Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense?

www.cnn.com ^ | 6/6/03 | John Dean

[harpu]

Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away -- unless, perhaps, they start another war.

[Consort]

The constitution says "high crimes and misdimeanors".

A misdemeanor can be a misdeed and not necessarily a violation of the law. He can be impeached for behavior that is not condoned but is not illegal.

That is pretty explicit that it is has to be a violation of the law.

Nothing is explicit in the law and especially in government law and politics.

The framers didn't want presidents being impeached due to factions so easily.

What the framers wanted and intended are being interpreted by people so as to meet their own agendas. The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution based on the majority ideology of the court at any given time.

[aristeides]

John Dean is loony tunes. Even the DemocRATs have enough sense of self-preservation not to join as quixotic a cause as this one.

[alrea]

But I don't like being lied to by my government on an issue like this -- and am hoping that is NOT what happened.

Is an airliner hijacked by murderous religious zeolots considered a WMD?

[grumple]

be-huh....depends on what your definition of WMD's is...

[Jewels1091]

This reallt scares me!!! The democrats are going to push this thing until it explodes!!! Even my newspaper headline today was something like can Bush be trusted?? People, we HAVE to do something this is going to get out of control before we know what hit us!!!!

[Grampa Dave]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/921692/posts

Weapons of Mass Distortion
The Wall Street Journal ^ | Monday, June 2, 2003 | Editorial


Posted on 06/02/2003 7:13 AM PDT by BOBTHENAILER


To certain critics of U.S. policy in Iraq, the only thing worse than going to war with Saddam Hussein is the fact that we won. This they can never forgive -- which is why they are now trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction.


For these opponents of war, it isn't enough that a tyrant and his psychopath sons have been deposed. It doesn't count that mass graves have been uncovered, that torture chambers have been exposed, or that Saddam's victims can speak freely for the first time in 30 years. The critics are now claiming the war was illegitimate because no one has yet found a pile of anthrax in downtown Baghdad.


These rather selective moralists are leaping on a distorted report about comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on WMD. An advance press release from Vanity Fair magazine spun as news the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz had said the following during an interview in early May: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."


In Europe this has been seized on by the antiwar left as a source of vindication. "Just Complete and Utter Lies," explained the Daily Express of London. Germany's allegedly more august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed: "The charge of deception is inescapable." State-side, meanwhile, the critics are focusing on whether there was an "intelligence failure," or the political manipulation of intelligence, in concluding that Saddam had WMD.


But who's trying to deceive whom here? That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war. U.N. inspections in the 1990s had proved that Iraq had such weapons, including 30,000 liters of anthrax, and Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraq's own Kurds. The French themselves insisted that disarming Saddam of WMD, as opposed to deposing him, had to be the core of U.N. Resolution 1441.


Only last week Democratic Senator Joe Biden was asked by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "Do you believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction going into the war?" Mr. Biden's reply: "Yes I do." Were he and other Democrats also part of the vast WMD conspiracy?


Mr. Wolfowitz's words were no contradiction of anything the U.S. said before the war. The allies had always given multiple reasons for ridding the world of Saddam. British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously used the human rights rationale in a major and well-received speech in Glasgow in March.


The Vanity Fair press release also failed to include that immediately after his WMD remarks, Mr. Wolfowitz had added in the interview: "But there have always been three fundamental concerns: One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism and the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people."


What seems to be going on here is an attempt to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters. If their backing for the war is morally vindicated, they will emerge as even larger forces on the world stage, and so they must be tarnished after the fact as dissemblers.


Within the U.S., the role of the French and the European left is being played by elements of the intelligence community. Parts of the CIA in particular like to think of themselves as Olympian analysts whose views should be accepted as gospel. They resent that Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sometimes challenges holy CIA writ, which has often been wrong about Iraq. In any case, intelligence isn't dogma but is supposed to be merely one tool for elected policy makers, all the more so given the sometimes murky nature of the information.


