[draft]
RESOLUTION OF THE MARIN PEACE AND JUSTICE COALITION
CALLING FOR ACTION ON THE ELECTION
Submitted by Alan Barnett

1. Express to our member of the House of Representatives and Senators our dismay at the Democratic Party members of the House and Senate for not having pressed action toward the impeachment of Bush and Cheney;
2. Call on all candidates for federal office to charge that in their view Bush and Cheney have committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” and therefore “impeachable offenses;”
3. Express our outrage at the Democratic Party Platform and presidential and vice-presidential candidates for not condemning the invasion of Iraq, its continued occupation and not setting a date for prompt withdrawal and not declaring their opposition to preventive or pre-emptive war;
4. Express our dismay at the Democratic Party Platform and candidates not calling for the total repeal of the USA Patriot Act;
5. Urge all registered Democrats to change their party registration to “Decline to State” or some other party, with the understanding that this is intended to send a signal to the Democrats that its progressives will not be taken for granted and that the party must earn their support. It is further understood that changing registration does not affect how a person votes in the general election.
6. It is recommended that if on the eve of the election California voters are expected to go for Kerry by a margin of five percentage points, that they vote for a different candidate.
7. Notify the media of these decisions.
   

WHY DEMAND IMPEACHMENT NOW?

Alan Barnett
August 2, 2004

So why demand impeachment now when it is clear that the chances of it happening before the November election are next to nil? The answer is that it is the only right thing to do, the constitutionally correct thing and the sole ethical response of citizens when “high crimes and misdemeanors,” have been committed. These are the grounds that the Constitution lays down as the basis for impeachment. To proclaim this loud and clear is not only to feel good, but it can have practical strategic value.

The Constitution does not say that when there is suspicion that such abuses have occurred, that members of the House of Representatives must act. But the inference is that this is their duty. This is the situation with President Bush, his Vice President, the National Security Adviser and Secretaries of Defense, State and the Attorney General. The importance of citizens taking a public stand on this even though it is not likely that Congress will act, is that those who believe that impeachable offenses have occurred must not quail before the challenge although Congress has. The integrity of the democratic system must be upheld and members of Congress held accountable for their failure to perform their duty.

It is insufficient to say that impeachment should not be attempted because it is likely to fail because the majority of both houses of Congress are of the President’s party. What has that to do with trying to prosecute acts that give all appearance of being abuses and indeed criminal, especially since they have resulted in the deaths of more than 900 US military personnel and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians?

It is insufficient to say that with an impending election that that should be utilized to rid the government of culpable leaders. How far must we be from an election to decide whether to try to impeach? From the time that Bush took the nation to war without submitting US claims to the UN Security Council, he was in violation of the United Nations Charter by which America is bound by treaty obligations. Those obligations are part of the law of this land. The President gives every appearance of having violated them and persists in saying that he would do it again.

Bush and his administration took the nation to war on the basis of lies, and there should be no mistake that they were lies. But even if they were misjudgments based on poor information, the President is culpable of at least unintended second-degree murder, that is, manslaughter. He should have been certain beyond a reasonable doubt that his claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and was responsible for 9/11 before sending thousands to their deaths. In either of these cases, he undeniably is culpable and unfit to govern a day longer.

In ordinary matters of criminal and civil law, if there is a reasonable suspicion that violations have been committed, do district attorneys decide whether to prosecute depending on whether there is an election impending?

If Bush were to take up a gun and start firing at people in the White House, would he not be restrained? Would he not be charged? But he is responsible for the unjust deaths of tens of thousands, and no one is stopping him! Who knows that a person who has demonstrated such a total lack of judgment and scruples will do before the election? He and his administration are a clear and present danger, and no one in Congress has the guts or responsibility to act to prevent further harm.

Elections are not the way that the American system of justice decides the guilt or innocence of the accused. They must be brought before a court (which the Congress would function as in the case of impeachment) and the evidence carefully scrutinized so that its soundness can be determined. This is not what occurs in elections with their hoopla, their unsubstantiated charges and counter-charges.

In place of impeachment we are now being treated to the American Heritage version of electioneering at greater cost and more balloon-drops than ever before. There will be the glistening capped-toothy smiles, the vapid speechifying and baby-kissing, while the criminals run amuck. Our representatives, most of them, have failed us by not performing their responsibility to halt this star-spangled race to the bottom.

