TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

The Impeachment Debate in the US Slowly Accelerates

By Barbara Jentzsch

[This article published in: Freitag 09, 3/2/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.freitag.de/2006/09/06090702.php.]

“Impeachment Hearing: The White House Prepares for the Worst.” This frantic headline comes from the latest edition of the political magazine Insight published by the conservative Washington Times publishing house, the paper of the republicans owned by the South Korean newspaper mogul Sun Yung Moon. Is the paper better informed than the competition regarding efforts at removing the president from office? Neither the Washington Post nor the N4ew York Times reported what Insight magazine knew from Capitol Hill sources. In the US Congress, a pro-impeachment coalition was formed, a hearing process recently initiated in the Senate Judiciary committee on the controversial surveillance order of the White House interpreted as a prelude to the threatened dismissal of George Bush.

Alongside the interpretation of the Senate hearing, Insight’s publication of this article is noteworthy. For a month, the mainstream media repressed the impeachment theme. The metropolis press reacted by shrugging its shoulders to the publication of the explosive Downing Street memo that drastically documented Bush’s war lies in the summer of 2005. All hints of a possible dismissal were rejected as unrealistic and exaggerated. The Democratic member of Congress John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary committee for a decade, initiated the impeachment process at the end of 2005 with an official request for information and presented a 182-page report: war lies, torture photos, CIA-kidnappings, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. This was not worth mentioning, the press found.

Information was intensely filtered under pressure of the White House. The reserve ended when the New York Times disclosed a report on illegal eavesdropping withheld for twelve months. A nationwide storm of indignation erupted when it became public that the National Security Agency (NSA) on order of the president monitored telephone conversations in the US since November 2001 without judicial permission. Conservatives and liberals rebelled over breach of the law, the surveillance state and dictatorship. The impeachment theme became the daily Washington subject when the visibly annoyed George Bush insisted on continuing the monitoring program – although the Supreme Court declared in 1972 that telephone monitoring without judicial order violates the constitution. “We are a republic; we don’t want a kind. Laws govern our nation, not men,” an angry Congress protested. Even Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, saw a constitutional crisis approaching. A hearing began on February 6 to determine whether Bush broke the constitution like his fellow party member Nixon by spying on compatriots.

America does not want a president who believes “I am the law.” A coalition of the unwilling is underway. Senators, House representatives, high-ranking members of the Justice Department, former judges, ex-presidents Carter and Clinton and also ex-vice-president Al Gore see a breach of the constitution in the bugging practices. Responsible persons must expect to be removed from office. A president may not lie to Congress with impunity.

The motion for impeachment must be made in the House of Representatives and approved by the members. The president can feel secure as long as the republicans have the majority. However if the democrats recapture the House in the off-year elections in the fall – and the chances are good – the case will look different. In the next eight months, George Bush will be fighting for his political survival – hard and dirty and with all possible means.