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Law Prof. Francis A. Boyle
on Impeachment
Broadcast 05/05/06 Talk Nation Radio
Professor Boyle argues for the use of impeachment to remove
Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsefeld before they can take us
into another war in Iran and farther along into an American
police state.
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TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Talk
Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights,
and the environment, I’m Dori Smith.
“We were in dire straights under Nixon in Vietnam and we
impeached Nixon, ended up with Gerald Ford, and the Vietnam War
was wound down. So I don’t think we can ever give up hope but we
really have no alternative.” – Francis Boyle
Intro: International law expert Francis A. Boyle of the
University of Illinois is our guest this time to discuss Iran,
presidential powers, the Plame Affair, the President’s decision
to override 750 laws, and the professor’s draft impeachment
resolution against President George W. Bush written back in
January of 2003. In debates held at that time with
administration officials Attorney Boyle came under sharp
criticism for maintaining that the President and others in the
administration made false statements that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction. As Congressional leaders from both sides of
the aisle struggle to evaluate any illegality on the part of the
President and others in his administration, Professor Boyle’s
warnings about the direction the government was moving in now
seem prophetic.
Dori Smith: Professor Boyle, welcome to Talk Nation
Radio.
Francis A. Boyle: Thank you very much for having me on
and my best to your listening audience.
Dori Smith: You wrote your draft impeachment resolution
against President Bush back in January of 2003 and in the time
since we have learned a lot more about pre-war intelligence
manipulation and the various kinds of disinformation provided to
the American people about Iraq. Just talk about the ongoing
effort to impeach since your resolution in 2003. Do you think
enough is known for impeachment to proceed and can we get there?
Francis A. Boyle: Yes, I think those of us in the peace
movement in the fall of 2002 were publicly stating that there
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and this was just a
bald faced lie and propaganda to generate momentum towards war.
And I think we have now been proven to be correct. Where the
impeachment campaign stands now; I have to review just a little
bit of history.
On 13 March 2003, that is just before the outbreak of the war
against Iraq, Congressman John Conyers, the ranking member of
the House Judiciary Committee, convened an emergency meeting of
40 to 50 of his top advisors, most of whom were lawyers, to put
in emergency bills of impeachment against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
and at that time Ashcroft, to head off the impending war.
He invited me and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in to
debate the issue in favor of impeachment. The debate lasted two
hours. We had my draft resolution on the table and Ramsey also
had his draft resolution; we don’t disagree at all in how we see
the issues. And to make a long story short the lawyers there did
not disagree with me and Ramsey that Bush merited impeachment
for what he had done and was threatening to do so far.
The main objection was political expedience and in particular
John Podesta was there. He had been Clinton’s White House chief
of staff. He stated he was appearing on behalf of the Democratic
National Committee and that as far as the DNC was concerned it
was going to hurt their ability to get whoever their candidate
was going to be in 2004 elected President if we put in these
bills of impeachment. I found that argument completely
disingenuous when the Democrats had no idea who their candidate
was going to be in 2004 as of March 2003. We had no idea.
In any event I’m a political independent so I didn’t argue that
point. It was not for me to tell Democrats how to get their
candidates elected. I just continued to hammer on on the merits
of impeachment. Now, Ramsey, as you know he’s a lifelong
Democrat so he did argue that issue and Ramsey’s argument was
the he didn’t think it was going to hurt and it might help to
put in these bills of impeachment immediately. Unfortunately,
the Podesta argument prevailed and those draft bills of
impeachment are still sitting there at the House Judiciary
Committee. I’ve been updating impeachable offenses since then
sending it in there to the House Judiciary Committee.
So the main problem we have now is political. That the
Democratic leadership in the House where the bill must originate
and also the Democratic honchos at the DNC are opposed to
putting in bills of impeachment against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
and now Gonzales. So this is not a drafting problem, a
substantive problem. We’ve already debated these and Ramsey and
I won the arguments. And as time has gone on since I drafted my
bill and this debate before Congressman Conyers, more and more
evidence has come out of the lies, propaganda, disinformation,
and further crimes that the Bush Jr. administration has engaged
in. –Recently; spying on the American people in violation of the
4th Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
which is a felony so obviously another impeachable offense that
Gonzales approved.