What has the Impeachment Committee of the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition been doing over the year and a half of its existence? It first of all persuaded MPJC to endorse the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. It has secured the agreement of the only member of the House of Representatives to sign on to a bill of impeachment if it is drafted and presented by Rep. John Conyers, the leader of the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee, where such a bill would originate. She is Marin and Sonoma’s Lynn Woolsey. We have lobbied Rep. Conyers, Rep. Barbara Lee and Rep. George Miller from the Bay area without success. We are hoping to meet soon with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, of San Francisco, the leader of the Democrats in the House. Having collected 600 letters addressed to her from her constituents, we want to present our faces behind these letters. We want to express our dismay with Congress and the Democrats for failing their constituents.

With activists of like mind in the East Bay we formed last November the National Coalition to Impeach Bush & Cheney and have drawn as endorsers Howard Zinn, Medea Benjamin, Kevin Danaher, Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois law professor who has drafted a bill of impeachment, Cynthia McKinney, who is likely to be re-elected to Congress after one term off her previous five in Congress. There are also Douglas Dowd, our local progressive economic historian and teacher, Barbara Lubin of the Middle-East Children’s Alliance and Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Civil Rights and others. Organizational members include the National Lawyers Guild, both the national and Bay Area offices, the Alameda Central Labor Council and other national and local groups. Members of NCIBC have collected thousands of letters from around the Bay that they have delivered to their writers’ representatives. We have sold thousands of “Impeach Bush” bumper strips and borne banners with the same message in the marches in San Francisco and Marin.

So what’s to be done? It seems to us that citizens must bear witness to the terrible crimes that have been committed. Otherwise we do not deserve to be citizens or to regard our nation as law-abiding and democratic. Let not history record that American citizens did not demand justice when their elected representatives failed them. What is heartening is the positive response when we stand along the streets and brandish our posters and distribute our bumper strips, when we march in parades with our “Impeach Bush” banner and get feedback from our website or write pieces like this. We believe that we must continue to speak truth to power.

There is practical strategic importance of educating the public and putting our representatives on notice that they have failed us. Whether Kerry or Bush wins the election, the one or the other and their parties need to know that significant numbers of citizens hold both Republicans and Democrats accountable for committing or tolerating criminal acts by the Bush administration. Those most responsible need to be brought to justice in the courts, national and international, if the rule of law is to prevail. Even more important, government policies that support wars of aggression, the continued occupation of Iraq and imperial globalization that exploits other peoples will be challenged. Further, legislation and executive orders that subvert civil rights will be contested. Not only the presidential candidates but also our representatives in Congress must be alerted to the fact that those of us who have called for the impeachment of Bush will continue to fight his policies whether they are perpetrated by a Kerry or second Bush administration. They need to know that there is a growing peace and justice movement in this country that will not be slowed by whoever wins the election.

IMPEACHMENT & BEYOND

Alan Barnett
March 15, 2004 

Impeachment must be pursued with all energy not only to remove from office those responsible for some of the greatest wrongs in American history but also to sensitize all citizens to the guilt of our nation for having permitted them. The upcoming election, which may rid us of those who have misled us, will not, because of its partisanship and hoopla, compel us to confront the enormous crimes into which the American people have allowed themselves to be led. At most the campaigning will result in the mutual recrimination of the candidates and parties. But the responsibility of the nation as a whole and the lessons that must be learned will be missed.

Thousands of our own soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, civilians and military, have been murdered and maimed in a war perpetrated by the deceptions of the Bush administration and tolerated by all of us. Even those of us who protested the war bear some responsibility for having allowed it to occur without having done more, such as a general strike that could have brought the war machine to a halt.

We can mitigate some of our responsibility by pressing for impeachment. But impeachment should provide the occasion for Americans to acknowledge that it is not only our leaders but our country that has committed grievous wrongs so that we can learn from them. These wrongs continue with the military occupation of Iraq, which is likely to go on for years along with the mayhem it provokes. We have incited an insurgency against our occupation and civil war among nationalists and those who collaborate with us. Meanwhile the oil of Iraq, which until now has been at least nominally the possession of the nation, will be privatized and plundered by US corporations, no matter how our elections go.

My fear is that the ballyhoo of electioneering will bury in the black hole of collective denial the responsibility of all Americans for what has occurred. It is comparable to the guilt that Germany had to face after World War II, although not resulting in as much mayhem, but still wiping out countless single infinitely precious lives. Numbers numb us to the reality of each. For us to have taken one innocent life as a result of a self-righteous national policy is a heinous crime; to have taken so many and to persist at it is unfathomable.

