TRANSCRIPT
Impeach George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney to prevent Wider War in the Middle East
and Bring U.S. Forces Home from Iraq
Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour
discussion on politics, human rights and the
environment, I’m Dori Smith. According to a
Newsweek poll more than half the country, 58%,
now say they wish the Bush presidency were
simply over. Much of the reason for their dismay
is the war in Iraq. Yet, leading Democrats have
been resisting calls from peace groups and
progressive Democrats to issue a resolution to
impeach Bush and Cheney.
Professor Francis A. Boyle joins us for the
half hour. He is a leading American professor,
practitioner and advocate of international law
and exactly four years ago on January 17th his
draft impeachment resolution against George W.
Bush appeared in Counterpunch.
Professor Boyle’s latest piece on impeaching
the President and Vice President is dated
January 20th 2007. His title is, ‘Immediate
Impeachment: Preventing the Guns of August in
Eurasia.’ You can find it online at
globalresearch.ca
Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 the
White House failed to heed warnings from
military and intelligence analysts about
possible repercussions from the violent
overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Now it seems the
U.S. is again failing to heed warnings about the
potential risks of an attack on Iran. I asked
Professor Boyle his view on why the present
administration ignores such warnings:
Professor Francis A. Boyle: Well you have to
understand the Neo-conservative mentality. I
went to the University of Chicago with these
people, (Paul)
Wolfowitz and all the rest of them, and I
went through the same program, the Department of
Political Science run by the Neocon founder
Leo Strauss. His mentor in Germany before he
came to the United States was Karl Schmidt who
went on to become the most notorious Nazi law
professor of that benighted era who tried to
justify in legal terms every hideous atrocity
the Nazis inflicted on anyone.
So the Neocons had been thoroughly
brainwashed I would say, as they attempted to do
to me at the University of Chicago, in Schmidt,
and Strauss, and
Nietzsche and
Machiavelli. These are the people we are
dealing with. They are extremely dangerous, very
bright, cunning and ruthless, and they are
really out to dominate and control the two
thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources in
Eurasia. –An objective that Zbigniew
Brzezinski identified a while ago in his book,
The Grand Chess Board.
I also went through the same PHD program at
Harvard in political science that produced
(Henry) Kissinger, Brzezinski, Huntington, and
the rest of these people. They gave me
Kissinger’s old office at the Center for
International Affairs. In fact, Kissinger and I
had the same international relations teacher,
Hans Morganthau, and when I was 21 years old
Morganthau offered to call up Kissinger at the
White House and get me a job on his National
Security Council which of course I declined to
do.
So we simply cannot underestimate at all what
these people are up to. For example, the Deputy
National Security Advisor,
Elliott Abrams –he was a classmate of mine
at Harvard Law School; he’s one of these people.
Abrams was responsible for personally murdering
35,000 people down in Nicaragua. He was in
charge of the Contra war. And I say that having
been down there myself in 1985, we had a
delegation of lawyers, Ramsey Clark, Len
Weinglass and two French Canadian lawyers, and
we were off in the war zone near Matagalpa
investigating Contra atrocities at a time when
the Contras said they would kill any Americans
on the grounds that they were presumptively
Sandanista sympathizers. And later they would
kill
Ben Linder.
So this guy
Abrams has already killed 35,000 in
Nicaragua and he should be in jail rather
than Deputy National Security Advisor. He is
running Bush’s entire policy toward the Middle
East. He is also a fanatical Zionist affiliated
with the Likud Party in Israel, as is true for
many but not all of these Neo-conservatives.
This is an extremely dangerous situation. These
Neocons want to take on Iran as a favor to
Israel. They believe that what is good for
Israel is good for the United States.
Dori Smith: The Bush administration has
created puzzling alliances. Are they now
refusing to reduce their presence in Iraq on
behalf of the
Saudis who urged them to stay or else they
would get involved in Iraq? And as we understand
it
Ahmed Chalabi who would have been the leader
of Iraq according to the plan that was
originally on the table in 2003, had alliances
with Iran which became much more important and
relevant as more and more Shiites came into
power under the U.S. occupation.
