Thursday, July 17, 2008
Impeach Bush and Cheney | Block An Iran Attack and don't trust this Congress or the Administration
Posted by ed. dickau at 5:55 AM
Impeach Bush and Cheney Before Iran In Struck. Beware of Machiavellian “Smoke and Mirrors, good old fashioned Red Herring” Tactics On Both Issue. We Must Force Impeachment and Quash Plans To Strike Iran. Believe No Nice Talk; Do Not Trust The Word Of Congress Or The Administration; We Must Act As If It Is All A Smoke Screen.
Apparently they are going to let Denny Talk and ignore the matter; that is the plan. The new Bush, Obama-like lower level communications announced yesterday can be as disingenuous and devious a move as we have seen: talk, declare failure, discredit the Obama approach, prepare America and STRIKE IRAN! I’m not paranoid: just experienced and unable to trust any move, any word from this administration.
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Impeachment: On the Table But Not for Consumption
Yahoo! News – USA | The Nation -- Impeachment is on the table.
But Congress is not allowed to bite.
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on one of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders in the chamber have signaled that they do not want the committee -- let alone the full House -- to take a vote on impeachment.
How's that?
The Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the president's abuses of power -- perhaps as soon as next week. Expert witnesses will be called. Kucinich says that a foreign official -- who he has not named -- is willing to testify regarding presidential wrongdoing. And Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, the veteran Michigan Democrat who actually believes in presidential accountability but has had a hard time getting other top Democrats to embrace that belief, suggests that the hearing will review evidence of "all the (Bush administration actions) that constitute an imperial presidency."
But, when all is said and done, the committee is only supposed to "accumulate" the evidence of imperial over-reach, not to act upon it.
Impeachment Hearings: A Win is a Win (Not A Victory) (Just A Tennis Set: The Match Is Not Over)
By dlindorff
One view would be that this is all a charade and that after all, it will not be a real impeachment hearing, but rather, simply a hearing into the impeachable crimes of the Bush administration. As committee Chair Rep. ...
Democrats.com - The Aggressive... - http://www.democrats.com
By Dennis Bernstein Dennis Bernstein's ZSpace Page
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Dennis Bernstein
Representative Dennis Kucinich took another bold step today in calling for the impeachment of the President of the United States and his removal from office for deceiving congress with fabricated threats of Iraq's WMDs to fraudulently obtain support for the authorization of the use of military force. Kucinich said today that it's time to speak out on behalf of those troops who will be in Iraq for at least another year, courageously representing our nation while the Commander-in-Chief sent them on a mission that was based on falsehoods meanwhile the House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi who up until this time has refused to take on impeachment may be relenting. Pelosi told reporters that quote, "This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will see some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee." We'll see what that means. But joining us from Washington, DC from the House of Representatives is Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Welcome back to Flashpoints, Congressman.
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NATIONAL IMPEACHMENT NETWORK
Bush Claims Executive Privilege in Valerie Plame Scandal|Check this out: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/
Claiming "executive privilege" is what you don't want to do in the context of impeachment hearings, according to Daniel Ellsberg. But this is exactly what is happening, given that Rep. Jim McGovern's office has said that the hearings against Bush will begin next week, H Res 1345 "Articles of Impeachment" in John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee. Bush has just claimed Privilege to prevent the release of an FBI transcript of a 2003 FBI interview with Dick Cheney on the Valerie Plame leak, which was a serious breach of national security of which Special Forces Colonel Pat Lang said, because of the leak: "the possibility of penetrating these groups, the possibility of knowing that they're going to carry 10-pound bags of explosive in the subway stations, will go right down the drain."
http://www.democrats.reform.
The most important thing after the hearings begin is that they get shown on C-SPAN!! We are asking all Americans to call and email C-SPAN to demand they broadcast every minute of the momentous event of impeachment articles being brought against a President of the United States. This is not a partisan appeal. The politicians may think it is, but it isn't. It is about restoring the Constitution, the rule of law, and a clear-eyed view of the national security. Republicans, Greens, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, please CALL C-SPAN. We are all just Americans now.
"Cover the Hearings on Articles of Impeachment H Res 1345"
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UFPJ: Call to Action July 19-21: No War With Iran
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) President Bush has authorized the most significant US diplomatic contact with Iran since 1979, sending the State Department's third-ranking official for a meeting this weekend on Iran's nuclear program, the New York Times reports. One analyst suggested that the precondition that Iran suspend enrichment before the U.S. would talk about the nuclear issue had effectively been dropped.
2) A phobia promoted by the Bush Administration about a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is a made-up issue masquerading as a serious military argument, writes former national security reporter John Diamond for USA Today. The fact is that we are not going to sneak out of Iraq. The realities of moving large armies dictate that there is no way the U.S. can significantly reduce its troop presence in Iraq without it becoming known well in advance.
3) President Karzai said Afghanistan opposes U.S. use of its territory for launching an attack against Iran, Reuters reports. "Afghanistan does not want its soil to be used against any country and Afghanistan wants to be a friend of Iran as a neighbor which shares the same language and religion," Karzai said.