Impeachment only carries with it dismissal of the convicted from public office and their exclusion from any position of public trust for the rest of their life. Our leaders must further be tried as war criminals unless impunity is permitted to prevail.

Of course there must be compensation to the families of the victims along with our reconstructing Iraq, which has been the target not only of massive bombing in two wars but also twelve years of economic sanctions. These sanctions embargoed the equipment necessary to repair the damage of the first Gulf War, including water purification and sanitation materiel, and prevented the importing of medicine and food, the scarcity of which has caused the death of over a million Iraqis, most of them children under the age of five. Compensation must not be taken from the oil profits that properly belong to the Iraqi people who cannot be held responsible for their authoritarian leaders, but be paid by the perpetrators of the two wars and sanctions.

But further, Americans must acknowledge what our country has done. Among the wrongs that have been committed are those against our institutions and system of justice, including our commitments to the collective security of the world through the United Nations and international law. Of highest priority must be the disowning of the National Security Strategy, promulgated by Bush Jr. in 2002, which calls for American empire by military and economic supremacy. This document was intended to provide the rationale for the attack on Iraq.

Although the NSS is the most blatant official proclamation of US aggression in our history, it arises from a tradition of conquest that began with the European colonization of the Americas and the accompanying genocide of the indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. This aggrandizement was continued by the War against Mexico that seized half of that nation, the Spanish-American War that extended our empire to the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba, then the annexation of Hawaii. During the 20th century much of Latin America fell victim to US economic and political penetration. As Simón Bolívar, one of the true liberators of our hemisphere, said as early as 1829, "The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Now it is the world that is the prey of our country.

The most recent exercise of US conquest provides the occasion once and for all of rejecting the aggrandizement that contradicts our other tradition—that of peace and the self-determination of peoples. But this can only occur by a nationwide acknowledging that we have waged aggressive war under the pretense of liberating the oppressed, now repeated in Haiti. The people of our country take pride in their optimism, which too often has meant blotting out the truth of our past so that we can continue to grab what we want. We must learn from the new atrocities or we are bound to repeat them.

I don't believe that people can make amends and be forgiven for the willful or negligent taking of others’ lives. There can be no wiping away of the stain, no cleansing of conscience. How can the murdered forgive? It is not for the survivors to absolve the guilty and complicit. There are things for which I cannot forgive myself. All I can do is to try not to forget my responsibility for the past so as to remember my obligation to the living. That keeps me intent on trying to change my life and to join with those who feel similarly to change our society. In that is the only solace. gel

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES
&
THE GOOD AMERICANS

Alan Barnett

(Marin Peace & Justice Coalition)
November, 2003

Half of the US public believes that President Bush lied to take the country to war against Iraq, according to recent national polls. Even a greater proportion believes that if this is the case, it is a matter of the utmost gravity. To have led the nation to war by deception certainly rises to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors," as the Constitution describes the grounds for impeachment. Yet few American leaders are calling for the prosecution of Bush and Cheney. But a growing groundswell of the public is.

If we do not insist on justice being done, we become "good Americans," no different from the "good Germans" who knew Hitler’s crimes and remained silent.

The reasons that Bush and Cheney gave to lead the nation to war were that there was an imminent threat of Saddam Hussein using weapons of mass destruction against us. If this was a deception, then the US invasion of Iraq was an aggressive war. The best estimates are that up to 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians were killed in the attack and they continue to be killed. Untold numbers of Iraqi troops were also murdered in a war in which they were defending their country. And by the end of October 350 US troops, most of them drafted by poverty into our armed forces, died in combat or from related causes. American citizens who, as they become aware that this war on Iraq was based on deceptions and therefore was aggressive war, become complicit in these crimes if they do nothing about them. Only by demanding that there be no impunity for the perpetrators of aggressive war and terrorism against Iraqi civilians do we free ourselves from this guilt.

Members of Congress, whose task impeachment would be, are not rising to their responsibility. We have to assume that they, too, believe that there are grounds for impeachment of Bush and Cheney. At least they have initiated investigations in the Senate and House concerning the intelligence connected with our going to war and its use by the Administration. Some members of Congress have also called for a special commission independent of Congress to investigate the subject, an investigation like that studying the failure to prevent 9.11. But these calls for a non-partisan commission on Iraq have gone nowhere. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates are also charging the Bush Administration with having misled the nation to get it to back the war and clearly regard the issue as useful for their campaigns. It is likely that that is one of the reasons that they are not pressing for impeachment.

