"False Statements Accountability Act of 1996"

[pnorman]

I hadn't been as excited as many others here, at the idea of IMPEACHING the President. Obviously, it won't get anywhere under the present set-up in Congress, and it seemed like useless windmill tilting. But I'd almost forgotten the above mentioned law. For a fib to a government investigator, Martha Stewart went to the slammer.

Here's what Rep. Conyers is getting at:
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If the evidence revealed by the Downing Street Memo is true, then the President’s submission of his March 18, 2003 letter and report to the United States Congress would violate federal criminal law, including: the federal anti-conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, which makes it a felony “to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose...”; and The False Statements Accountability Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which makes it a felony to issue knowingly and willfully false statements to the United States Congress.
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http://rawstory.com/exclusives/alexandrovna/memo_bush_impeachable_offenses_526

It's realy quite simple, and here's Bush's ONLY alibi: EVERYTHING he's said since he's been in office could be termed "electioneering", and thereby be considered Free Speech. I'd LOVE to hear his supporters say that!

Just keep hammering at this. In due time, and as Iraq and the economy further unravels, it'll begin to SINK IN.

pnorman
Edited to include my favorite quote: "When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." (Jacob Riis)

[radfringe]

1. my take

more of my thoughts on this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

meanwhile - to go to your stonecutter analogy - the rock isn't going to crack without a hammer/chisel. We have a rock and we have stonecutters, but we also need the tools. At the moment all we have is a rubber-stamp which won't do doodly-squat to crack a rock.

we need the house and senate out of the control of the radical neo-cons. There are many republicans out there that are "moderate" and they may be just as concerned as we are about the direction of the country -- however if even a tiny breeze blows out of the bowels of the neo-cons, these moderates dutifully drink the kook-aid and reach for their rubber stamps.

[pnorman]

3. That wasn't really intended as an analogy,

or a specific hammer/chisel "tool" either. it was just intended as a reminder that if we abandon HOPE, we abandon everything else including self respect.

I'm visualizing a simple slogan that would be along the lines of "IMPEACH BUSH! and would also contain a few lines of that Accountability Act. It could be a placard, button/badge, or bumpersticker. Keep it simple rather than overly ambitious or condescendingly "preachy". But keep it everpresent ... so that that others will encounter it on a daily basis.

At this moment, I just realized that I'm still wearing my "NO IRAQ WAR" button. Ive been wearing that button wherever I'm at ... shopping, walking around, at my union hall ...EVERYWHERE. I've been doing that for the past 2 years, and occasionally see others doing the same. If nothing else,it encourages others who feel the same but may have become discouraged. STAND UP KEEP FIGHTING!

pnorman

[leveymg]

2. Impeachable? Yes. But, impeachment is a political not a legal process

Even during the Watergate hearings, most Republicans on the Judiciciary Committee voted against the impeachment of Nixon. The charges then were much more concrete.

The only reason Nixon was forced out was that there was a Democratic majority in both houses.

Johnson lied too. But, he had the good sense not to run again after he made such huge mistakes in escalating the Vietnam War. One doubts he might have been impeached by his own party.

Unfortunately, the Democrats, by nominating Vice President Humphrey, paid for Johnson's mistakes during the Presidential race of 1968.

:bounce:

[Toots]

4. You have concrete evidence of that?

I know it has been speculated on that the gun boat incident never happened but there are credible witnesses that say there was indeed an attack by North Vietnamese gun boats. What other LIES are you aware of by LBJ?

[KharmaTrain]

5. All You Need Is One

Didn't Clinton teach you that. One lie can be made to look like 10 or 50. Inversely, this regime is masterful at turning 50 lies and making them look like 0. It's perception and how the media plays it.

Johnson's pretext for first sending American planes to bomb North Vietnam (the original Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution) as a retaliation for the strike on the Turner Joy, he used it as a greater pretext that led to the landing of the Marine at Ia Drang a year later and the rest is as we say "history". Had Congress known that this attack didn't occur, they might have held back in giving Johnson authority to take military action and let the Jeannie out of the bottle where a President could declare a war without declaring war.

Nixon's lies were not about the break-in as much as the use of his office and the executive branch to userp other branches. Almost all the impeachent counts were directed strictly at his lies in not only knowing and abeting in the cover-up, but also in skipping taxes as well. Depends on what you define as a lie.

As stated above, Impeachment is a political process. There's no way you try something of this sort unless you have strong majorities in both houses and strong popular support. The Repugnicans took a shot at Clinton...most never thought the impeachment crap would make it to the House floor (until DeLay got involved) but it became more a political tool to rally their base...and some will say it paid off later with the regime we have now.

After all the division that has occured in this country in recent years...and the even greater turbulence I see ahead, I don't see a nation strong enough to be able to properly judge this regime for all its abuses...especially before 2008.

Hopefully this is material that can be used at The Hague and that the time is approaching when rational minds worldwide will want answers to what's been really going on in Iraq.

