Powell's Chief of Staff Advocates Impeaching Bush and Cheney

As far as I know this has never happened before: the right-hand aide of the highest-ranking cabinet member--the Secretary of State--calling for the impeachment of the president who appointed his boss:

Powell's Chief of Staff Proposes Impeachment | AfterDowningStreet.org: By David Swanson: On Thursday, May 10, 2007, Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking on National Public Radio, proposed impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.... Wilkerson is a Retired Army Colonel, the former Chief of Staff at the State Department from 2002 to 2005 under then Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Vietnam War veteran, the former Acting Director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico, and currently a teacher of national security at William and Mary College.

The program, On Point, was hosted by Tom Ashbrook, who focused the discussion on a need for greater public accountability for the Iraq War, but who maintained that the public was not outraged or interested. (Ashbrook should read some polls and invite on organizers of the impeachment movement.) Also on the program was Ken Adelman, who promoted the war and said it would be "a cakewalk". Adelman argued a case for not holding public officials accountable. Wilkerson said in early comments on the show: "This administration doesn't know how to effect accountability in my opinion." But he did not raise the possibility of impeachment until after a member of the audience had phoned in.

The first caller who was put on the air demanded an investigation of the lies that launched the war, and asked for accountability "all the way up." In response to Adelman's claims that history would hold people accountable, the caller said "I would love to have a job where, worst case scenario, my historical record is flawed." Ashbrook framed the question in terms of alleged limitations of the U.S. political system, and Wilkerson replied: "Well I do think that that's a reality of our system. However, let me back up just a minute and say that I really do think that our founding fathers, Hamilton, Washington, Monroe, Madison, would all be astounded that over the course of our short history as a country, 200 plus years, we haven't used that little two to three lines in Article II of the Constitution more frequently, the impeachment clause. I do believe that they would have thought had they been asked by you or whomever at the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia 'Do you think this will be exercised?' they would have said 'Of course it will, every generation they'll have to throw some bastard out'. That's a form of accountability too. It's ultimate accountability."

After an interruption, Wilkerson continued: "The language in that article, the language in those two or three lines about impeachment is nice and precise – it's high crimes and misdemeanors. You compare Bill Clinton's peccadilloes for which he was impeached to George Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors or Dick Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, and I think they pale in significance." Ashbrook asked for some examples of such high crimes and misdemeanors, and Wilkerson replied: "I think that the caller was right. I think we went into this war for specious reasons. I think we went into this war not too much unlike the way we went into the Spanish American War with the Hearst press essentially goading the American people and the leadership into war. That was a different time in a different culture, in a different America. We're in a very different place today and I think we essentially got goaded into the war through some of the same means."

Comments

[Dennis Rohel]

If they American people do not convict and hang these leaders, they as a population will be held accountable.

[Cola Vaughan]

It is intersesting to me to read Mr.
( General ) Wilkerson's citing of a parallel between the Hearst newspaper syndicate, the politics of that era and the Spanish American war to our current polity.

One common thread is the control of national politics and policy by plutocrats made wealthy by the extractive industries.

Why merely having the wealth to afford the equipment necessary to rip the natural resources of the earth out of the ground gives some individual the right to the wealth accrued thereby ( as if they had made the earth ) is a mystery to me..... and watch out when that wealth/power is converted to political ends.

A thief is a thief is a thief is a thief.

[Archit Shah]

Is this the sort of thing that he would have discussed with Sec. Powell beforehand? Or did he just improvise on air? The story is much more interesting if Powell knew he was planning on suggesting impeachment.

[bigTom]

Impeachment would of course the the best way to begin to restore our international reputation. I just
am not nearly optimistic enough to think we have the national gumption to do it.

I think Wilkerson suspected that saying what he did would be career limiting. That is why it took a call-in-question to get him to unburden his mind.

[Admiral Tirpitz]

Wilkerson has been critical of the administration for some time now. I suspect he has come to the realization that the road to hell will be paved with his bones when his former employers get chauffered there. He is still complicit in mass murder.

[dave]

Archit, I think Powell distanced himself from his former aide's condemnations quite some time ago. That doesn't make them any less true, but his old chief's almost certainly uninvolved.

[Tuco]

Since Bush's personal Iraq war is an ongoing criminal enterprise I propose that instead of talking about timelines for leaving Iraq and ending our involvement in the war that we instead talk about deathlines. 2.23 troops die each day in Iraq on average. That means setting a timeline of even six months for withdrawal means a deathline of 406 additional lives lost.

