The commemorations of 9-11 are being polluted by participation of President Bush and other administration officials who for five years have shamelessly used the deaths of 3000 people as an excuse for an unremitting assault on the Constitution and for a brutal and illegal war on the innocent and long-suffering people of Iraq.
If we really want to commemorate that terrible day in 2001, we need to focus on the five-year crime spree against the Constitution and the American people that began almost immediately as the buildings fell, and that today has the American Republic teetering on the brink of a totalitarian future. Because it is clear that Bush and his advisors, far from acting to unite the country and protect it from attack, used that horrible tragedy half a decade ago as an excuse to terrorize Congress and the American public, and as an excuse to set the nation on a permanent war footing, so as to aggrandize unchecked power and to usurp the powers of the Congress and the Courts, thus converting the presidency into a dictatorship.
We know the Bush team had their sights set on an invasion of Iraq from even before the president took his first oath of office. The ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a member from the outset of the White House National Security Council, has reported that at the first meeting of that body, several days into the first Bush term and long before the 9-11 attacks, the focus was on how to maneuver the U.S. into a war against Iraq. "Find me a way to do this," O'Neill quotes our draft-dodging president as saying.
In attacking Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda organization operating there, the president appropriately sought, and was granted by Congress, an Authorization for the Use of Force. But he has subsequently interpreted that authorization to pursue terrorism in Afghanistan and other jurisdictions around the world to mean he had been given the permanent title of commander in chief in a "war on terror" that has no conceivable end, and no boundaries (it includes the domestic U.S. in his view), and that this title authorizes him to override acts of Congress, orders of the Courts, the rules of government laid out in the U.S. Constitution, and international treaties and laws adopted by the U.S.
In short order, the president ignored Congress's passage of a funding bill for the war in Afghanistan, and called off the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, illegally shifting troops and personnel in that country away to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other areas around Iraq, in preparation for an invasion of that country.
While Bin Laden was left free and continue his deadly plotting, a secret conspiracy was then organized by the Bush Administration, which included creation of an alternative intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, in the Pentagon, and a propaganda arm, the White House Iraq Group, all with the goal of manufacturing and pushing into the media fake evidence designed to frighten Congress and the American public into supporting war against Iraq. The OSP used lies and bogus "defectors" provided by the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress to gin up horror stories of germ weapons and chemical weapons programs, and even of a nonexistent nuclear-weapons program by Saddam Hussein. One of the most elaborate hoaxes involved the use of forged documents purporting to be signed agreements by the government of the African state of Niger to provide 400 tons of uranium ore to Iraq. These documents originated in Italy, where stationary and seals stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome were used to give them a look of authenticity, but the forgers, apparently linked to the Italian intelligence service SISMI, were slipshod and signed the names of officials no longer in office in Niger. When the forgeries were easily spotted by U.S. intelligence experts, key members of the OSP, allegedly working together with Iran-Contra conspirator Michael Ledeen and notorious arms dealer and con-artist ManucherGorbanifar, as well as with the heads of Italian intelligence and defense, allegedly concocted a black-op scheme to recycle those forged documents through British intelligence, presenting them as "new" evidence of Hussein's nuclear ambitions.
It was this scheme that Vice President Dick Cheney and then National Security Director Condi Rice were mendaciously citing when they referred ominously to a mushroom cloud threat in the fall of 2002, and that Bush lyingly referred to in his 2003 State of the Union message, when he said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The administration's lies that launched the country into a war in Iraq were just that. Lies and a conspiracy against the public and against peace which have cost the lives of over 2700 American troops and of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has now admitted that the administration's claims, like one linking Hussein to Al Qaeda, were bogus--but they did the trick all the same, and the country continues to pay the price, in blood and money.
Bush also used his delliberately inflated "commander in chief" title to justify his decision to exempt hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan, and hundreds of others kidnapped from all over the world, and held in Guantanamo Bay's detention center, from the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Supreme Court recently ruled that this decision was a violation not only of the Geneva Convention, but of the U.S. Criminal Code, which adopted the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of POWs as a part of U.S. law in 1996. The president, that is to say, has already been declared to be a criminal by the highest court in the land. (I should note that some of the "terrorists" held for five years at Guantanamo were kids, some as young as seven and eight, at the time of their "capture"--a violation of the Geneva Accords. One of these children, brought to Guantanamo at age 12 from Afghanistan, was one of the three captives who committed suicide last June in despair at ever being released. Compounding the horror, the government had determined several weeks earlier, that the boy had been wrongly accused and had scheduled for him for release just three days after the day of his suicide. But government officials didn't bother to tell him. Though his attorney was told of his pending release, the government barred the attorney from contacting him.)
A lower federal court has also found the president to have criminally violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution for authorizing National Security Agency spying on the communications of tens of thousands of Americans without first seeking a warrant from the secret FISA Court.
When the Supreme Court slapped down the president's claim to have special powers as commander in chief, it effectively pulled the plug on his argument justifying other criminal abuses of power, including his refusal to provide information demanded by congressional committees and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission, and his use of "signing statements" to invalidate all or part of over 850 laws enacted by Congress. The same court ruling undermines the president's claim that as commander in chief he has the power to declare any American to be an enemy combatant, subject to arrest without charge and detention without the right of habeas corpus access to the courts, and the power to authorize the use of torture against such individuals, or against other captured in the bogus "war" on terror.
The problem is that while the Supreme Court has made this determination regarding the president's criminal behavior, the president is constitutionally invulnerable to prosecution, even from war crimes, while in office. The only recourse is impeachment, which is the power to remove an elected president or any other federal official, and which belongs solely to the Congress.
Because both houses of Congress, and most importantly, the House of Representatives, are currently controlled by the Republican Party, which is in league with the president, there will be no impeachment of the president until at least this November.
At that point, however, if Democrats manage to gain the necessary 15 seats to gain a majority in the House, impeachment becomes not only a possibility, but a duty and a necessity.
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