So that’s where we stand. So far we need one member of the House
of Representatives with courage, intelligence, integrity,
principle, and a safe seat, willing to put in a bill of
impeachment or bills of impeachment against the four of them.
Right now we do not have that member of Congress because the
leadership of the Democratic Party is taking the position that
this would be politically counter productive as far as they are
concerned.
Dori Smith: You mentioned the NSA spy program. There is
also the right now Patrick Fitzgerald is working on involving
leaks of the name, Valerie Plame Wilson, who as we know was a
CIA agent. We have many documents that have been coming out and
so I want to talk with you about that. And finally, I do want to
touch on the more recent story about the President quietly
assuming the authority to disobey 750 laws since he took office.
This is a story by the Boston Globe’s Charles Savage, April 30,
2006.
So taking them one at a time, you mentioned the NSA spy program.
Are we on the verge of seeing a bipartisan effort to question
Bush on that program and could that possibly bring up the issue
of impeachment if the President is unwilling to listen, say,
even to the head of the U.S. Senate
Francis A. Boyle: Well it would be nice if we were on the
verge but Senator Specter was making some noises that he was
going to do something and maybe have some hearings but so far we
don’t have them. I really don’t know what to say. Again, the
issues you mentioned all involve impeachable offenses. There’s
more than enough there on the substantive merits across the
board to impeach these four individuals but I regret to say I
just don’t think the Democrats have the guts to do it. (See
update in breaking story Thursday, May 4, 2006, one day after
this program aired that Senator Specter has called for hearings
on the President’s failure to obey 750 laws. Hearings Update
My conclusion is that basically the incumbent Democrats have
pretty much been complicit with everything Bush has done since
September 11, 2001. In the NSA spying scandal it came out that
the leadership of the Democratic Party, the 14 top leaders in
the House and the Senate, knew full well that Bush was spying on
the American people and said nothing at all to the American
people.
It was the New York Times as you know who broke the story, but
they sat on it for a year. Well let’s put the New York Times
responsibility aside, the Democratic leadership who knew should
have said something. Now they gave the lame excuse saying well
the information was classified. That’s baloney. In the
Constitution there is what is known as the speech and debate
clause that gives any member of Congress absolute immunity from
both civil and criminal proceedings to say anything he or she
wants to say from the floor of the House or the floor of the
Senate. This happened in the impeachment campaign against Bush
Senior where I was counsel to Congressman Henry B. Gonzales and
did the first draft of his impeachment resolution that was
introduced January 16, 1991, and in support of that resolution
as matters went on Congressman Gonzales repeatedly got up on the
floor of the House and released classified information.
Of course Bush Sr. went irate. He sicked the CIA to investigate
Congressman Gonzales but nothing could be done because of the
speech and debate clause. As long as the member of Congress only
talks on the floor of the House or the Senate they can say what
they want. They can’t go back and have a press conference on
classified information.
So everyone knows this and in my opinion my reading then went
with the NSA spy scandal it came out that the Democratic
leadership has simply been complicit with Bush. They were
complicit on the war against Afghanistan. They were complicit in
the war against Iraq. We in the peace movement told the
leadership of the Democratic Party that there was no evidence of
weapons of mass destruction for those of us who also have been
following this matter for 20 years. You know, these are
intelligent people, they had access to the same information I
did and Ramsey Clark did and others. So, the problem is we have
a leadership in the Democratic Party that has been complicit in
all of these Constitutional violations being inflicted by the
Bush Administration.
I think we are going to have to elect people; men and women of
good faith whatever party, who are willing to put in bills of
impeachment because otherwise we are quickly degenerating here
into a dictatorship. You mentioned that story in the Boston
Globe. The President is just ignoring laws or issuing these
signing statements saying he is not going to enforce them. Well
the President has an obligation under the Constitution to take
care that the laws are faithfully executed. If he believes they
are unconstitutional he has to go to the Supreme Court and get
the Supreme Court to strike them down.
