I know the impeachment issue has been debated on this site to the hilt, but I wanted to bring your attention to a recent book that frames the argument for impeachment quite nicely.
The Case For Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office
Good Mama's day present? For the Mom that's starting to realize that accountability for these criminals would be a wonderful gift.
It's a book that the publisher I work for released last week. (Posting this diary isn't some marketing ploy - my job isn't really affected by whether the book succeeds or not.) I read it yesterday during a jury selection process (I didn't get picked) and thought it served a good purpose. There was almost nothing in the book that I haven't read on this site and others, but while I've read about wiretapping and Plame and Katrina and Downing Street Memo and Guantanamo and torture in a piecemeal fashion over the years, it was a huge wallop to read about the crimes committed in one sitting. It put everything in perspective for me, and could be a good primer for the millions that are just learning about the "high crimes and misdemeanors" but have been deprived of the facts by the traditional media. The people that caused the approval rating to dip from 40% to 29%.
Many chapters begin with a suggested impeachment article. For example:
ARTICLE III: In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, George W. Bush, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to reserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, repeatedly did violate the constitutional rights of citizens and residents of the United States by detaining them without charge, depriving them of the right to a fair and speedy trail, denying them the fundamental right of habeas corpus, and misusing the National Security Agency to spy on citizens, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act passed by Congress of 1978.
The book includes just about everything. In the appendix alone:
Downing Street Memo in full ("There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action")
The Tagubo Report ("c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing" "i. Writing `I am a Rapest' (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked.)
Gonzales Memo on Torture, Niger Forgeries, etc. The body of the book includes the administration's incompetence in failing to prevent 9/11, a Katrina timeline ("The president was on the phone with Secretary Chertoff, but, astonishingly, the topic of their conversation wasn't Katrina and New Orleans; it was immigration."), a Plamegate breakdown, Abu Ghraib breakdown, Padilla, Lindh, El-Masri, Abramoff, remarkably up-to-date research on the NSA illegalities and lots more.
And a few things I hadn't read, like:
That's what happened to Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian resident living in New York, who was picked up in the post-9/11 roundup of allegedly suspicious Arab males. After being deported by the INS to Egypt, Elmaghraby returned to the United States under a special court order that allows him to file suit against the Justice Department for his abuse while in detention. The thirty-seven-year-old man, who owned a small deli-restaurant in Times Square, had been held by federal authorities in the New York Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was kept in solitary without charge for almost a year before being shipped off to Egypt. That was bad enough, but Elmaghraby alleges that during that whole period he was kept from seeing an attorney, was regularly beaten, was accused of being a terrorist, was left outside for hours in the rainy detention center yard on cold days, was kept in ankle shackles, and was regularly pushed to the ground so that his face was injured and his teeth broken. "I was in life and I went to hell," he said. Elmaghraby was termed a "person of high interest" by the Justice Department, but it appears the was no reason for this other than random, unverified calls from tipsters who had claimed he "looked suspicious".
This and the Katrina timeline made me cry in court yesterday. The Katrina timeline always makes me cry. I have fantasies of confronting Condi as she's shopping for shoes days after the hurricane hit. I just say to myself, "I can't believe he just continued his vacation" over and over again.
Anyway, I want to see this book succeed because the traditional media's blackout of the impeachment discussion disgusts me. Blogs are one way to get the word out, but books are a way to add credibility to the argument. The book has a wide distribution - it's on sale at the major chains as well as the best independent bookstores around the country.
Yeah, we're the minority in Congress and unless the stars are aligned in November, 2006 and the U.S. experiences a windfall of common sense, we ain't gonna see any impeachment hearings. But I do believe discussion of impeachment helps our cause. It's good to let the masses know that this administration without a shadow of a doubt deserves to be kicked out on their can.