The Santa Cruz, California city council, a dues-paying corporate member of the Loony Left, weighs in with a proposal to impeach President Bush. Is it for lying under oath? Trying to suppress evidence in a civil trial? Suborning perjury? No, he apparently "violated international treaties by going to war in Iraq, and that the president manipulated public fears to justify the war and undercut Constitutional rights."
If "manupulating public fears" is an impeachable offense, then no Democrat is fit to serve in Congress, because every two years they try to scare old people into thinking the Republicans are going to take away their Social Security and Medicare. Also, the U.S. has never signed an international treaty precluding it from making war; if that happened, it didn't make the headlines.
This "movement" was founded by a University of Illinois law professor named Francis Boyle. He comments, "President Bush wants to waste another $87 billion in Iraq....That could pay for a lot of stop signs in Santa Cruz." Or psychiatric hospitals, which are in perpetual short supply in the Golden State.
Francis Boyle is one of the biggest crackpots my Alma Mater has to offer. He's constantly mouthing off about something nonsensical and counter-productive, so I don't expect anything different from him here.
Actually, we did. The Kellogg-Briand Treaty was signed in 1928 and ratified in 1929. In it, the United States, Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Poland, Belgium, France, and Japan “declare[d] in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another,” and “agree[d] that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.” Of course, one should point out that the treaty is exclusive to the signatories; since Iraq never signed it, our campaign against Saddam Hussein was not a violation of the treaty. One could also point out that 12 years later, 14 of the 15 signatories were at war with one another (Ireland remained neutral), so the current validity of the treaty is rather moot
Two of the signatories, Japan and Germany, declared war on the United States, thereby breaking the terms of the treaty and rendering it null and void. At any rate, thank you for the interesting historical note.
(Full text of the treaty: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/kbpact.htm#art1)
Sunshine state = Florida
Santa Cruz unfortunately is in California. To my regret as a resident of the Golden state.
Crap. Considering both sides of my family are from California, I shouldn't have made that mistake. I must have been thinking of Pete Vere.
OIL.
Enough said.
As someone from a country out of the US I can assure you that this is not an internal political movement, but simply a vocal view point of the international community.
John, two questions:
1. How come you kept going after you typed "enough said"?
2. Can't you think of something a little more original than "oil"? Maybe we were after that good, fresh Iraqi flatbread, or perhaps it was about dates (Iraq used to be the #1 producer of dates in the world.) Come on, use your imagination!
Here's a copy of the letter:
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Honorable Chairman Sensenbrenner:
The Santa Cruz City Council has asked me to write to convey the widespread concern in our City about President Bush's deeds leading up to and in support of the United States war on Iraq.
We have received public testimony, petitions, phone calls, emails, and letters demanding our support for an impeachment inquiry.
As local elected officials and patriots, having sworn an oath to uphold the constitution, it is our job to relay these concerns to you. By a vote of six to one, local elected officials of the City Council share these concerns. Please determine if one or more of the following represent impeachable offenses by the President:
Did President Bush violate congressionally ratified international treaties and thus
Article VI, the "supremacy clause," of our own constitution through the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Did false or misleading information exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq, and was this part of a conscious effort to mislead the United States Congress and the American public?
Did President Bush exploit the fear generated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks to erode or compromise our constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties?
Does the Bush Administration's plan to develop and deploy yet more nuclear weapons violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which the United States is a signatory?
Did the United States' use of depleted uranium in both Iraq and Afghanistan violate the United Nations Charter?
Has the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere violated the
Geneva Convention, the Nuremburg Principles, and/or other treaties and conventions to which the United States is signatory?
We do believe that as patriots it is our job to raise these concerns to your level.
Please begin an official inquiry.
If your inquiry identifies illegal acts on the part of the leaders of our current administration, we expect that impeachment proceedings would follow immediately.
Emily Reilly
Mayor
cc: City Clerk
Members of the Committee on the Judiciary
Members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution
I feel as though I am caught in a never ending nightmare. Will the madness of this "president" never stop? He has managed to take a wonderful country, with a great standing in the world community and isolated us from them. What worries me even more is that so many Americans are living with blinders on. They refuse to see the crimes this man has committed. The sooner he is gone, the better!
"William M. Cooper" wrote:
Subject: This is the letter I sent the New York Times
.... I think that even if you don't find as much as a
primer to a bullet cartridge, you have still found
thousands of body parts of the thousands of innocent
civilians who were butchered at the hands of a madman.
You have unending stories of the victims coming
forward and testifying of the brutality that they
lived in every day. You have the Kurds who were
gassed to death. Not soldiers, but women and
children. You have the jubilation of the freed people
as they tore down the statues of their tormentor and
beat the head of it with the bottom of their shoes;
which for them was the highest insult to offer up.
You do the President, Great Britton's Prime Minister,
the military forces from differing contries and their
sending nations a great injustice by calling the war a
bad move to have taken. To clarify this position;
what if Hitler hadn't been grabbing all the countries
he did, but kept to all his secret projects and his
genecidal activities. Would we not had gone after him
once we learned just how brutal he was and how
murderous his power over the peoples of Europe had
become? Perhaps you would have wrote then something
like: "well it's only Jews, Gypsies, Retards,
Handicappers, Elderly, Ministers and a mixed group of
nonGermans, so why waste the fuel and manpower?". I'm
so sick to my stomach to say, that the way the news
and Democrats are using airtime and prose for nothing
better than showing the world your total contempt for
the suffering masses around the world. A very
obnoxious and macabre way to slam the integrity of a
man you obviously want to loose the next election,
while doing it over the tombs of those whose blood
cries out for some justice, and protection to those
they leave behind. The media was so biased against
the then, Governor Bush during Bush's election that it
really opened the eyes of a lot of people who saw your
tactics. But you still didn't learn anything. When
the war started, the networks started the propaganda
machinery all over again and lost ratings, because of
their baseless cries of destruction to the American
Military and other such nonsense. Now you're at it
again with slam articles about not finding weapons of
mass destruction.
I think you and every body else who has verbated all
the parties previously mentioned, owes President Bush
and Prime Minister Blair, and all the other noble men
and women who freed the multiple people groups who
were brutalized in Iraq a huge and resounding pat on
the back for what they did do and not what a madman
with ample warning was able to successfully ship
accross his borders and hide before the war started.
The intelligence that the President used was also from
previously found items that were found before the war
by UN inspectors who saw the illegal hardware with
their own eyes. So continue the antiBush/Blair
stance you seem to be insanely devoted to, but you'll
not find a sympathetic ear from me, because it is
obvious that your minds are so polluted with
prejudice, that every thing appears evil in your eyes,
even when good is all around and in clear sight.
I say this to your shame.
For our noble President, England's Prime Minister, the
troops, the victims, the grieving mothers, fathers,
children of Iraq.
William M. Cooper
1227 W. Kenedy #52
Kingsville, TX. 78363
http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/8857
coopr2000@yahoo.com
good! i'n glad we're going to war over oil! we could use the cheap gas! because i am not going to pay 1.90 for a stupid gallon of gas! i am going to pay only 99 cents for gas! and if we have to go to war on iraq over it, so be it!
Let us Catholics not fight with one another.
Let us Catholics not fight with one another.