Bush, of course, is an advocate of an open ended deathline.

Deathlines and impeachment, when will be moved to act?

[Jon Fernquest]

Maybe I'm being naive, but why isn't there some Middle Eastern peackeeping force like the African one in Sudan that they can hand this whole mess over to?

But definitely impeach Bush before he leaves Iraq. There are lots of things to screw up, but this is the screewiest screw up of 'em all, that towers above all other screw ups, the screw up, that you screw up getting out of (or even thinking about), because there's always a way that one of Bush's ever dwindling group of supporters can argue that getting out of it is itself actually a screw up in and of itself, but never mind that the real screw up was getting into the easy mess in the first place.

Maybe a 5% approval rating would be a more appropriate time to start impeachment proceedings. Given sampling error, 5% could actually mean 0% or even negative. Then we could be really sure.

[edje]

The domesticated domestic public does not now,never did and never will give a shit about this war or the impeachment of the president they duly elected. This war has had zero impact on the lives of most Americans and the deaths of 3000 or even 30,000 of the mercenaries they "hired from the "other america" won't change a thing. The deaths of a few otherwise unemployables is a small price for a country to pay in exchange for an almost 100% return on the S&P since the "invasion" began with Dan Rather's blessing. Pre-emptive wars are as good as any other war for maintaining the good life in America. And let's not forget that most of the people we're killing over there "hate us for our freedom" and probably deserve just what they're getting. IMPEACHMENT!!!! Forget about it.

[dave]

"Maybe I'm being naive, but why isn't there some Middle Eastern peackeeping force like the African one in Sudan that they can hand this whole mess over to?"

Because the rest of the world isn't there to sacrifice lives to clean up America's mess every time it wrecks a country? It's just a thought.

[wkwillis]

The Republicans would love to have Fred Thompson running for the presidency in 2008 as an incumbent. So the Democrats won't let Bush and Cheney be impeached for any reason.
Unless you think Lieberman will vote with the Democrats on Bush and Cheney's replacements?

[Michael Cain]

"Maybe I'm being naive, but why isn't there some Middle Eastern peackeeping force like the African one in Sudan that they can hand this whole mess over to?"

The US is "surging" up to about 160,000 troops on the ground, and it's almost certainly insufficient to establish order. Which combination of ME countries would you like to have in a position to put 200,000 or more well-equipped troops, with armor and air support, into Iraq?

[anne]

There is as much reason to argue that were we to leave Iraq, there would be a gradual or even fairly rapid marked diminution of violence though I was more convinced of this earlier on. Nonetheless, there is no reason to believe there will be an increase in violence if we leave and beyond we have an obligation to leave. I can find no reason to believe that participating in violence in occupying Iraq will lessen violence.

[bigTom]

michael, I doubt the other ME troops would be well equiped. In any case we have roughly 100,000 contractors over there as well. Admittedly most are not trigger-pullers, but a substantial fraction are security-contractors. And if you add in contractor deaths, the number of killed is well above 4000 already.

[anne]

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed through the war and occupation, hundreds of thousands have been displaced. We must leave for our sakes, and the sakes of Iraqis.

[Ed K]

What all you commenters are missing so far is the interest in the 'key line' of the impeachment clause Wilkerson cites. The answer to his question, as to why it hasn't been used, is that that phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" has been defined down, or up, as you will -- the threshhold has been set, in any case, so narrowly that impeachment has become virtually impossible without the existence of an evidientary trail *much* greater than any that would be required for an ordinary prosecution on reasonable suspiscion of guilt.

In this case, the failure of the Clinton impeachment has actually backfired against the Democrats who might now be inclined to try to get such proceedings put forward -- with vastly more justifiable reason -- against the current holders of both offices. The reason for this is that the interpretation of what might constitute an impeachable offense -- namely what counted as a 'crime' of any sort -- was so narrowly defined in that trial, and in very recent memory, that I cannot imagine how, without some literally smoking piece of evidence showing that Bush or Cheney deliberately directed someone, or themselves did, to lie under oath to congress, such a proceeding will move forward. The fact that they have consistently refused to give *any* testimony under oath, and have also resisted attempts to compel thier aides to do so, appears to be part of a deliberate strategy to make use of exactly this opening as cover.