Who is our
ally and who is not? Some have suggested
that the Bush administration might put more
pressure on Iran or
attack Iran because they want to show the
Sunni that they are more inclined in the
direction of supporting them. Talk about that
puzzling problem of who our allegiances are with
and perhaps in the context of
OPEC too.
Francis A. Boyle: These are all our puppets
and they do pretty much what we tell them to do.
We shift around one puppet to another to another
as it suits the Neocon’s interest. The point is
the 22,000 troops, the new troops the President
is sending to Iraq, is probably part of this
strategy of escalation generally in the Gulf
being coordinated with plans to attack Iran.
Again it’s somewhat reminiscent of the Nixon
administration bombing Laos and Cambodia on the
alleged grounds that somehow it was going to get
us out of Vietnam.
So we have to understand I think these people
would like to expand warfare in the region and
not tamp it down. For that reason they will make
alliances with whomever they want to to promote
this policy. They have even said earlier, the
Neocons, that they want to rewrite the
Sykes-Picot agreement that basically carved
up the Middle East between the British and the
French during the First World War.
John Bolton, another Neocon, just said the
integrity of Iraq is not in our interest and if
Iraq is to be carved up into three pieces so be
it. Indeed that’s been the objective all along
here is to destroy Iraq as a viable state.
Huntington identified that in his book,
Clash of Civilizations that Iraq was really
the only state that could provide leadership for
the Arab world in its confrontations with the
West over oil and its confrontation with Israel.
So Iraq had to be destroyed as a state and it
pretty much is destroyed as a state and that
suits the Neocon interests quite well. So now
they are moving on to Iran and it appears maybe
Syria as well.
Dori Smith: I want to return to your topic of
impeachment as a way to prevent wider war, to
stop this march into what could well be wider
chaos. We have seen Russ Feingold introduce a
measure that would ban war funding. What else
would you like to see members of Congress do,
talk about that in the context of your major
work here on impeachment and what the Bush
administration has done of a criminal nature in
terms of international law and US law.
Francis A. Boyle: Right. As is very clear if
you have been following the debate over the
so-called ‘surge’ you have moral cowards and
hypocrites like Senator Biden saying well we
basically have to go along with the President
because he has all the power. Which is
ridiculous. Anyone who has studied the situation
knows two things: One, the Congress has the
power of the purse and can terminate the surge
and terminate the war immediately if it so
desires. I’m very happy to see Senator Feingold
introducing his legislation to do exactly that.
That’s what we need to support, not these cop
outs by Senator Kennedy or what Biden is doing
or Hagel or the rest of them. We need to cut off
the funding. That was the way the Vietnam War,
Cambodia, Laos Wars were all ended.
Second, building on the Nixon precedent, use
impeachment: We need to pursue both prongs
simultaneously. The same thing happened with
Nixon. Congressman Bob Drinan, a friend of mine
recently deceased, introduced the first bill to
impeach Nixon over his bombing of Cambodia. So
we have two prongs here, cutting of the funds,
which Senator Feingold is starting and
impeachment which must be started in the House.
We need a member of Congress willing to put in
bills certainly against Bush and Cheney and try
to head this attack against Iran off, to do the
best we can under the circumstances.
Dori Smith: Who do you think might be the
most effective person to introduce this bill and
what is in the works in that regarded?
Francis A. Boyle: We just need one person to
introduce the bill with courage, integrity,
principles, and of course a safe seat. In Gulf
War one I worked with the late great Congressman
Henry B. Gonzales on his bill of impeachment
against Bush Sr. We put that one in. I did the
first draft the day after the war started. So in
my opinion there is no excuse for these bills
not to have been put in already. In fact, on 13
March 2003,
Congressman John Conyers convened a meeting
of 40 to 50 of his top advisors, most of whom
were lawyers, to debate putting in immediate
bills of impeachment against Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, to head off the war.
There were draft bills sitting on the table
that had been prepared by me and Ramsey Clark.
