Time To Dust Off The Bush Impeachment Papers?

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
April 1, 2005

Time to Dust Off the Impeachment Papers?
WMD Commission: Yet Another Intelligence Failure
By RAHUL MAHAJAN

Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond.

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The "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" has done reasonably well what it was created to do. Unfortunately, it was created to provide political cover for the Bush administration in the middle of a scandal that dwarfs Watergate, Iran-contra, and even Lewinsky-gate, but that, in contrast to those events, has led to no in-depth investigation, minimal television coverage, and hardly any calls for the heads responsible to roll.

Think back to late January 2004 and the preliminary report of the Iraq Survey Group, which concluded that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. This came on top of what was by then a mounting wave of revelations that the Bush administration had repeatedly and deliberately deceived the American public -- and attempted to deceive the world -- about the evidence it claimed to have regarding Iraq's WMD.

.... the wave of political discontent with the Bush administration, crested when David Kay's report came out. Yet, within days of its issuance, the administration, with the help of prominent Democrats like Jane Harman on the House Intelligence Committee, had already spun the issue around from administration deception to something called "intelligence failures," shifting blame from the coterie of top officials who had lied us into a war to the intelligence agencies had been pressured to come up with those lies. The creation of this commission was the final step in the process, and helped to head off any chance of a serious investigation into those lies.

Instead of impeachment proceedings for Bush, we saw a very skillful bureaucratic maneuver that killed two birds with one stone -- deflection of attention and also an attack on the CIA, seen as an institutional obstacle to implementation of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-neoconservative foreign policy agenda. The check provided by the CIA is a pragmatic, not a moral one, but if heeded might have kept the administration out of embarrassing adventures like support for the military coup attempt in Venezuela and perhaps even out of the more than two-year-long occupation of Iraq.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan04012005.html

[chelsea0011]

1. With a Republican Congress, it can't happen.

It will never get out of any committee.

[Warpy]

2. Stranger things have happened

but it won't happen while Delay controls the party purse strings. He's managed to bully all the moderates into voting in lockstep with the extremists. We don't have any hope at all until the Roach gets stepped on.

[FreedomAngel82]

4. You're right

I do think there are some republicans who are fed up with Bush. Those who didn't vote for the bankruptcy bill and the Schavio thing I think could possibly help us. Sadly with people like DeLay and Rove around they're scared. I wish they would stand up to them.

[OETKB]

3. It is past time

Let's start appropriately plotting. A divide and conquer strategy among the Republicans may be viable. There may be a few who will not fly under the banner of this crowd in upcoming votes. It is becoming more crucial what happens in the 2006 elections. It will become incumbent on as many of us as possible to get our candidates at long levels elected.