What's absolutely mind numbingly depressing about this is that while its a great way of protecting the president against impeachment for ultimately trivial reasons -- viz. Clinton; who damn well should have known better, and who behaved miserably at minimum, and who, in all seriously, would have, in my profession (and Brad's), academia, have been justifiably thrown out on his ear for abuse of a custodial relationship (intern-student), but lets keep in mind that the person in question was both an adult and that his profession was not strictly defined around that custodial realationship, as that of a college professor would be, which is why the rules there must be absolutely unbendingly strict, but I digress.... to repeat, its depressing that while this strict standard is useful for guarding against the abuse of impeachment for ultimately trivial (in context of the office and its responsibilities) and politically motivated reasons, it has had the very very very much worse side effect of creating an avenue of protection that can, and is, being used by those who have perpretated much more serious and general abuses of power to protect themselves not only from removal from office, but from serious scrutiny-- that is, scrutiny which is legally forceful, accompanied by real subpoena and investigative power.

In hind sight, it begins to appear, depressingly, that sacrificing Clinton for what really was, though its scope of effect is much smaller, genuinely bad behavior (not the sex, or even the infidelity, but the absue of power that was involved in it) would have been a small price to pay to have a recently established legal threshold that would allow those who might want to push for impeachment, or who might have wanted to do that some time ago, in a perfect world, to actually have some force behind them.

[RKKA]

It does say something about the American people, that they elected this man twice to the highest office in the land.

However, a successful Impeachment will require rethuglican votes. And if we know anything about rethuglicans, there are no circumstances under which they will supply them, even if shrub was shown on national TV getting a bj in the Oval Office.

We don't need talk about impeachment. What we need is a plan for ensuring that the rethuglican party is utterly crushed under the rubble of the shrub presidency.

[Robert Waldmann]

Wilkerson is fudging on the constitution which clearly limits impeachment to cases of violation of the law not general incompetence, nastiness or evilness (this contrasts to the rule for impeaching judges who can be impeached for misconduct).

However, in the cases of Cheney and Bush (in that order please !) there is no problem. They have openly violated the law. They can be impeached for violation of FISA (10 year sentence not a misdemeanor at all) for ordering kidnappings, for ordering torture, for ... the only problem is the list is so long as to be unwieldy.

[Ed K]

Robert W,

You are correct that Wilkerson may be fudging, however: if there is such an unweildy list of impeachable offenses that everyone seems to know about, why does it appear that Cheyny-Bush are in very little actual legal jeapordy? This was really my point, namely that Wilkerson actually calls attention to something very interesting when he remarks on how infrequently the clause has been used, and that it is even worse ex-post Clinton trial.

Surely there have been other cases, prior to this one, where there is a more than reasonable suspiscion that the President or VP have done some things that are manifestly illegal, and yet the prosecutions for such have been extremely few and far between.

One thought, in terms of explaining this, would be to look at the whole question of 'emergency' powers and the way they are often invoked to justify these 'illegal' acts. This has *clearly* been a feature of the Bush presidency -- even to the point of becoming something like a principled argument on thier part. But if one looks at the recent work of someone like Giorgio Agamben (see "States of Exception" in particular, and then "Homo Sacer"), one also acquires reason to think that this is a larger feature of the way in which post-Enlightenment executive power has defined itself in relation to basic -- and ordinary -- law.

The constitution was written right *before* the beginning of this movement, or maybe, oddly, as a part of it (Agamben tends to locate his first big example with Napolean), which might in part explain why Wilkerson is right that the framers would be surprised how little use has been made of the impeachment clause. However, as Agamben also shows by using Guantanamo as an example of exactly how far this sort of problem -- which is charachteristic of European Fascism of coruse -- has gone in nominally democratic states as well, espcially in the 20th century, it also becomes clear that this question is more than purely academic.

Why it seems to me that at least one of the most important questions surrounding 'impeachment' in relation to BushCo. is not whether or not it has legal legs to stand on in abstract, but why it is almost entirely unlikely to ever happen.

[albatross]

I don't claim to understand the law, but I've always assumed that if *I* had somehow violated the law as the Bush administration did with FISA, I'd be in prison right now. But then, if I'd been busted for drunk driving in my 30s, I'd probably still have that on my record, too. The law just means something different for people at the top, I guess.

Of course, if Bush is impeached, it will be because of the number of votes available, not the facts of the case. Similarly, the replaced US attorneys are a major scandal that will eventually pull down Gonzales because of the current makeup of Congress--the same set of facts would simply not have been important in a Republican-dominated Congress.