As to the undiscovered WMD, Iraq is larger than Germany and much of it remains unsearched. As Mr. Bush noted in Poland this weekend, the U.S. has already found two of the mobile biological labs that Colin Powell fingered before the war. Yesterday Mr. Blair added that he's seen more evidence that he will soon make public. But it is also possible that Saddam destroyed much of it, or that some was taken out of the country.


Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory. The allies liberated a country of 22 million people, rid the world of a terrorist ally and have begun a process that may well create a more stable and prosperous Arab world. The credibility gap lies with those who were opposed to achieving all of that

[Grampa Dave]

CNN says its silence on Iraq atrocities had nothing to do with maintaining access
AP ^ | Monday, April 14, 2003


Posted on 04/14/2003 2:22 PM PDT by DannyTN


A top CNN executive kept quiet about some atrocities in Iraq not because the network wanted to protect access but because it worried about putting lives in danger, CNN said Monday.

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, revealed the incidents in an op-ed piece in The New York Times Friday headlined "The News We Kept to Ourselves."

He said that in the mid-1990s, an Iraqi cameraman working for CNN was tortured because the government believed Jordan worked for the CIA. Reporting the story "would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk," Jordan wrote.

CNN also learned from Kurds that a planned attack on network employees by Saddam Hussein's forces in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq was thwarted a few months ago, he said.

Jordan was subsequently criticized by at least two columnists for soft-pedaling news on Iraq to maintain CNN's access to the country by its reporters.

Franklin Foer, an associate editor of New Republic magazine, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that he was suspicious of Jordan's "outbreak of honesty."

But Foer wrote the he didn't see it as honesty. "If it were, Mr. Jordan wouldn't be portraying CNN as Saddam's victim. He'd be apologizing for its cooperation with Iraq's erstwhile information ministry -- and admitting that CNN policy hinders truthful coverage of dictatorships."

The New York Post, owned by the same company that owns CNN competitor Fox News Channel, headlined Eric Fettemann's column, "Craven News Network."

CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson noted that CNN reporters have frequently been kicked out of Baghdad by angry authorities, most recently a few days after the start of the war.

"The decision not to report these particular events had nothing to do with access, and everything to do with keeping people from being killed as a result of our reporting," she said.

[Dutch Boy]

Given Bush's track record of smacking the dems around with their own words I think this is another instance. Notice how the dems are getting more and more hysterical on the topic. Just as many times in the past. Just when they think Bush is in the corner BAM! The real facts come out. I suspect this will occur some time just before the 2004 election, but only when the dems have dug the hole deep enough.

[stop_fascism]

Is this the John Dean? The one who started Watergate to hide the fact that he married a call girl? The one who sold out his friends because he knew he;d be someone's punk in jail. Why didn't Liddy just shoot him like he wanted to?

[Grampa Dave]

CNN and Uday - Best Friends? CNN comments on UDay in 2000.
CNN ^ | 3/28/2000 | CNN


Posted on 04/14/2003 7:36 PM PDT by Toskrin


Hussein's eldest son poised to lead Iraqi parliament March 28, 2000 Web posted at: 5:04 a.m. EST (1004 GMT) From staff and wire reports

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Odai Hussein, appeared Tuesday to have won a seat in parliament, and may end up becoming its speaker, a sign that he's the Iraqi president's heir apparent.

In Iraq's first parliamentary election since 1996, Odai Hussein on Monday secured 99.9 percent in the Baghdad districts, according to the state-run weekly Al-Ittihad.

Before the results could be counted, Odai Hussein, still limping from a 1996 assassination attempt, told reporters what he expected from the newly elected cabinet.

"All that is good for our great people," the young Hussein said, "and all that through which we can serve its brave men and women."

Inaugural set for April The new parliament is scheduled to hold its inaugural session in April and it is widely expected that Odai Hussein will be its speaker, a position viewed in Iraq as almost equal to that of prime minister, a post now held by Saddam Hussein himself.

Odai, a powerful figure who was making his formal political debut, was among 512 candidates running for 220 seats in the election.

