http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060121/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_al_qaida_attack By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press Writer
8 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's president told a senior American official Saturday the United States must not repeat airstrikes like the one that apparently was aimed at al-Qaida but killed civilians in a remote village, as officials sought to soothe public outrage over the attack.
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President Gen. Pervez Musharraf assured visiting U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns that Pakistan would not waver in its support for Washington's war on terrorism but said such airstrikes must not be repeated, a Foreign Ministry official said. The attack prompted nationwide protests calling for Musharraf's ouster. The comments were Musharraf's first publicized reaction to the Jan. 13 attack on the village of Damadola, near the border with Afghanistan.
The strike, which hit three homes in the mountainous Bajur tribal region, is believed to have killed at least four of al-Zawahri's close associates and at least 13 civilians, including women and children.
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In 1973, the House Judicary Committee voted on an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon introduced by Robert Drinan (supported by John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and others) for abuse of power in his authorization for the act.
Today, which Dem will have the spine to sponsor an article based on this latest * transgression to the list of impeachable offenses? http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK24Aa01.htmlFront Page Nov 24, 2005
Opening the Watergate floodgates
By Judith Coburn
On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against president Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for the indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the president. To Drinan, now a Jesuit priest, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals that had already come to be known as "Watergate". The 14 months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings", which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher).
In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the president ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia
anything that flies on anything that moves". (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like Haig laughing".) The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives such as John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.
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Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex, that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of presidential conduct that seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell wrote of "the distortions in the conduct of the presidency, which deformed national politics in the Vietnam years - the isolation from reality, the rage against political opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive action". He concluded that three presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs". To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.
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The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives such as John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.
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