Neighbors Times: November-December 2006 #1

"New Congress, Same Agenda?

The saga of the 110th Congress could easily wind up being another cautionary tale of how politics as usual brought no change to the country's current direction of increasing militarism, fiscal irresponsibility, and transnational corporations‚ control over our society. These are topics we will address in future issues.

Neighbors for Peace continues to call for an immediate end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, the problems that U.S. citizens now face with both Congress and the Bush Administration are intrinsically linked to our quest for peace and justice, and cannot be discounted. Two additional items that are of major importance demand attention.

All rational people who care about the future of this country should let this incoming Congress know that they must repeal the Military Commissions Act, an odious violation of human rights, and a clumsy attempt to immunize the Bush Administration and the CIA from prosecution for their policy of torture over the past five years. This Act, which denies Habeas Corpus for anyone - even a U.S. citizen - labeled "enemy combatant" was signed into law in early October. It gives despotic powers to an administration that must promote a myth of "us versus the evildoers" in order to remain relevant. As we mentioned in our previous issue, Habeas Corpus is an 800-year-old legal concept guaranteeing that those who are arrested must have their case reviewed in a court of law. Mr. Bush was not solely responsible for this gross violation of civil liberties. The Republican-led 109th Congress - with some Democrats supporting the bill - passed the Act, placing themselves in the uncomfortable position of being accomplices to this administration‚s acts of torture and other war crimes (1).

Secondly, we need to make the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney a top priority. This goal already has the support of a sizeable portion of the U.S. population. Yet those who are active in the peace movement need to be clear in their motives for undertaking this project.

We cannot dismiss our living for the past five years under a murderous U.S. leadership whose violent policies will be remembered for generations. But Democrats that now speak only of bipartisanship and cooperation betray a fear of the spin Republicans will place on calls for official investigations into the crimes this administration has committed. If we believe what the corporate media have been communicating, impeachment appears difficult, even ludicrous. Pundits, already parroting the line of "vengeance," hope that those who are more interested in their political image than in seeking to bring Bush and Cheney to justice will stall or block the necessary hearings.

The references to Bill Clinton‚s impeachment could not be clearer, nor could they be more absurd. Although the Clinton administration also had a foreign policy that was quite destructive for Iraq and focused on preserving and building on American hegemony in the world, he was impeached for relatively frivolous reasons. His affair posed no threat to the rule of law in this country, nor to civil and human rights. His lies about his relationship to Ms. Lewinsky did not cause needless deaths. Yet the official Democrat line seems to run parallel to the corporate media spin: future speaker Nancy Pelosi has assured reporters that "impeachment is off the table" and "Democrats are not about getting even.‚" Even Representative John Conyers (D-Mich), best known for his sponsorship of the "Downing Street Memos" investigations, has backed away from calling for impeachment.

Our demands cannot be framed in the context of revenge or petty power plays. Impeachment is a process discussed at length in our Constitution and is the traditional remedy prescribed for the abuse of power in the executive office. John Nichols, author of the book, "The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders‚ Cure for Royalism," points out that "the founders intended for impeachment to be utilized whenever necessary in defense of the republic. They did not want the power to impeach treated as a fetish or a fantasy, nor did they intend for its application to be seen as a constitutional crisis. Rather, they wanted impeachment to be recognized for what it is: the cure for the crisis of executive excess." (2).
We also need to keep in mind that allowing this president to corrupt his office and take powers that are typically appropriated by dictators means that his successor ˆ regardless of political affiliation ˆ will have these same powers, coupled with the potential of expanding them. The outgoing Congress has aided in this corruption of the executive branch by saying a great deal about it, yet doing nothing.

The Constitution's architects already knew that abuses of office would most likely occur during wartime ˆ and that Congress would be unwilling to take steps to remove the executive. Yet the movement to impeach Bush and Cheney has already begun at the grass roots level, and is now spreading upwards throughout local and state governments. If it continues to grow, we can eventually force this Congress to respond. In light of their own culpability in empowering this administration to break laws, the goal won't be easy. But the alternative is that we remain complacent and dismiss the democratic process of bringing government officials to account when they fail to serve the public interest. It is also an admission that those who would usurp power for their own purposes have succeeded.

There is little doubt that a thorough investigation of the crimes that Bush and his cohorts have committed will bring overwhelming evidence to public view. These violations of both constitutional and international law have an amazing scope: lying to Congress and the American people about the Iraq invasion; a reckless disregard for the many warnings given of an imminent attack on the U.S. in 2001; fraud; torture; unauthorized wiretapping and spying; unjustified invasion of a sovereign nation; "extraordinary rendition"; and by many accounts, genocide.

There are no justifiable arguments for protecting U.S. officials from the rule of International Law: Besides congressional investigations, there are other venues available for bringing this administration to justice: the World Court, the International Criminal Court and the UN:.

It is presumptuous to rejoice over the gains Democrats have made in the Senate and the House. While we shouldn't ignore the fact that many candidates running at the local, state and national level won on anti-war, anti-globalization platforms, there aren‚t enough of these new progressives to alter the major policies of this government.

Naive hopes that this year's election results will bring back the democratic freedoms we once took for granted will ensure that we lose what few freedoms and rights remain. Our most important work begins when we realize that any changes to this country's direction begin with our own commitment and energy to creating those changes.

1 34 Democrats in the House and 12 in the Senate voted for the bill.
2 John Nichols, "Founders Saw Impeachment as a Cure", Common Dreams News Center http://www.commondreams.org; republished from Madison Capital Times, September 22, 2006