The prevailing view seems to be that impeachment is unviable because the Republicans control both the House of Representatives, which would have to bring charges, and the Senate, that would have to try those charged. This would make it impossible to prosecute wrongdoing by the President and Vice-President and force them from office. It assumes that the House, which acts as grand jury, and the Senate, as trial jury, are so warped by partisanship that an impartial performance of their duty is impossible. This may be the simple fact of the matter unless the public generates so powerful a demand that the Congress must act.

We may ask whether the original drafters of the Constitution intended to create an impeachment process that can only operate if the Executive and Legislative Branches are controlled by different parties. Actually, the Constitution does not take parties into account, but it does establish a system of checks and balances between branches of government. If Executive and Legislative branches are of the same mind, there can be no checks and balances and seemingly no impeachment. If this is true, the burden lies on the citizenry to protect the integrity of its government.

What is really at stake is the question of whether Bush and Cheney fraudulently led the nation to war and whether that war was aggressive and unprovoked. At stake also is the uncontested fact that the war was pursued without permission by the United Nations Security Council. All of these violations would be crimes against US law, which incorporates the UN Charter.

The Democratic presidential contenders are taking the position that the election of 2004 is the proper means to deal with the issues surrounding the legitimacy of the war on Iraq. While the Republican members of Congress are hiding out from their constituents, the Democratic members will take electoral advantage of the probable criminality of the Bush Administration rather than risk indicting and prosecuting it. In short, both the American system of justice and the constitutional system of impeachment are in jeopardy.

To make these matters the issue of an election campaign is a dereliction of legal process. Elections are not ways of dealing with charges of crime and determining the guilt or innocence of persons. Pre-trial investigation and then prosecution is the only permissible way under our system of justice. The proper form of investigation with the possibility of bringing a charge of "high crimes" is the impeachment process. The American system of justice does not hold votes by the public to determine the guilt or innocence of persons. It places them on trial where evidence is carefully examined and strict procedures are observed to protect the rights of those charged and the public. This is the correct way to hold the President and Vice-President accountable. To do anything less would be a perversion of justice.

There are other grounds as well on which Bush and Cheney could be impeached, such as the negligence, willful or otherwise, surrounding the attack of 9.11, the aggressive war fought against the Taliban government of Afghanistan when it offered to negotiate, and violations of civil liberties by the USA Patriot Act and related government decrees. Where Congress has authorized presidential violations of civil liberties, there is some question as to whether these are impeachable offenses. But the violations about which there is the widest concurrence of the public and the evidence is ready at hand are Bush and Cheney’s deceptions that were used to justify the US attack on Iraq.

The principal issue that is before citizens is whether there is sufficient evidence to bring charges against the President and Vice-President and then to put them on trial. This should not be a matter of partisan politics. If a majority of the public believes that there is sufficient evidence to warrant a formal investigation that can lead to an indictment, that is, impeachment, then they should be demanding their representatives in the House to support a bill of impeachment and begin the procedure. It is only a groundswell of public outrage that will accomplish this because most members of Congress are very reluctant to begin the process.

It will be said that the Commander-in Chief must not be indicted while our troops are exposed to danger. But in fact it is precisely for that reason that the propriety of the actions of Bush and Cheney in putting our soldiers at risk must be determined. Unless the cause is just and principled, then Americans should not be engaged in war. We must not ask our fellow citizens to risk their lives for a war based on deceptions. We cannot kill those who oppose us and the many more who die as "collateral damage," for a lie.

Some people say that apart from any deceptions of the Bush Administration, Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein; it has been liberated. That it is a good and humane thing that the Iraqi people are no longer subject to his cruel dictatorship there is no doubt. But liberation was never a primary reason that Bush gave for going to war. Those reasons were that the Hussein regime posed an imminent threat to the United States and the Middle East because it possessed weapons of mass destruction and would acquire even more powerful ones in the near future. Moreover, it was charged by the Bush Administration that Hussein was connected with the al Qaida terrorists and inferred that he had responsibility for the 9.11 attack on the US. The Administration itself has been forced to admit that it has no evidence to connect Hussein with 9.11, although it still contends there is a connection between him and al Qaida. But none of the charges that Hussein posed an imminent threat because he possessed WMD have stood scrutin