4) All of the Bush administration's negotiating partners, particularly the Europeans and the Russians, have been pressing Washington to join the talks with Iran, the New York Times reports. They welcomed the decision to send Burns as a signal by the Bush administration that it is seeking a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis and not moving toward military action. Ayatollah Khamenei said: "Our red lines are clear and if the other parties respect ... these red lines, our officials will negotiate as long as no one makes any threats against Iran." Iran has made clear its "red lines" refer to its insistence that it has the right to peaceful nuclear energy, including the enrichment of uranium.
Iran
5) President Ahmadinejad said Monday he would welcome direct talks with the U.S. if both parties are on equal footing, AP reports. Ahmadinejad said if the US formally requested to set up an interests section in Iran, "we will study it with a positive view."
Iraq
6) The entire bloc of Kurdish lawmakers walked out of Iraq's Parliament Tuesday to protest a proposed provincial election law, the New York Times reports. The originally scheduled date of Oct. 1 for provincial elections appears unlikely, the Times says.
U.S./Top News
1) U.S. Envoy To Join Meeting With Iranian
Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, July 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/
President Bush has authorized the most significant American diplomatic contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, sending the State Department's third-ranking official to Geneva for a meeting this weekend on Iran's nuclear program, administration officials said Tuesday.
The decision appeared to bend, if not exactly break, the administration's insistence that it would not negotiate with Iran over its nuclear programs unless it first suspended uranium enrichment, as demanded by three resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.
Still, after months of accusations and counteraccusations from the United States and Iran, the meeting raised the prospect of an intensified diplomatic push to resolve concerns over Iranian nuclear activity, not unlike the lengthy and painstaking talks that resulted in a deal last month with North Korea.
William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting on Saturday with the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement on Wednesday.
At the meeting, Jalili is expected to present Iran's formal response to a package of economic and diplomatic incentives that Germany and the Security Council's five permanent members, Russia, China, France, Britain and the United States, presented Iran in June. Representatives from those countries will also attend the meeting.
The package, which revived an earlier European offer to provide civilian nuclear assistance and increased trade, met at first with official disdain in Iran but has since prompted conflicting signals among senior Iranian officials. That led the administration to conclude that there could be more chance of a diplomatic resolution than some Iranian declarations and a battery of missile tests last week suggested.
Bush approved the contact "to press the advantage," a second official said. The officials emphasized that Burns's participation was a one-time decision, that he would not meet one-on-one with Jalili and that he would reiterate the administration's demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment.
Clifford Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy in Washington, said the meeting, even with strict limits, was "a much-needed and an extremely welcome correction" in the Bush administration's policy.
"Disclaimers notwithstanding," he added, "the precondition that Iran must suspend before the U.S. will talk about the nuclear issue will by every standard have been dropped."
2) The Truth About Timetables
The U.S. is not going to sneak out of Iraq.
John Diamond, USA Today, July 16, 2008
http://blogs.usatoday.com/
An Eloquent and Very Much On Point Letter…
Dear Senator Obama:
With Israel rehearsing an attack on Iran and the Bush administration considering the alternative of a low-level diplomatic mission in Tehran, it is necessary to revisit your June 4th speech to the AIPAC convention in Washington. In that address, you denounced the Iraq War as a conflict which strengthened Iran and asserted that Iran has always constituted a greater threat to Israel than Iraq. You stated that Iran now constitutes the greatest challenge in the region. You even asserted that Iran is part of a “tyranny of oil” in which the high price of oil is “one of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because petro-dollars abet the killing of Israeli civilians and American soldiers. In so doing, you are taking an easy road to “toughness” on national security issues that still allows you to trumpet your opposition to a war that is now overwhelmingly unpopular. This road may follow the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, Democratic Party candidates who talked peace only to lead our people deeper into war.
Your AIPAC speech represents a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental problem in American-Iranian relations. This is the fact that we are still dealing with the revolutionaries who overthrew the repressive Shah installed by the United States at the expense of an elected government. This nascent democracy led by Mohammed Mossadegh, struggled against a “tyranny of oil” very different from the one you constructed to inflame sentiment against Iran. Your so-called “tyranny” wields a high-priced “weapon” forged through the wasteful consumption of its victims. The tyranny faced by Mossadegh involved a British multi-national, the forerunner of today’s “British Petroleum,” backed by every other major oil company on the planet. This tyranny sought to perpetuate a concession system originally granted by a corrupt, foreign-influenced monarchy, which denied Iran’s people a fair share of their most important resource. This tyranny would also include the British navy which helped enforce a world-wide boycott of Iranian oil, and our C.I.A. which orchestrated the violent military coup that overthrew Mossadegh in August, 1953.
