A rally at the US Capitol overnight attracted a diverse coalition of administration critics, all united in the view that George W Bush has abused his powers and lied to the American people.
One of the key speakers was Cindy Sheehan, who has been railing against Mr Bush ever since her son was killed in Iraq.
"The only solution to end this war is to impeach them, impeach the liars, impeach the murderers, and get our troops home," she said.
Joining the array of East Coast liberals at the rally was Rocky Anderson, the Mayor of Salt Lake City, in solidly Republican Utah.
"I think impeachment is an incredibly appropriate and important remedy at this stage in our nation's history," he said.
"We're not the kind of nation that goes around kidnapping, disappearing, torturing people, that engages in aggressive war in violation of our constitution."
Most Americans seem to support the call to impeach him.
Everyone is saying, even Republicans, long-time Republicans, are saying, not only is he hurting our party, this man is destroying our country.
Also at the rally was Daniel Ellsberg, the man who, by leaking the so-called Pentagon papers in 1971, helped trigger the downfall of president Richard Nixon.
"The impeachment clause was actually written into the constitution with officials like Bush and Cheney in mind," he said.
Democratic leaders in the US Congress are not willing to launch impeachment proceedings, but at least one congressman has broken from the pack.
Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kuchinich has filed impeachment papers against Vice-President Dick Cheney.
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A message for today on why George Bush should be impeached, from Chris Hedges:
George Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law in the treatment of detainees. Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public.
This president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the “crime of aggression.” And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation – largely put in place by the United States -- and thrust us into a Hobbsian nightmare.
We must not allow international laws and treaties – ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences – to be discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of George Bush’s violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow us along with those outside our gates, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
George Bush -- we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo -- fabricated a legal pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisors manufactured reports of Weapons of Mass Destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied to us and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in Iraq because of a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law. The grief visited on American and Iraqi families demands that we as citizens begin the process to restore of the rule of law. The murderous rampages in Iraq demand this. The torture done in our name demands this. The empowerment of states that will act on our lawless example if w e do not impeach George Bush and return to a world of standards demands this. Simple human decency demands this.
A rule-based world matters. The creation of these international bodies and rules, as well as the use of our influence over the last half century to see they were followed, have allowed us to stand preeminent as a nation – one that respects and defends the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are worthless, if we allow these international legal systems to unravel, we will see our moral and political authority plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation states, including our closest allies and see visited upon us the evils we visit on others.
Sincerely,
Debra Sweet
Director, The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime
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The same goes for the Coalition of the Killing including Australia. We need to send war criminal John Howard and his cronies to the International Criminal Court for war crimes against humanity.
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Related:
Tens of thousands remember Anzac murderers in Perth and tens of millions stay home
Don't show your support for the ex-service community and in particular for the militants that are currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan with the estimated 655,000 dead in Iraq and the dead Afghanistan's that the militants have refused to count to date.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/144002.php
Travesty of War: Lest we Forget
For reasons too numerous to cite, I weep as I write this piece. Today is the highly emotive, for Aussies and Kiwis, ANZAC day – a day of remembrance and commemoration for those who desperately seek a national identity in a modern alienated society. There is NOTHING whatsoever to glorify in War. WAR is the lowest form of human expression; those who glorify it deserve our unrelenting critical attention. Those who attempt to exploit highly emotive and largely mythologised events deserve to be questioned, what are their real intentions?
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/144038.php
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