And the Congressman invited Ramsey and me to
come in and state the case for impeachment. It
was a two hour debate, very vigorous debate,
obviously all of these lawyers there. And most
of the lawyers there didn’t disagree with us on
the merits of impeachment. It was more as they
saw it a question of practical politics. Namely,
John Podesta was there, Clinton’s former White
House chief of staff, who said he was appearing
on behalf of the Democratic National Committee
and they were against putting in immediate bills
of impeachment because it might hurt whoever
their presidential candidate was going to be in
2004. Well at that time no one even knew who
their presidential candidate was going to be in
2004.
I didn’t argue the point, I’m a political
independent. It was not for me to tell Democrats
how to elect their candidates. I just continued
arguing the merits of impeachment. But Ramsey is
a lifelong Democrat and he argued that he felt
that putting in these bills of impeachment might
help the Democrats and it certainly wasn’t going
to hurt them in 2004.
Well the Democrats did lose in 2004 but as
Ramsey and I were walking out after a two hour
debate adjourned (I had offered to stay as long
as it took to polish up my bills of impeachment
and get them put in right away, because the war
started, it was going to start in four days) I
turned to Ramsey and I said Ramsey I just don’t
understand it, their arguments make no sense,
why did they not take me up on my offer to stay
and polish up those bills of impeachment and put
them in right away to head off a war? Sadly,
Ramsey said, “I think most of the people there
want a war.” That was 13 March 2003.
It’s very clear that high officials in the
Democratic Party, certainly on the DNC, have
been complicit with the Bush Administration in
this war against Iraq from the get go. The
Democratic national committee still vigorously
opposes putting in any bills of impeachment
against Bush and Cheney. Podesta made that very
clear to us on 13 March 2003. Also, former
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a very
courageous person, has reported that the DNC put
enormous pressure on her not to file bills of
impeachment despite the fact that I know she
wanted to do it. We were in contact with each
other. Likewise, Congressman Lewis from Georgia
made a statement that Bush should be impeached.
He was then invited on Fox News. Susan Estrich
was substituting and Estrich is a member of the
DNC, a very powerful member, she had headed the
Dukakis campaign in 1988, and she literally
savaged Congressman Lewis, showed him absolutely
no respect when he tried to argue the point of
impeachment. And by the end of the session she
had basically bullied him into saying that well,
maybe Bush shouldn’t be impeached.
So we have the problem that the DNC opposes
impeachment for partisan political reasons.
Also, they are heavily funded by pro Israel
sources who also want to see the United States
attack Iran and do Israel’s dirty work for it.
So it’s really for the constituents of some of
these members of Congress to directly confront
them and to demand first that they support the
Feingold Bill to cut off all further funding for
this war and second, put in immediate bills of
impeachment against Bush and Cheney to stop what
could be an homicidal aggression against Iran
that could set off a third world war.
I’m not exaggerating here. President Putin,
before Bush attacked Iraq, stated that attacking
Iraq could set off WWIII. Bush should have paid
attention to that. I think there was an implicit
threat there. Walter Cronkite said that if Bush
attacked Iraq he could set off WWIII. So far
that hasn’t happened fortunately but if he
attacks Iran too I think that could happen. And
it would not bother Bush and the Neocons at all.
Bush sees himself as a war lord like Churchill
and would like to set himself up in that
capacity. And the Neocons want to see chaos in
the Middle East. They want to redraw the borders
in the Middle East to suit the interests of
Israel.
Dori Smith: The war powers clause, could that
be another avenue for slowing or stopping the
march toward wider war?
Francis A. Boyle: Yes. That’s very clear as
well. Finally now there are some members of
Congress starting to talk about that. Evoking
the War Powers Resolution on Iraq and also
stating that the War Power’s Resolution Bush has
on Iraq does not apply to Iran. But it appears
that the Bush administration is implicitly at
least taking the position that the War Powers
Resolution they got on Iraq may support an
attack on Iran. And when (Secretary of State)
Condoleezza Rice was asked a direct question on
that issue inherent she refused to say that the
Iraq Resolution could not be used against Iran.
