Impeachment Movement Gains
Momentum
US Politics (About.com)
Kathy Gill
December 27, 2005
The movement to impeach President Bush is gaining momentum, according to US
Liberals Guide Deborah White. An early December Rasmussen Reports survey
suggested about one-third of Americans would support 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 sexual
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 Citizenship. 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).
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