[leveymg]

6. Read Ellsberg on TGI: "How LBJ Manipulated Events to Bring on War"

The lies were in the detail misrepresentations to Congress and the American people about what the US Navy was doing off the coast of Vietnam and about what happened there. Rather than the "sneak attack" by North Vietnam that was portrayed, the "incident" was actually part of an elaborate, premediated policy of provocation by the U.S. to justify escalation planned by Johnson and the Joint Chiefs. Of course, the Pentagon Papers detail a web of thousands of lies and deceits that attended the planning and commission of that war. This doesn't excuse Bush one bit for his own Iraq war lies, but puts them into perspective.

http://hnn.us/articles/1108.html
11-18-02: Features: HNN Polls

How LBJ Manipulated Events to Bring on War
By Daniel Ellsberg
Mr. Ellsberg was prosecuted by the Nixon administration for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public. His latest book is: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.


August 4, 1964 was Daniel Ellsberg's first day on his new job at the Pentagon as an analyst. A courier came running in with a message. It was the news of the second attack in two days on the USS Madox, a destroyer operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon Johnson told the American people that the North Vietnamese -- the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (DRV) -- had fired upon U.S. ships in an unprovoked and unequivocal attack in international waters. Congress quickly granted the president the authority to respond to the attack. In his new book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg recounts his shock at the course of events he witnessed first hand from his perch at the Pentagon.

In chapter one he notes that nearly every statement the president made in a televised address to the country about the attacks was inaccurate. The attack was not unprovoked; the U.S. had recently shelled several DRV islands in an operation run by the United States, codenamed 34A. Nor was the attack unequivocal; there was no second attack--the ship's radar had picked up false readings of torpedoes that had never been fired. Finally, the Maddox and a sister vessel, the Turner Joy, were operating in an area long claimed by North Vietnam. The ships were on a secret mission, codenamed DeSoto, designed to elicit intelligence about DRV activities.

In chapter four, excerpted below, Ellsberg tells how the president used the Tonkin Gulf resolution to step up military action that turned into full-scale war.

From early September 1964, US "retaliatory" capability against North Vietnam was a cocked pistol. Officials just below the President were waiting for something to retaliate to and increasingly ready to provoke an excuse for attack if necessary. Six days after Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton's September 3rd plan "to provoke a DRV response and to be in a good position to seize on that response. . . to commence a crescendo of GVN-US military actions against the DRV,"(1) the highest officials forwarded the proposal to the President for his decision. After recommending the immediate resumption of DeSoto patrols off the coast of North Vietnam and the resumption of 34A actions, both suspended since August 5, they added: "The main further question is the extent to which we should add elements to the above actions that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction, and consequent retaliation by us. Examples of actions to be considered would be running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast and/or associating them with 34A operations."(2)

I recall that these proposals excited a flurry of concrete suggestions by the Joint Staff as to how best to provoke an attack on US forces by the North Vietnamese if it proved hard to get a rise out of them. Along with running a US destroyer increasingly close to beaching on their coast, U-2 reconnaissance planes over North Vietnam could be supplemented by low-level reconnaissance jets flying progressively lower over populated areas, culminating, if necessary, in a supersonic flight that would break every window in Hanoi with a sonic boom.
But nothing so spectacular proved to be necessary. On the night of October 31 there was an attack on U.S. forces, killing five Americans, wounding thirty, and destroying or badly damaging eighteen of the B-57 jet bombers that had been deployed to Bien Hoa airbase in South Vietnam as part of a buildup rationalized by the Tonkin Gulf incidents.(3) The VC guerrillas didn't rely on advanced weaponry from the Soviet Bloc to accomplish this destruction. Having moved through heavily populated areas up to and within the American air base near Saigon without giving warning, they used 81 mm. mortars and satchel charges. Again Ambassador Taylor and the JCS strongly demanded retaliation, this time urging plausibly that to fail to respond would show weakness. The JCS proposed initial attacks in Laos and North Vietnam, to be followed by a night attack by B-52s on Phuc Yen airfield near Hanoi and a dawn strike by tactical fighters on other airfields and oil storage in the area of Hanoi and Haiphong. But the VC attack was three days before the election, and once again the pistol stayed cocked by decision of the candidate in the White House.

The military and Ambassador Taylor were extremely unhappy with this degree of restraint, predictably. They were assured, by Rusk among others, that after November 3rd things would be different. The organization of the NSC Working Group under Bundy on November 2 was part of this assurance. That group eventually reported consensus on the strategy of graduated pressures. The President endorsed this in principle on December 1, without committing himself to a definite date of beginning it. The consensus did not really include the JCS. They continued to urge a "hard knock" rather than a gradual approach, beginning soon, with or without provocation, with the attack they had urged on November 1. But they accepted the gradual approach as a first step toward their own strategy <SNIP>