That has been why they are making these spurious
allegations that Iran is actively involved in
the war in Iraq. So this is very dangerous. They
very well might try to bootstrap an attack on
Iran to the Resolution they procured originally
against Iraq in 1992.
That resolution of course was procured by the
Bush people against Congress by fraud and lies
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and
that somehow Iraq was tied into Al Qaeda and the
attacks of 9/11. That really is a crime. It’s
perpetrating a fraud on the United States
Government which is a felony.
The latest so-called “surge” requires
additional authorization from Congress under the
War Powers Resolution itself. Indeed we have to
understand that Congress passed the War Powers
Resolution to prevent a repetition of the
Vietnam War as well as to close alleged loop
holes that previous presidents going back to
Truman had used to justify military force abroad
without the expressed consent of Congress.
One of the issues in Vietnam, of course, was
incremental escalation of U.S. troops. There was
Eisenhower and then Kennedy and then
Johnson–soon we had 550,000 U.S. troops there.
They put in language and a requirement into the
War Powers Resolution itself specifically to
deal with this, (paragraph 3) saying quote, ‘In
the absence of a declaration of war (and we
don’t have one against Iraq,) in any case in
which United States Armed Forces are introduced
in numbers which substantially enlarge United
States Armed Forces equipped for combat already
located in a foreign nation,’ the War Powers
Resolution is triggered.
At the time of Bush’s January 10th press
conference we had about 132,000 troops in there.
He announced an additional 21,500 and that
clearly was a substantial enlargement. He
clearly required authorization from Congress to
do this, prior authorization.
Finally now some members of Congress have
said this but Bush and Cheney have dismissed
this out of hand, saying well he’s the Commander
in Chief and as Bush said he’s the “Decider”.
Well the Commander in Chief clause was only put
in there at the Philadelphia Conference for the
drafting of the Constitution in order to
guarantee and secure civilian control over the
U.S. Military establishment.
That’s why it’s there. The War Powers were
securely logged in both houses of Congress. This
was debated at Philadelphia. In fact, one member
at Philadelphia wanted to give the President
alone the War Powers and that was just summarily
rejected as dangerous. There was another
proposal to give the War Powers to the President
together with the Senate. The problem there was
that at that time the Senate was not directly
elected by the people it was appointed by the
states.
Finally, the conclusion was that the safest
location for the War Powers would be both houses
of the United States Congress representing as
best as possible the American people. The theory
here was to clog the machinery of war, not make
it easier.
In my opinion we have numerous impeachable
offenses. Since that debate Ramsey Clark and I
had before Congressman Conyers and his legal
experts the Congressman just put out a report–he
is keeping track of impeachable offenses. You
know I send my analyses in there. You can find
the report on his web site. It came out in
August. The impeachable offenses up until then
are all in that report. This is not a drafting
problem at all. This is a political problem that
we face that the Democratic Party, the top
honchos, the top leaders, have been complicit
with Bush on this war from the outset and it is
that complicity I submit that people are going
to have to deal with.
Dori Smith: Can the American people play a
big role? Can members of the Military play a big
role?
Francis A. Boyle: We are all going to have to
do it together. The American people made it very
clear in the November 2006 elections that they
wanted an end to the Iraq War. Nothing could
have been clearer. And yet right after the
elections Bush says that he is going to go ahead
with this so-called, “surge” anyway and the
elections and the opinion of the American people
be damned. He really threw the gauntlet down for
all of us. And now it also appears to retrieve
the situation in Iraq they are preparing to
attack Iran. So it’s really back in the court of
the American people. Are we going to let this
happen or not? That was my reason I wrote my
piece on immediate impeachments. I think the
support is out there to stop these people and I
believe we are going to have to stop them and
impeachments of both Bush and Cheney are the way
to go as soon as possible.
Even putting aside Iran we owe it to U.S.
Armed Forces in Iraq. The latest report I saw
was that at a minimum 3065 members of U.S. Armed
Forces had been murdered in Iraq by Bush and
Cheney and the Neocons. And I use murder as a
technical term of art. I was originally hired
here to teach criminal law, taught it for a
number of years, and murder involves voluntary
killing with malice of forethought. And its’
very clear Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, all the
Neocons, lied their way into this war and
murdered those troops. These troops are our
mothers and our fathers, our brothers and our
sisters, and our sons and our daughters. And we
are going to have to stop this war and save them
from being further murdered by Bush and these
fanatical Neocons.