Apologists for the coup unabashedly claimed that it saved an unstable Mossadegh government from a Soviet takeover. However, any alleged instability was the obvious result of a grossly unfair and patently illegal boycott of Iran’s largest export. Moreover, the Soviets were in no position to attempt a takeover of Iran a few months after Stalin’s death and in fact, Mossadegh’s government was finding ways to survive the boycott. The coup thus stands as a very sordid “regime change” that crushed a secular Third World democracy which sought to reclaim national resources from a colonial arrangement. Similarly, the quarter-century from the 1953 coup to the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution saw U.S. support for the Shah’s military and secret police and corrupt, multi-billion dollar arms deals which offset efforts by the Shah to look “tough” on Western oil companies. In many Iranian eyes, the passage of these 25 years only aggravated the coup of ’53.
For Iran, this was the second time within 42 years that a representative government had been destroyed by foreign intervention. Iran’s Constitutional Revolution begun in 1905, had struggled to create a parliament, a free press and a rule of law to control a corrupt monarchy that sold national resources to foreign interests on generous terms. This struggle even produced an American hero, Howard Baskerville who died leading a Constitutionalist attack on Monarchist forces, and is still recognized as “the American Lafayette” in Iran. Yet by 1911, British and Russian intervention had dispersed the parliament and restored monarchal despotism. The effective replay of these events in 1953 would convince many Iranians that democracy, with its openness and freedom, could not maintain national independence against foreign intrigue. Such feelings combined with an old feud between the clergy and the reinstalled, American-supported dynasty created perfect conditions for the growth of religious militancy.
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Such facts are essential to an understanding of the 1979-81 hostage crisis which was sparked by fear of yet another restoration of the monarchy. I appreciate the horrific nature of kidnapping and hostage-taking and as an assistant state attorney general, helped secure severe penalties for such crimes. However, the quarter-century rule of the American-supported Shah would also involve political executions and torture. This repressive monarch became the cornerstone of American policy in the region and a “status of forces” agreement exempting American personnel from Iranian laws only increased Iranian feelings of betrayal and humiliation. Most significantly, the Shah’s reign saw the beginnings of an American-supported nuclear program in Iran which eventually would have been able to develop nuclear weapons.
The restoration of the Shah also affected Iran’s relationship with Israel and it is disingenuous for you to denounce Iran as always having posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq. In 1947, Iran with its Shiite-Persian majority joined 12 other nations including Hindu-majority India in opposing the creation of Israel through the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. India like Iran, shares no border with Israel and like Iran, has had a traditional enmity with Sunni Islam. Nonetheless, India had the freedom to develop its own diplomacy and foreign policy which would eventually include recognition of Israel. In contrast, Iranian foreign policy under the Shah was heavily influenced by the United States and the Shah’s support of Israel would be widely perceived as another Western violation of Iranian self-determination.
Thus, some substantial anti-Israeli sentiment developed in a nation that was traditionally indifferent, if not hostile to the interests of Sunni Muslims such as the Palestinian Arabs. Although such sentiments can still be played by cunning politicians such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, powerful actuarial trends strongly favor pro-Western and even pro-American perspectives. Approximately 60 percent of Iran’s population is now under the age of 35 and this younger generation is unquestionably tired of the revolutionary dogma of its elders.
This younger generation represents a realistic hope for a peaceful and stable Middle East but only if Iran is freed from fears of “regime change” and permitted to continue developing its own, unique democratic institutions which already show progress even within the Islamic Republic. Thus, there is no more important foreign policy “change we can believe in” than renunciation of the neo-conservative prerogative of “regime change” for nations that have not attacked the United States, and restoration of our fundamental belief in self-determination. Such was expressed as a foreign policy concept in the 1941 Atlantic Charter which guaranteed all peoples the right to choose their own form of government. This guarantee was a primary objective of the World War II Allies and your grandfather and great-uncle, as well as members of my family sacrificed to advance this goal.
Given the West’s long-term stifling of Iranian democracy, it is disingenuous to denounce Iran as the “greatest strategic challenge” to our nation in the Middle East. To the contrary, Iran opposed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan before and after the September 11th attacks. Iranian assistance to the Northern Alliance in the wake of those attacks was crucial to victory over the Taliban and subsequent diplomatic efforts by Iran helped smooth Afghanistan’s transition to the Karzai government. Iran was then “rewarded” with placement on President Bush’s “axis of evil” and presumably targeted for “regime change” sometime after Iraq. Your easy road to national security “toughness” only reinforces this volatile situation and gives the Bush administration no incentive to choose the presently-available diplomatic alternative to war.
If you genuinely represent “change we can believe in” you should not be denouncing not Iran, but rather the grossly un-American policy of “regime change” which accounts for the current state of affairs in that troubled nation. If you genuinely want to win the election, you need a national security platform that restores our fundamental belief in self-determination, not a sorry attempt to “out-tough” John McCain with tirades against Iran. Except for Western-instigated aggression by the Shah during the 1970’s, Iran has not attacked a neighbor in over two centuries and, if afforded genuine self-determination, Iran will likely align itself with the country that gave it Howard Baskerville.
It is no coincidence that the overthrow of Mossadegh, the arming of the Shah, the beginnings of his nuclear program, and even long-term support for Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, all occurred under Republican administrations. Is it asking too much of our Democratic candidate to recognize these facts and demand genuine “change we can believe in?”
Respectfully yours,
Bob Petrusak (bpetrusak@gmail.com)
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