The elimination of a brutal regime is certainly desirable, but how it is done is as important. The US and UK invasion has caused death and suffering to tens of thousands of innocent civilians. For those who believe that Iraq has been liberated by the US and its coalition partners, we are now witnessing the violent resentment of a people who have been over-run by foreigners and have not liberated themselves, as the Americans did during their War for Independence which they initiated and then sought the aid of the French. There are obviously Iraqis and perhaps foreigners whom they have invited to fight alongside them who do not want to be "liberated" by the Americans and British who obviously have ulterior motives, such as gaining control of Iraqi oil and bases for their forces in the Middle East. It is clear that people do not want to be "liberated" at the point of a gun to their faces. While those fighting the US coalition forces in Iraq may not all be nationalist patriots, most of them li

The Bush Administration has made clear by its own pronouncements, especially the National Security Strategy, published in September, 2002, that its goals are the US military and economic supremacy of the world. The document affirms explicitly that to attain these goals the US will utilize preventative war, that is, aggression, for that purpose and if necessary proceed unilaterally without its allies or the United Nations. Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate these intentions. These policy objectives and methods run counter to US ideals and commitments to the United Nations Charter, to which the US is a signatory and bound. To violate these is to violate US law and hence an impeachable offense.

The conduct of the Bush Administration in foreign affairs has undermined US credibility as a democratic, peace-loving nation and established precedents for other nations to pursue what they perceive as their national interest with whatever violence that they can mount. This has already occurred in the case of Israel, India, Russia, China, the Philippines and Colombia which have all embraced the Bush rubric of the "War against Terrorism" to put down insurgencies by peoples seeking self-determination. The result can only be a retreat from collective security and social justice advanced by an imperfect but improvable United Nations. It is to ignite a worldwide conflagration where neo-imperialism is yoked to corporate globalization and the US Constitution is undermined by a fascist melding of nationalism, militarism and the police-state. Impeachment is the necessary firewall against this.

The Emperor has no clothes. Practically everyone sees this, both citizens and their elected representatives. If the members of Congress dare not concede publicly what their constituents know, then the citizenry must by its outcry compel them to act. Otherwise we become "good Americans." It is our outrage at the betrayal of public trust, the thousands of murders committed in our name, the even greater number of injuries and the immense destruction that moves us. We must not rest until justice is done.

Marin Independent Journal
September 9, 2003

Marin Voice

Mill Valley Parade Ordinance

Allan Barnett

     These are indeed scary times. The Mill Valley City Council on September 2 began the process of codifying in a city ordinance the exclusion of undesired political expression in its one municipal parade of the year. Until now city government has permitted unofficially but effectively only jingoist patriotism in its Memorial Day observance.

     But now conformity is being legislated by the parade ordinance. It will make official what was formerly decided by the police and a backroom cabal of local worthies like Billy Budd, chairman of the "I Love A Parade Committee," which with the Chamber of Commerce has been mounting the Memorial Day observance since the 1980s.

     The here-to-fore arbitrary procedure was exposed last May when the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition, which has some 70 members in Mill Valley, sought to apply for a place in the parade and was refused because of its opposition to the war on Iraq. MPJC’s presence would dishonor those who died for their country, Budd explained. He added that in any case the Memorial Day Parade should not be tarnished by political expression; it was a family event.

     Nevertheless, MPJC, did march at the head of the parade and was joined by Sustainable Mill Valley and the Seniors for Peace at the Redwoods retirement center.

     The Council has made clear that it wants to protect Memorial Day celebrants from the expression of views critical of the US government by giving preference to "traditional" applicants to run the march, namely, Budd. Its desire to keep political expression out of the parade neglects that Memorial Day is a political holiday and that to reduce it to hoopla is to sully the sacrifice of those who died to protect our civil rights.

     Members of the Council argue that the civil rights of residents would not be abused because if they were not allowed to march in the Memorial Day Parade or to get a permit to mount it, they could seek a permit for another day. MPJC, Sustainable Mill Valley and Seniors for Peace should not have to compete with the "I Love a Parade Committee" to mount the Memorial Day Parade in order to participate in the city’s principal annual celebration.

     In 1967 I organized a peace contingent in Mill Valley’s annual parade that was then held on the Fourth of July and put together by one of the city’s fraternal organizations. Maxine White, wife of the mayor, Al White, got out of the convertible at the head of the parade to march with us. This was the first peace contingent to march in the city and contributed to the City Council passing the following January a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. The Council put the issue on the ballot and in March residents also voted for peace. This made Mill Valley the first city in the United States to call for the end of the war.