We also saw just yesterday in the New York
Times, the Pentagon had a report on its web site
indicating that in fact, 50,000 troops had been
injured in Iraq and not the lower figure they
were using of 20,000. They backtracked on that
up and down. The Pentagon always lies about U.S.
casualties in wartime. My guess is that the real
figures are a lot more than they are reporting.
Then, of course, there are the dead Iraqis.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the rest of them,
have murdered a minimum of 650,000 Iraqis,
that’s according to the Lancet report last
spring. You know if you extrapolate from that we
are now up to 700,000. And the longer this goes
on those figures are going to increase for both
Americans and Iraqis. My guess is given this
“surge” we are going to see a bloodbath in
Baghdad for both the civilian population of
Baghdad and U.S. Armed Forces, the 18,000 being
sent there.
We really have to stop this bloodbath. We
have to pull these troops out. We have to get
rid of Bush and Cheney. At a minimum we owe it
to our own Armed Forces who have been put in
harms way in our name to stop this war and to
stop certainly further development of conflict
and violence to Iran that could set up a
regional if not global war.
Dori Smith: Is there a way to use arguments
of potential illegalities in the operation
itself and the fact of the unconventional
weapons use to also bring further challenges to
this policy?
Francis A. Boyle: Yes. If you have a look at
the latest revision of the Pentagon’s
operational war plans you will see that pursuant
to the Bush national strategy doctrines of 2002,
calling for aggressive warfare, even if by means
of weapons of mass destruction–they have now
integrated tactical nuclear weapons into our war
plans. Today under Bush Jr. and the Neocons
tactical nuclear weapons are just another weapon
to be used in the inventory and are to be used
along with conventional weapons. I’m certain
that based on prior experience we have tactical
nuclear weapons on the one aircraft carrier task
force already there and a second one on its way.
Likewise we have given Israel so-called
nuclear bunker busters that they do have and
they do have the fighter bombers that we
provided to use them. I don’t know if they will
start with using nuclear weapons in an attack on
Iran. It might start with a massive bombing
campaign with conventional weapons as was done
against Yugoslavia by Clinton for 78 days, but
if that does not do the job, both the Neocons in
the United States and their cohorts in Israel
affiliated with the Likud Party, and many of
these Neocons are Zionists affiliated with the
Likud Party like Elliott Abrams at the Deputy
National Security Council, are fully prepared to
use nuclear weapons. They would have no problem
at all in using nuclear weapons.
Personally I think the Neocons as I suggested
have this Neo Nazi mentality. I believe that
they would like the opportunity to break the
taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and indicate to
the world—we here in the United States are fully
prepared to use nuclear weapons and we just used
them against Iran.
So I don’t believe there are really any
restraints on these people from using nuclear
weapons, whether in Israel or the United States,
and I believe that if they decide that it will
be ‘necessary’ to use them they are fully
prepared to use them. Indeed, the reports coming
out, Seymour Hersh, the high level planners in
the Pentagon were opposing plans to use nuclear
weapons but eventually as we have seen Bush Jr.
has made a clean sweep of everyone in the
Pentagon standing in his way. I think the last
sources of opposition to the use of nuclear
weapons in the Pentagon is now gone.
Dori Smith: Professor Francis A Boyle teaches
international law at the
University of Illinois. Professor Boyle
thank you so much for spending this time with
us.
Francis A. Boyle: Thank you again for having
me on and my best to your listening audience.
Dori Smith: Professor Francis A. Boyle is the
author of eight books including, Destroying
World Order out from Clarity Press, as well as,
Defending Civil Resistance Under International
Law, a text often used by those who have
engaged in some form of civil disobedience where
a point of law is sought. For Talk Nation Radio,
I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in
the studios of WHUS at the University of
Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. WHUS.org to
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