This from Andrew Sullivan with which I am in full agreement http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/06/impeach-cheney.htmle:
A conservative makes the case. Conservatives should be more outraged by his assault on the law, the constitution and individual liberty. He's also clearly a war criminal - a knowing enforcer of torture and abuse of military detainees. We once executed Nazis for the same techniques as Cheney has approved and enforced. I don't want to see him impeached. I want to see him prosecuted under American and international law as a criminal. The link to the article Andrew references is http://slate.com/id/2169292, where all of Cheney's activities are described. Here is a partial description:
Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:
The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.
The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.
The man needs to be removed from office. He definitely suffers from a Darth Vader mentality and has made America look like some third world dictatorship in the making.
2 comments:
He has frightened me more than any one single person ever. Whenever anyone said "Impeach Bush" my answer was "Hell NO! Can you imagine Cheney with what few reigns he has on him removed?????" Impeach Cheney...That I can get behind.
Sullivan's problem is that "conservative" in his sense, which is more like Goldwater and his libertarian friend Jonathan Rauch, is not "conservative" today. Sullivan is an anachronism, appealing to "conservatism" that no longer exists, except as libertarian, but still not the same.
Both Bush and Cheney have committed more heinous crimes than Richard Nixon, the ONLY difference, is the former have done it with help from both Democrats and Republicans, while Nixon did it on his own. When Russ Feingold suggested impeachment for impeachable offenses, who stood with him? Who? Hilary? Obama? Edwards? Biden? Dowd? If I remember correctly, they (with Obama as the possible exception) were front-row cheerleaders of the crimes. But NONE stood with Feingold. NOT ONE.
Oh, Hilary now protests it's "Bush's War," just like she protested her husband's philandering was a "vast right wing conspiracy," but we know who had those pom-poms for Bush-Cheney's War until the political winds of public opinion changed, don't we?
If no one is wrong, then it matters if no one is right, does it? Feeding at the K-Street trough has a lot of pigs, a great many chickens, but few shepherds like Feingold, whose flock would not obey, and still will not. Feingold, who? [fade into convenient amnesia, even for HilaryCare Horror I.]
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