Saddam will appoint another 30 representatives for the Kurdish north, where voting was not held. Saddam Hussein effectively lost control over Kurdish areas a decade ago in an uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Iraq's 250-seat National Assembly is seen as a rubber stamp for Saddam Hussein, doing little more than making recommendations to the all-powerful Revolutionary Command Council he heads.

Monday's election did not include many characteristics of voting in other nations. There are no secret ballots and no opposition candidates.

Iraq: this election more diverse Iraqi officials said this year's election allowed more diversity than previous contests, when members of the nation's ruling Baath party made up most of the candidates.

"The percentage of the party members participating in this election is only 27 percent," said Humam Abdel Khaliq, Iraq's minister of information, "and 71 percent are independent people."

Odai Hussein, a member of the Baath Party, owns several newspapers and a television station. He also commands a paramilitary force and heads the National Olympic Committee, the Journalists Union and the Youth Federation.

Reporter James Martone and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[snooker]

BTW, they aren't 'labs'. They are chemical weapons mixing and production facilities on wheels. Labs are what the libs want to turn them into, so you overlook the production aspects. The end result of the process is a chemical/material which can be placed in a warhead.

The mere fact that these mobile production facilities were found should be reason enough. Notice how these chemical weapons production trucks are overlooked by the lying media types.

[Grampa Dave]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924722/posts

Before you even read this piece, I want you to open a new e-mail and send the link to everyone in your address book. Yes, it's that big - and it's the kind of news you never would have heard about without the so-called new media. I've posted here a letter from the Senate Committee on Armed Services to President Bill Clinton on October 9, 1998. It reminds the president of the February resolution authorizing military force if Saddam failed to comply with UN Security Council resolutions "concerning the disclosure and destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."







June 5, 2003
"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." You can see who signed the letter in the attacked copy, but among them are the following Senate Democrats: Levin, Lieberman, Lautenberg, Dodd, Kerrey, Feinstein, Mikulski, Daschle, Breaux, Johnson, Inouye, Landrieu, Ford and Kerry.

[nmh]

Prove he was lying about the war, FIRST. So far we've seen chemical suits which leads a rational person to believe that there ARE WMD there waiting to be found.

[Grampa Dave]

I have been one of the orginal believers that GW is using this WMD thing as another way of letting the rats and their mediot buddies play rope a dope.

When enough of them get really vocal and demanding GW's and Tony's heads on a platter, the reality will be shown to the world.

That will not change the 25% of lunatic who believe whatever the NY Slimes and ABCNNBCBS say about President Bush.

However, it will satisfy the moderates who determine the elections and the faithful like us.

[MizSterious]

The list I posted earlier in this thread also included an article detailing how they found stashes of atropine injectors--you wouldn't want to use those unless you've been exposed to certain kinds of chems.

Everyone knew long before the war began that there were wmds in Iraq. France knew, Germany knew, Canada knew, the media knew, Blix knew, and even the dems knew. Now all of the sudden they've forgotten what they knew? I don't think so.

I also included a link to the letter Grampa Dave just quoted above in that list. It's a darned good read, especially given the massive democrat amnesia now.

[MizSterious]

Great articles, I just hope everyone reads them!

[Grampa Dave]

That was why I posted them. A lot freepers don't take the time to look at links.

[GraniteStateConservative]

The most likely scenario is that Cheney and people like Perle made sure the information that Bush got led him to the conclusion they wanted him to reach. Like the uranium from Africa statement in the SOU speech-- Bush wouldn't have purposefully set himself up to look so foolish; someone else put that in there hoping the public wouldn't really notice when it was debunked. Reagan got foreign affairs info that was unreliable, too, on things like Nicaragua, and was lead to believe things as his advisors wanted him to believe. The problem is that it makes the president look bad even though it's not his fault, so the president can't do a damn thing about it.

[sweetliberty]

"Is "lying" impeachable now?"

It was only about sex.....oh wait; THAT was the previous administration. THIS is different. < /sarcasm >

[Romulus]

Which reminds me: what has become of the three Iraqi cargo ships supposedly loitering suspiciously in the Indian Ocean while being tracked by American /British intel? Have they been inspected yet? Do they even exist? I think we should be told.