Impeachment

By David Swanson

These are the top 10 reasons it makes sense that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is waiting for a report from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in the Department of Justice prior to impeaching federal judge and former torture and war facilitator Jay Bybee.

10. It could turn out that writing memos pretending to legalize torture was the ethical thing to do, or at least that doing so in the future is a recommendation of Obama’s task force on interrogations.

9. read more

So, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on abuse of the “state secrets” privilege and asked someone from the Department of Justice to appear and testify. The DOJ told Conyers, not exactly in these words, to go Cheney himself. Now, given that a member of Congress would need a spine surgically implanted before taking the obvious step of sending the Capitol Police to read more

By David Swanson

A judge gropes and harasses his female employees, lies about it to investigators, is tried and convicted, and is on his way to prison. The U.S. House of Representatives springs into action, activating something none of us even knew existed during the entire eight-year hell of Cheney-Bush: the House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Judicial Impeachment. And what did Judge Groper do on Wednesday? He chose not to show up, as requested by Congress, for his own impeachment hearing.

Over read more

More videos below from Press TV:

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Here’s his statement:

If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.

Of course it could also be because of the mess the Bush and Obama administrations created there and in Iraq and elsewhere. My point is not to agree with Rich but to notice that he thinks we somehow threw Bush and Cheney out and that he wishes we’d done so sooner. read more

Click here.

200 Organizations Ask Holder to Appoint a Special Prosecutor for Bush, Cheney, et alia

Two hundred organizations, including After Downing Street, Democrats.com, the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Society of American Law Teachers, Human Rights USA, the American Freedom Campaign, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, have signed a joint statement urging Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor for former read more

Jay Bybee is a member of the D.C. bar and could be complained about there and disbarred, since apparently enforcing the laws he violated or impeaching him would just be too much trouble. Except that, as Gordon Clark pointed out to me, the Washington Post just printed a letter from the “senior legal ethics counsel for the District of Columbia Bar” essentially objecting the existence of ethics:

Regarding the May 7 news story “Experts Say Authors of Memos May Avoid Professional read more

Elizabeth de la Vega has a new article at truthout arguing that in some cases torture can be prosecuted no matter how many years go by. This is helpful information, but where she loses me is on the notion that delay is desirable. Arguing that delay is possible for certain crimes if certain arguments can be won I understand. But that it’s desirable I’m unable to see. As time passes, the ability of politicians to oppose “looking backward” grows, public interest shrinks, read more

By David Swanson

#1: Cheney says that he and Bush ordered torture but did nothing wrong.

On Sunday, Cheney said: “The fact of the matter is that these [torture] techniques that we’re talking about are used on our own people. In the SERE program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth, and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures.”

If this were true, participants in the SERE program would be kidnapped and tortured by read more

By David Swanson

That’s right, children, it’s national Nancy Day, honoring the occasion on May 7, 2006, when Nancy Pelosi first allowed Tim Russert to badger her into agreeing that she wouldn’t permit the impeachment of Saint George or Father Dick, not even if they barbequed children on the White House lawn.

The right honorable Republican National Committee had just sent out a press release reading, roughly, as follows: “Skin me, Miss Nancy, snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar read more

Audio clip.

ImpeachBybee.org Open for what to do and why.

CLICK HERE to ask Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.

The New York Times finally wants somebody impeached and it’s Jay Bybee.

A Spanish judge is seeking an indictment of Jay Bybee.

Jay Bybee’s “legal” memos were thrown out by the Bush administration.

Jay Bybee signed memos authorizing torture.

Jay Bybee is a federal judge with a lifetime appointment.

Lawyers have been held accountable for the crime of pretending to legalize crimes before, read more

By David Swanson

As evidence of Bush and Cheney’s crimes is slowly pried loose from President Obama’s fingers, it’s easy to forget just how long ago numerous articulate voices were identifying and denouncing those crimes, none more so that Francis Boyle, who told Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show on September 13, 2001:

“Before I support a war that will jeopardize the lives of tens of thousands of our servicemen and women, I want to see the evidence that we are relying read more