     Some of the same people marched in the Memorial Day Parade in 1994 under banners calling for a No-vote on Proposition 187, that would end public education for the children of the undocumented. Somehow this escaped Billy Budd’s attention. Mill Valley voted by 59% against the measure.

     The people of Mill Valley have not changed. It is only their public officials who have.

     The Supreme Court has found that an organization that receives a parade permit from a city may invite whomever it chooses. But the law also provides that if city government takes control of a parade that it must abide by the First Amendment and include whoever wants to march, limited only by some neutral criteria, such as, that some of the members of the organization must be local residents.

     Understandably officials do not want to spend the City’s limited funds on the Memorial Day parade, but City government could take control of it, thereby insuring the civil rights of all its residents. The City could then contract out the mounting of the parade to any group of volunteers who is willing to protect these rights. Sausalito does precisely that, and MPJC was proud to be invited to participate in its recent Fourth of July parade and in fact to win an honorable mention for its unit

      Memorial Day is a national patriotic holiday, and all citizens should be able to express their ideas in what for all intents and purposes is a municipal celebration, as is demonstrated by the inclusion of City officials and ceremonial police and fire department units for which the City pays overtime.

     As Billy Budd is quoted as saying of the ordinance, "It isn’t going to change anything." The Council will be doing a second reading of it on Monday, September 15. People concerned about civil rights should let the Council know their views or attend the 7:30 pm meeting.

Marin Independent Journal                                                                            August 8, 2003   

Marin Voice

Bush's war deceptions a crime

Alan Barnett

    Forty percent of people polled believe that President Bush deliberately misled the public about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, according to a CNN-USA Today and Gallup survey at the end of June. That does not include those who believe that he may have been misled by his intelligence agencies.

    Hussein’s alleged weapons, his supposed alliance with the al Qaeda terrorist network and thus complicity in the 9.11 attack, were the President’s chief reasons for taking our country to war. No evidence to support any of these charges has stood scrutiny. Still Bush continues to make them, although admitting that he misspoke in his State of the Union address last January about Iraq importing African uranium, a claim that Vice-President Cheney knew was false for almost a year before.

    If President Bush fraudulently led us to war, this would be a "high crime," for which the Constitution requires impeachment.

    Even if he was misinformed by his staff, he must be held accountable for failing to exercise due diligence in sending more than 200 American troops to their death, to say nothing of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

    For the President to have been persuaded sufficiently to justify an attack that he knew would take thousands of lives, he would have had to know where the WMDs were and that they were poised for attack. The sheer size of the WMD stockpiles that the President described in his January address, if they existed, requires that they would have been discovered by now.

    Having refused to permit the U.N. inspectors the time they sought before the war to find these weapons or conclude they did not exist, now after the mayhem, the President wants time for U.S. inspectors to discover the weapons to prove he was right…or time for the public to forget.

    The ease with which Hussein’s forces were overcome by the U.S. indicates that they posed no imminent threat. Indeed, it suggests that Bush attacked Iraq because its forces were weak and that he had ulterior reasons for going to war. Iraq was targeted already by strategy documents of 1992 and ’93 written under the auspices of Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense to Bush Sr. The reasons then were the same as now: getting control of the world’s oil and gaining permanent bases in a strategic area.

    The President tries to legitimize his unilateral "preventative" attack by insisting on U.S military and economic supremacy around the world, as set forth in the National Security Strategy, which he promulgated last September. This flies in the face of continually reaffirmed U.S. goals of peace and collective security. Although this country has violated them in the past, never before has a president publicly rejected them and pursued a foreign policy explicitly committed to world domination.

. None of the President’s violations of the Constitution can be properly dealt with by the election of 2004. Elections are not means of prosecuting crime. The Bush administration has demonstrated that it knows how to hijack elections. Incumbency now gives the Bush machine even greater access than before to the levers of power, massive campaign contributions and buying the media.

    Athough Congress has initiated investigations into whether the President fraudulently led us to war, these are to be mainly secret hearings, and we can be sure that major efforts will be made to prevent the truth from emerging. The public must insist that there be independent open hearings that can determine whether impeachment charges should be brought against both the President and Vice-President.

    None of this will happen unless there is a public outcry to force the hand of Congress. We the people must compel it to get the whole truth and act on it. Otherwise the wound to American democracy will be fatal.