quote:
Statement from Ramsey Clark:
'Our Enormous Responsibility to Indict Bush'With your help and nearly six years of constant effort, we were able to reach 1,100,000 U.S. citizens who dared to ask their Representatives and the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach President George W.. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other civil officers of the United States before January 20, 2009.
Despite the Bush Administration’s commission of the most frequent, flagrant, contemptuous and deadly assaults on US. and international laws of war, peace and human rights of any presidency in our history, the Congress failed to act and carry out its clear duty to impeach, so carefully woven into the Constitution to prevent usurpation of powers not delegated by the people and compel removal from office and accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Now we have taken the next step to save the Constitution.
We do not regret the effort to impeach. We do regret the failure. Inaction by the Congress on impeachment is tantamount to approval of the many crimes committed by the Bush Administration in pursuit of its policies of military domination and the concentration of global wealth in fewer hands.
The failure to impeach clearly exposes the enormous resistance in government and vested wealth to any limitations on their power to commit high crimes with impunity and the extreme difficulty of motivating the public beset by economic insecurity and contrived distractions from addressing its own unhappy condition, plus a sense of powerlessness that is incompatible with the idea of democracy, and incessant propaganda in the mass media confounding the facts. Still there is nothing to prevent our organizing a massive movement of the people that can force the government to act. The Civil Rights Movement forced major reforms that have achieved continuing, if much too slow progress. The peace movement over a bloody decade, 1965-1975, helped force the U.S. government to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, but failed to persevere.
Now we must act effectively to reclaim the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the rule of law to restore and insure integrity in government designed to protect life and the human rights and dignity of every child, woman and man on earth.
Failure to fully investigate, and where the facts found warrant it, to prosecute George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other civil officers of the Bush Administration means they and their successors are above the law and the American people, their government and the victims of their crimes, foreign and domestic, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, will continue to suffer the consequences and assure the repetition of their lawless conduct.
We dare not blink at the magnitude, diversity and pervasive impact of the known crimes committed by the Bush Administration. Wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Supreme International Crime, have killed hundreds of thousands outright, wounded, sickened, and malnourished many more than they have killed and sent millions as refugees to neighboring nations while rendering homeless millions more. Indiscriminate killing of civilians, summary execution, arbitrary seizures of people and property, secret unlimited detention and torture have been authorized widely practiced and both defended and denied publicly. President Bush, the self-proclaimed "decider," reached for unlimited dictatorial power whenever he proclaimed the national security was threatened. And he considered himself above the law where domestic affairs were concerned even as he signed Acts of Congress into law.
A culture of corruption in contracting for security services, war relief programs, reconstruction in war-devastated countries have unjustly enriched favored predators abroad while at home mortgage lenders, banks, insurance companies and corporate executives exploited Bush administration policies intending enrichment of the rich that with the radically increased national war debt and military spending have led to collapse of the global economy, threatening massive unemployment and world wide depression with all their consequences for the general welfare.
Widespread illegal surveillance, at home and abroad, persecution, harassment of and discrimination against Muslims, other minorities and political opposition by U.S. government agencies - the Immigration Service, Border Patrol, IRS, FBI, prosecution by the Department of Justice - have violated the most precious rights of citizens and aliens alike, injured the United States in international relations and cooperation and made new enemies of many nations. Corrupt conduct by Bush politicized appointees, constituting crimes in at least six Executive Departments, most notably Interior and Justice, has brought lawlessness into the government bureaucracy itself, costing billions of dollars and creating distrust of government.
The Bush Administration brought us to the brink of despotic government. A Cheney Administration would have taken us over the brink. The imperative duty of the American people is an unrelenting public demand for comprehensive federal criminal investigations of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other officials of their Administration and all persons acting under their authority and direction, followed by rigorous criminal prosecutions wherever the evidence, having been fully and fairly presented to a federal grand jury, results in indictments.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General
http://www.impeachbush.org/site/PageServer?pagename=homepage
posted March 16, 2009 17:03
