Impeachment Movement Gains Momentum
Tuesday December 27, 2005
http://uspolitics.about.com/b/a/207535.htm
The movement to impeach President Bush is gaining momentum, according to
US
Liberals Guide Deborah White. An early December Rasmussen Re****ts survey
suggested about one-third of Americans would sup****t impeachment, and
that
was before revelations of domestic wiretaps without warrant. Christmas
Eve
revelations related to this include news that the Administration has
monitored Muslim mosques and homes for abnormal levels of radiation
since
2002 - without warrants or court orders - and NSA has also obtained
back-door access to domestic and international telecommunications -
voice
and internet traffic - as part of the warrentless-domestic wiretapping
scheme:
Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the
N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of
some
of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to
switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States'
communications networks and international networks... The switches are
some
of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and
out
of the United States, and, with the globalization of the
telecommunications
industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are
also
routed through such American switches...
The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the
intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully
addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now
that
foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some
judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those
calls
as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved
warrants for domestic surveillance.
Writing for MSNBC last week, Howard Fineman predicts:
As best I can tell -- and this really isn't my beat -- the only people
who
knew about the NSA's new (and now so controversial) warrant-less
eavesdropping program early on were Bush, Cheney, NSA chief Michael
Hayden,
his top deputies, top leaders of the CIA, and lawyers at the Justice
Department and the White House counsel's office hurriedly called in to
sprinkle holy water on it.
Which presents the disturbing image of the White House as a series of
nesting dolls, with Cheney-Bush at the tiny secret center, sifting
information that most of the rest of the people around them didn't even
know
existed. And that image, in turn, will dominate and define the year 2006
--
and, I predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political
theater since the days of Richard Nixon.
We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by
each
party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what
amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of
destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of
destroying
our security.
Andy Ostroy provides perspective, reminding readers of the events of
late
1998:
[A] highly partisan U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach
President
Bill Clinton, making him just the second U.S. president in history to be
impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868 following the Civil War.
Clinton's
offense? Lying under oath about his unimpressive high-school-quality
***ual
dalliances with intern Monica Lewinsky. Pretty tame stuff, and not quite
a
threat to anyone or anything except a flimsy red dress and a Rhodes
Scholar's dignity.
And AmericanBlog wonders why talk radio dismisses current revelations as
maybe "violat[ing] a law."
There are several websites devoted to impeachment, including
ImpeachBush.org, ImpeachBush.tv, ImpeachBushNow.org, The Four Reasons of
Responsible Citizen****p. Citizens who wish to meet like-minded neighbors
can
turn to ImpeachBush.Meetup.Com.
Blogs covering this issue: The Conservative Voice, Eva Marie's Blog,
Hammer
of Truth, Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Necropolitan Times, Slashdot,
Letters
to the editor: Shout 'impeach Bush' From The Rooftops (The Day, New
London,
CT) ; Impeach Bush (Philadelphia Daily News) .
Do you think President Bush should be impeached?
--
Impeach Bush ! a noble cause
Operation Iraqi Liberation = O.I.L.
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