and is guilty of offenses rising to the level of impeachment.

· November 2005. “Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth,” a forty-eight page special report by Greg Muttitt, is published by a consortium of groups, including Platform, the Global Policy Forum, the Institute for Policy Studies, the New Economics Foundation, Oil Change International, and War On Want. These represent a combination of academic, legal, environmental, charitable and social justice advocates largely from the U.S. and the U.K. The report asserts that the goal of U.S.-U.K. military intervention in Iraq is to convert Iraqi oil production from a nationalized industry under the control of the Saddam Hussein regime to that of a privatized regime under the control of an array of U.S.-U.K. and affiliated interests based on the development of a long term production sharing agreement with newly established regime in Iraq. The report is publicized by the Guardian, ZNet, and a variety of alternative presses, but largely ignored by the main stream press.

· December 18, 2005. Congressman John Conyers introduces House Resolution 635, calling for the U.S. House to investigate the decision to invade Iraq and the possible grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. The Resolution and the Conyers committee report are all but ignored.

· January 11, 2006. Article by former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, Nation magazine. Holtzman observes that a full-fledged movement for the impeachment of Bush has now emerged openly in the U.S., becoming visible in the public press, on websites and in Congress itself. She presents four central arguments for the Bush impeachment: warrantless wiretaps under FSA, the subversion of democracy through fraud in the run-up to war in Iraq, a failure to take care that the laws of the U.S. be faithfully executed in accordance with the presidential oath and the Constitutionally mandated requirements of office for the presidency, and violation of the War Crimes Act and Geneva Conventions prohibiting the use of torture—in addition to an array of other lesser charges.

· March 2006. Publication of Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Made up of a group of attorneys organized for the defense civil rights activists in the South, the Center for Constitutional Rights is one of America's most prestigious collectives of constitutional lawyers and experts. The CCR attorneys present four articles of impeachment: warrantless surveillance, lying to Congress about Iraq, torturing of prisoners, and subverting the Constitutional principle of the separation of powers.

· March 2006. Harper’s Magazine, Lewis H. Lapham, “The Case for Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush,” joins major publications making the case for impeachment. Argues Bush is the first president in U.S. history to actually admit publicly to an impeachable offense.

· May 16, 2006. Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announces that she will not support a proposal of impeachment, and confirms this again on November 8, 2006 and again in July of 2007. Political expediency is the essential basis of her argument.

· August 2006. Publication of The Impeachment of George W. Bush, A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens by Nation Books. This extended study written by former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holzman with Cynthia L. Cooper presents a fully fleshed array of arguments drawn from the original article appearing The Nation, but with additional chapters providing extended comparison to Watergate and the campaign for the impeachment of President Nixon. New arguments are included based on a reckless indifference to human life in Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, plus arguments on the leaking of classified information in the Vallery Plame affair, and a chapter on the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. The book is presented as a handbook, with a collection of documentary appendices and a listing of selected sources. A short advisory appears at the end of the book for the citizen activist working to make a difference.

· August 4, 2006. Phil Burk, Richard Mathews, and Sophie de Fries, of impeachbush.tv and impeachpac.org, produce, “A Guide to the Impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney,” a ten page resource compilation, including legal arguments, books, websites and more. Available at—

       http://www.impeachbush.tv/downloads/guide_to_impeachment.pdf

· September 2006. Publication of George W. Bush v. the Constitution: The Downing Street Memos and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Spying. Compiled by U.S. Rep. John Conyers chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, edited by Anita Miller, with a foreword by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. This is a full and completed edition of the report produced by the Conyer’s committee.

· October 2006. Publication of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, by Dr. Dennis D. Loo and Peter Philips. In this collection, twenty-two political analysts explore the threat the White House and its allies present to civil liberties, civil rights, the Constitution, international law, and the future of the planet. Unearths the stories behind the election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the overt lies used to justify pre-emptive war on Iraq, the extensive, ongoing commission of war crimes and torture, the tragic failures in the lead-up to and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and other lesser-known but equally alarming offences. With an introduction by Howard Zinn.

· November 2006. Publication of United States. v. Bush et al by Elizabeth De La Vega, a former federal prosecutor with twenty years of experience before the courts. Presents a hypothetical legal argument before a fictive grand jury, arguing that Bush and his top advisers engaged in a conspiracy to deceive Congress and the people in the run-up to the war in Iraq and are therefore guilty of war by fraud. Examines the public statements, press accounts and official documents from the months leading up to the war.

· December 8, 2006. Defeated U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, in a parting shot on her last day in the House, introduces a Resolution for the Impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. The resolution is referred to the House Judiciary Committee where it fails to make progress.

· January 12, 2007. A full page ad calling for impeachment appears in the New York Times, sponsored by ImpeachBush/ VotetoImpeach.org, with parallel ads running in the Boston Globe, U.S. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers.

· March 17, 2007. More than 50,000 March at Washington, D.C. enduring freezing rain to hear former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, U.S. former Representative Cynthia McKinney, and Iraq War mother Cindy Sheehan speak before the Pentagon. The march is echoed by hundreds of other protests across the U.S., including large demonstrations at Los Angeles and San Francisco.

· April 20, 2007. Vermont Senate passes a resolution calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, becoming the first state to call upon its representatives in the U.S. House to introduce legislation to begin impeachment proceedings in the Judiciary Committee. The measure passed by a vote of 16 to 9. A growing list of towns, cities and municipalities have already passed such resolutions, including the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina.

· May 2007. Publication of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing George W. Bush from Office by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky. This book itemizes ten specific arguments for the removal of Bush by impeachment: the practice of fraud in the theft of the Florida election of 2000, lies to Congress in the Iraq War run-up, the obstruction of justice in the 9/11 cover-up, violation of citizens’ rights in the denial of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, wiretapping without a warrant under NSA laws, violation of international treaties including the Geneva Convention, actively encouraging the use of torture, gross negligence in response to Hurricane Katrina, corruption in Iraq War contracts resulting in the unaccountable loss of more than $8 billion, and fraud in the Ohio election of 2004.

· July 6, 2007. USA Today publishes the results of a telephone opinion poll, showing that 66% of U.S. voters disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president; 36% agree there is justification for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush.

· September 15, 2007. 100,000 march from the White House to the capital calling for the impeachment of Bush and Chaney. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark delivered a speech before the White House calling impeachment a legal necessity.

· October 22, 2007. Valerie Plame Wilson publishes, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, the sister of a U.S. Marine, recounts the details of her career in the agency, explaining the circumstances of her “outing” by White House officials intent on punishing her husband, a former U.S. Ambassador, for exposing the uranium acquisition claim in the run-up to war in Iraq.

· November 6, 2007. U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduces House Resolution 333, a bill calling for the impeachment of Vice President Richard Cheney, with twenty-one members of the House signing onto the measure as cosponsors. Kucinich cites a national opinion poll in which 54% of U.S. citizens favor the impeachment of Cheney. Kucinich announces, “As a member of Congress, I have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution and the laws of our nation...”

· To date: Impeachbush.org, an activist website polls more than 978,371 online voters who record their support for the impeachment. The list grows daily.

 

Readers are encouraged to access any of the online materials cited within this report, and to go to http://impeachbush.org for new information on the campaign to impeach Bush and Cheney.