Matthew Cardinale / Atlanta Progressive News & US Alone.com – 2007-05-03 00:07:37
http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com
ATLANTA (April 29, 2007) — H Res 333, the bill introducing Articles of Impeachment against Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, now has two co-sponsors, for a total of 3 current total supporters, including sponsor US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Atlanta Progressive News has learned.
The two cosponsors are US Reps. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Janice Schakowsky (D-IL). APN currently has press requests in to both Offices since this morning but has not heard back yet; check back here for updates on their comments.
US Reps. Clay and Schakowsky were early cosponsors of US Rep. Conyers’s (D-MI) former bill, H Res. 635, in the last, or 109th, Congressional Session. Conyers’s bill had been introduced December 18, 2005. The first round of cosponsors appeared on December 22, 2005. Clay and Schakowsky had been part of the second round of cosponsors appearing on January 31, 2006.
The cosponsorships are significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows there is more than one Member of Congress willing to entertain real accountability for the Bush Administration, despite the insistence of US Rep. Pelosi that impeachment is off the table.
Also, this bill is calling for actual Articles of Impeachment for Cheney, unlike the last bill which not only was related to Mr. Bush, but created an investigative committee to look into possible impeachment rather than providing for actual possible impeachment.
Therefore, cosponsorships on H Res 333 have even more weight than those which were listed on H Res 635 last Session.
Also, since the time of H Res 635, Democrats have taken control of both the US House and Senate. Thus, impeachment is even more a real possibility an account of having the potential Democratic support for the bill, even though most Democrats currently aren’t rushing to impeach Bush.
Because Democrats are now the Majority in Congress, we also now know that Bush refuses to be accountable to Congress, particularly on the US Invasion of Iraq. Bush has now vetoed historic legislation to attach funding for the Occupation with a deadline for withdrawal. Thus, it is now even more clear that traditional oversight mechanisms will not be effective.
Just over the weekend there had been a flurry of events supporting impeachment, including several here in Atlanta, organized by World Can’t Wait and other groups. Organizing and public outcry for impeachment is ever-increasing, and Atlanta activists say that the crowd response to impeachment events are overwhelmingly positive.
The House Judiciary Committee told APN there are no plans to have hearings on impeachment of Cheney or anyone else at this time.
“It’s not at this time on the Committee’s immediate agenda,” spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said.
“Once its referred it has to be on the Committee’s agenda for the Committee to take it up,” Roussell said.
“In order to move a bill you have to have hearings scheduled on it,” Roussell said.
When asked by APN if Conyers taking impeachment “off the table” meant based on present information or whether it was complete abdication of a constitutional mechanism no matter what information comes forward, “All we can speak to is the present time,” Roussell said, adding it would be unwise to speculate about the future.
“I don’t think it’s prejudging,” she said.
Impeachment activist David Swanson said he was very encouraged by the two cosponsorships. “It’s wonderful. There are now three heroes in the US Congress. They deserve all the thanks and credit in the world. They have merely done their duty,” Swanson told Atlanta Progressive News.
Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor and National Correspondent for Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.
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As courageously drafted by Dennis Kucinich in H.Res. 333 filed just last week, the first and most central ground stated for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney was that he led the charge in fabricating a case for invasion of Iraq, based on phony weapons of mass destruction.
Now almost as if it were timed to coincide with that initiative, former CIA head George Tenet reveals they knew their evidence was flimsy, erroneous and just plain bogus all along, but that Cheney just kept exaggerating the threat anyway.
This is without question the most momentous issue of our time, and whether you agree that Cheney should be impeached, or not, your voice is needed to speak out now, and tell Congress what they should do about it.
You can vote yes.
Or you can vote no.
But we cannot remain silent.
Of course, anyone who’s been honestly and fairly paying attention has known at least since the exposure of the Downing Street Minutes that we were misled into the Iraq quagmire, by an executive branch that could not be bothered with either the actual facts or a serious policy debate about them, Richard Clarke told us the same thing and he was smeared in the corporate media for his truth telling, as has every other previous lesser whistle blower.
What will the contemptuous talking heads say now that the chief of the CIA at the time is another, and perhaps the most clinching, confirming witness?
Apparently what so galled Tenet enough for him to spill the beans on his own complicity (beside an O.J. scale book advance) was that the Bush administration, in its typical coward’s fashion, tried in the media to pin on him the ENTIRE blame for the failure of their wrong-headed strategic debacle.
“Tenet told us it was a slam dunk,” Cheney pleaded on TV, as the five time military deferment king again tried to escape any public responsibility for his own primary malfeasance. But now in an astonishing twist, Tenet reveals what the words “slam dunk” actually meant in context.
In the book, Tenet confesses that he was NOT being asked at the time to vouch for the quality of the intelligence. He says he was being asked if the case could be SOLD to the American people.
That’s all they cared about, not whether there was any actual support for their arguments, but whether they thought they could get away with bum rushing the rest of us. So when Tenet said “slam dunk”, what he MEANT was they were sure they would be able to stuff their cooked intelligence down our throats.
This is incredibly damning stuff. Tenet has unleashed the intelligence community equivalent of “If I Helped Them Do It”. They were not having a policy debate about the strength of the case against Iraq, they were having a sales meeting of con men to plot how far they could go in cheating the American people out of our lives and the contents of our treasury.
And they were determined to go all the way. “Slam dunk” was not an intelligence assessment, it was a SALES PROJECTION of their fraudulent product.
Tenet was neither the victim of a bad rap, nor the unwitting excuse. Instead he was a willing co-conspirator, happy enough to play along with the war fever and collect his ill-gotten medal of freedom while mooching all the other various perks of the power they seized. But the criminal mastermind of the whole sordid affair was none other than Richard B. Cheney. And that truth can no longer be hidden by even this most secretive of administrations.
What will it take for Congress to impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate for highest of all high crimes, launching a war of immoral and unjustifiable aggression, that has cost more Americans their lives than died on 9/11 (and upwards of a million Iraqis), based on NOTHING but deliberate and calculated lies?
VOTING ACTION PAGE:
http://www.usalone.com/cheney_impeachment.php
What it will take.. . . and all that is required . . . is your voice, and the voices of your friends, neighbors and acquaintances. VOTE now in the National Impeachment Poll and send your personal messages to Congress at the same time. In just a couple days we have had over 18,000 submissions already.
We need everyone who has ever submitted an action page to cast their vote in this one. There’s no reason why we can’t present Congress with a million votes on this. We’re GOING to do it. And when we do, impeachment hearings WILL become a reality on Capitol Hill, no matter what a handful of corrupt and overpaid pundits may have said.
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this message to everyone else you know.
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