He has also taken an oath to uphold the Constitutional laws of
the United States as required by the Constitution. So this
behavior, this pattern of behavior rises to the level of an
impeachable offense. The test is subversion of the Constitution
and clearly you have over 700 laws that the President has said
he is not going to enforce.
Dori Smith: In terms of which laws we are looking at his
unwillingness to adhere to laws recently passed, since he took
office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute
passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of
the Constitution. And now this has gone to issues like torture.
He has said he can bypass the torture ban. There are other laws
involving the Military, armies, the ability to declare war, make
rules for captured enemies, make rules for government and
regulation of the land and Naval forces and also regulate the
Military; and this is traditionally a role that Congress does
play.
Francis A. Boyle: That’s correct. If you read the
Constitution Congress is given all sorts of powers with respect
to the conduct of warfare and most importantly the power to
declare war, not the President. Look what we have in operation
here is the [Fuhrer] principle that was rejected by the
Nuremberg Charter judgment and principles that the President is
above the law, he’s above the Constitution, he’s above
international law, he can do whatever he wants. He can take
United States citizens, strip them of their rights, and throw
them into Military brigs. We have to remember that in the first
draft of the USA Patriot Act that was done by a Federalist
Society lawyer for Ashcroft, in the first draft they tried to
have in there the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus which
is all that stands between us and a police state. -It’s your
ability if you are detained by any law enforcement official to
have a lawyer go into court and the judge you know produce the
body, a person appears in court, and then the government has to
explain what is the legal authority for this person to be
detained and if there are any problems with condition of
detention, I.e., torture or something like that.
John Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers tried to get
Congress to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for all of us U.S.
citizens. Fortunately a Congressional staffer saw that and it
was struck out. But clearly that is their ultimate objective; to
set up a police state.
Dori Smith: Well now you say that, a lot of the laws that
were ignored did turn out to be military rules and regulations,
but also there were Affirmative Action provisions, requirements
Congress be told about immigration service problems, whistle
blower protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and
safeguards against political interference in federally funded
research. We could look at any one of those and find lots of
stories to work on, but let’s talk about the nuclear aspect
because I know you have looked at that as well and we do see a
new nuclear arms race going on where the White House is now
working on how to describe programs that are already underway,
we are already looking at testing, we are already looking at
development and replacement with some of the weapons systems and
various kind of new technologies; and an emphasis on new weapons
that may be “usable” under the new sort of description of a
nuclear conflict, which is the old traditional label of “Low
Intensity Conflict” that has to do with these surgical strikes
again with a nuclear warhead.
Francis A. Boyle: That is correct. As you know in
December of 2002 they put a new policy on the White House web
site, a new National Security Policy that supplemented the one
they had done earlier that fall in September endorsing
preventive warfare. And in the December 2002 policy and I
discuss this in my book, Destroying World Order they made it
clear that they were prepared to use weapons of mass destruction
to carry out that policy. And now it has come out from the
Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker that they are prepared
to use nuclear weapons against Iran they say low yield, but we
are talking of orders of a little bit less than Hiroshima or
Nagasaki.
Just recently President Bush and Secretary of State Rice were
asked about the use of nuclear weapons with that name, by the
way, with respect to Iran, and both the President and the
Secretary of State said “all options are on the table.”
If you look at the Pentagon policy manual on war fighting, which
I have reviewed, that came out I believe a year ago,
implementing then the December 2002 policy on weapons of mass
destruction, and they are currently integrating nuclear weapons
with conventional weapons all up and down their operational
policy. So this is going on now as we speak.
As you know at Nevada they have this, Nevada test site, this
Operation Divine Strike, that is again going to simulate bunker
busters, and it’s clear they are getting ready there to resume
nuclear testing. So if you add it all up it looks horrendous and
of course then you don’t want nuclear whistle blowers going out
and trying to tell the American people what’s really going on.
But if you make a very close examination of what’s already out
there in the public record it is startling and extremely
disturbing.
If Bush were to go ahead and actually do what Seymour Hersh says
he is going to do we could be witnessing the outbreak of the
third world war. And I know Noam Chomsky has recently taken the
same position on that independently of me.
