This Impeachment Notice? - Democratic Underground

lonestarnot

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Sun Jun-05-05 12:32 PM
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This Impeachment Notice?

Edited on Sun Jun-05-05 12:32 PM by lonestarnot

www.kavkazcenter.com

John Kerry announced Thursday that he intends to present Congress with The Downing Street Memo, reported last month by the London Times. The memo purports to include minutes from a July 2002 meeting with Tony Blair, in which Blair allegedly said that President Bush's administration "fixed" intelligence on Iraq in order to justify the Iraqi war.
The Downing Street Memo is the leaked secret British document that details the minutes of a 2002 meeting between top-level British and American government officials. The memo states that George Bush "was determined" to attack Iraq long before going to Congress with the matter, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
So far neither government has disputed the accuracy of the memo.

The memo caused an uproar in Britain and made a significant impact in the British national elections, but has received little attention in American news.
The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader, Tuesday, in which Nader also called for President Bush's impeachment. The story is being carried on Michael Moore's website and the Democratic Underground.
Failed presidential candidate Kerry advised that he will begin the presentation of his case for President Bush's impeachment to Congress, on Monday.
Kerry said of the memo: "When I go back on Monday, I am going to raise the issue. I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."
He questioned Americans' understanding of the war and the idea that criticism equals disloyalty, saying, "Do you think that Americans if they really understood it would feel that way knowing that on Election Day, 77 percent of Americans who voted for Bush believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found and 77 percent believe Saddam did 9/11? Is there a way for this to break through, ever?"
House Representative John Conyers has written to the President regarding the memo:
"...a debate has raged in the United States over the last year and one half about whether the obviously flawed intelligence that falsely stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was a mere 'failure' or the result of intentional manipulation to reach foreordained conclusions supporting the case for war. The memo appears to close the case on that issue stating that in the United States the intelligence and facts were being 'fixed' around the decision to go to war."There is a growing movement on the internet and in Congress for a "Resolution of Inquiry" into issues surrounding the planning and execution of the Iraq war, especially in regard to the Administration's handling of intelligence.
John Dean, a key Watergate figure, wrote in a June 2003 column for a legal website, that, "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked... Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause."
However, in practical terms impeachment in the U.S. Senate requires a 2/3 majority for conviction, which is unlikely given that 55 out of 100 Senators are Republican.
When asked about the Downing Street Memo on May 23, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "If anyone wants to know how the intelligence was used by the administration, all they have to do is go back and look at all the public comments over the course of the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and that's all very public information. Everybody who was there could see how we used that intelligence.
"And in terms of the intelligence, it was wrong, and we are taking steps to correct that and make sure that in the future we have the best possible intelligence, because it's critical in this post-September 11th age, that the executive branch has the best intelligence possible."