Dori Smith: That brings us to CIA officer Valerie Plame
Wilson again but it turns out that she was working on Iran at
the time she was outted by this White House, then we see that
her husband Joseph Wilson had been in Niger on a mission to
determine the degree of any validity to this suggestion that
Saddam Hussein was trying to get nuclear material from Niger,
that turned out to be false and of course he said so in his
OP-ED piece that is now so famous. So here we see two people who
did try to in a way warn us back at the time that this was all
starting to come out and now we see that every argument they
made is being legitimized if you will with more and more of the
documents that are coming out through the Special Prosecutor as
he proceeds with his case.
Francis A. Boyle: You know Daniel Ellsberg who released
the Pentagon Papers has publicly stated that it is in the
interest of the preservation of our republic that people inside
the government who have this information have to start leaking
because otherwise I’m afraid the Bush people are going to lead
us into a total catastrophe. It could be a nuclear catastrophe.
As to Mr. Fitzgerald my reading of him is he is not an Archibald
Cox or Leon Jawarski. Remember he was appointed as U.S. Attorney
in the Northern District of Illinois by President Bush himself.
So he is not really independent of anything and it seems to me
he is pretty much going with their play book which is to narrow
his focus as much as possible and zero in on underlings and
avoid the responsibility of the people on the top. So I’m afraid
we really can’t rely on Mr. Fitzgerald to do the right thing. He
might. I’m not discounting him. But he’s no Archie Cox he’s no
Leon Jawarski. He is a creature of this administration.
Again, it’s really going to be up to us, the American people, to
take a stand here because otherwise the Bush people I’m afraid
will lead us over a precipice with this purely concocted crisis
with Iran. It’s the exact same playbook they used on Iraq. It
appears they are timing it to coincide with the November
elections, again, Karl Rove at work again. It looks like the
Republicans are afraid they are going to lose control of either
one of both houses. And what better way to keep that control
than to manufacture this crisis with Iran, distract attention
from all their other problems that they have, and try to hold on
to the House and the Senate, to prevent a bill of impeachment or
investigation or whatever. So this is the dilemma we are in as
American people.
Dori Smith: I just want to ask again about the potential
to use impeachment as a remedy for the present crisis in
Washington; a crisis of economics, a crisis of leadership, and
as it turns out a crisis of just plain old honesty because we
have seen again and again corruption at the highest levels of
the land and so often we can trace that directly to the doors of
multinational corporations. Let me just ask you if the American
people are ready to hear that they need to stand up for
impeachment and if we can translate that into a state by state
effort.
Francis A. Boyle: First of all it did work with Nixon so
we have a very powerful precedent there. Now, I admit at that
time the Democrats controlled Congress, it was a different
party. But even eventually most of the Republicans came along to
the need to get rid of Nixon just for the good of the country.
So we have that precedent.
Number two, we have the precedent of what happened all over this
country for immigration reform. We’ve had hundreds of thousands
of people take to the streets all over to advocate in a peaceful
nonviolent way for human rights, for undocumented aliens in this
country. So there is an enormous potential out there that the
peace movement is going to have to mobilize. As I see it we are
going to have to sit down and figure out how did the immigration
reform movement turn all those people out and we are going to
have to start turning out similar numbers for impeachment of
Bush and trying to stop the war in Iraq, it’s killed now over
2400 U.S. service members, all needlessly killed, we have no
idea how many Iraqis, probably 200,000 at least, and to head off
what could be a nuclear catastrophe in Iran.
Dori Smith: Finally, you have written about Obliterating
Fallujah and what the U.S. Military did there. And we have had
as a guest on our program Dahr Jamail who drew a very
devastating picture of what was going on in Fallujah, as did a
few others who had been there and spoke with us about that, Jo
Wilding and Rahul Mahajan
We get the impression that not much has been done there by way
of reconstruction so we see this city basically destroyed, and
we see other cities in Iraq getting to the point of destroyed,
and we see lots of refugees being created from the cities; To
what extent do you think that this is going to have such an
impact in the region that that too could provoke more war and
wider war?
Francis A. Boyle: Fallujah will probably be like Grozny
which is completely demolished and almost uninhabitable over in
Chechnya. What I was pointing out in that essay was the legal
principles of State; you have to go back to the Nuremberg
Charter that said quite clearly that the wanton devastation of a
city, town, or district, is a war crime. And what I pointed out
was to obliterate an entire city like Fallujah or Grozny, these
are Nazi crimes to try to put them into perspective. That we
prosecuted, convicted, and executed Nazis at Nuremberg for doing
this type of behavior. Now, I’m against the death penalty for
anyone including Bush and the rest of them. I believe they
should be impeached, they should be indicted and they should be
prosecuted, but not executed. -I wrote that piece to try to put
this behavior into perspective and right now as you saw Senator
Biden making the proposal that Iraq should be carved up into
three pieces? Well that’s been their policy all along is to
destroy Iraq as a viable state. And I am very afraid then that
this will be implemented and you could see a massive convulsion
of civil war in Iraq that could draw in, even against their best
wishes, the neighboring states particularly Turkey, Iran, and
others. It’s a very volatile situation over there. You have
Russia arming Iran, China pretty much supporting them. You have
close to two thirds of all the oil and gas supplies in the world
at stake there. I don’t think I or Professor Chomsky have
underestimated the potential cataclysm that could happen if the
Bush Administration continues on its campaign.
But look, we were in dire straights under Nixon in Vietnam and
we impeached Nixon, ended up with Gerald Ford, and the Vietnam
War was wound down. I don’t think we can ever give up hope. But
we really have no alternative.
Dori Smith: We see Israel in the press now relating to
Iran. The latest being that Israel announced the sale of some
rockets from North Korea to Iran, I believe these were scud type
missiles, and Iran has been talking about the destruction of
Israel and has said some very harsh things about the Holocaust.
-A very inflammatory situation. Just talk about Israel under the
new leaders and where we stand in that regard.
Francis A. Boyle: Well I have to agree with the study by
Professors Walt and Mearsheimer at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard. If you look at the record here in the
United States, the only people pushing for war against Iran are
the Israel lobby people, their sources, assets in the news
media, and also in Congress. I don’t detect any great sentiment
here on the part of the American people to go to war against
Iran.
It’s clear under the philosophy of the Neo-Conservatives that
they wrote Clean Break” (”A Clean Break: a New Strategy for
Securing the Realm,” Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies, By Douglas J. Feith and Richard Perle.) and
everything, they want the United States to take out Iran as a
favor to Israel and so I think we have to be aware of these
strategies and who is mongering for war against Iran. Again,
that’s not just my reading of it. That’s also what Professor’s
Walt and Mearsheimer have stated in their article in the London
Review of Books with all of the footnotes at the Harvard Kennedy
School. I agree with them.
Dori Smith: Francis A. Boyle teaches law at the
University of Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of
Chicago and Harvard Law School. He has advised numerous
international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes,
genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. Professor Boyle also
serves as counsel for Bosnia Herzegovina in application of the
convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of
genocide pending before the International Court of Justice. He
also represents associations of citizens within the country and
has been instrumental in developing the indictment against
Slobdon Milosovich for genocide, crimes against humanity, and
war crimes, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He received a PHD in
political science from Harvard University. You can find
Professor Francis A. Boyle’s writing online at Counterpunch.org.
Some of Professor Boyle’s Books:
The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence
World Politics and International Law
Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East
Before and After September 11th
Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to
International Relations 1898-1921
For Talk Nation Radio, I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is
produced in the studios of WHUS at the University of
Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 pm.
talknation.org and talknationradio.org for transcripts and
discussion. Our music is provided by Fritz Heede.
http://talknationradio.org Francis A.
Boyle teaches law at the University of Illinois. He is a
graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He
has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human
rights, war crimes, genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare.
Professor Boyle also serves as counsel for Bosnia Herzegovina in
application of the convention on the prevention and punishment
of the crime of genocide pending before the International Court
of Justice. He also represents associations of citizens within
the country and has been instrumental in developing the
indictment against Slobdon Milosovich for genocide, crimes
against humanity, and war crimes, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He
received a PHD in political science from Harvard University. You
can find Professor Francis A. Boyle’s writing online at
Counterpunch.org. (In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with
the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
