Bob Fertik:Bruce Fein's DEVASTATING Indictment of Dick Cheney

[cal04]

I don't often call something must-read, but Bruce Fein's indictment of Dick Cheney in Slate is utterly devastating - and everyone in America should read it.

Fein, of course, is no liberal - he was Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration and had posts at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Moonie Times.

Impeach Cheney
The vice president has run utterly amuck and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein

Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry...

Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:

The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.

The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.

Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.

Plus lots more removed at the suggestions below...

Of course we know all of these things happened, but the Bush Administration and its media whores have spent 6 years denying each of them, insisting they were legal, changing laws and regulations to make them legal - or all three.

Fein breaks new ground by laying all of these crimes at the feet of Dick Cheney, drawing on this week's reporting in the Washington Post.

This list of charges is so overwhelming that House Democrats can no longer ignore them.

Call your Representative and demand they sign on as a co-sponsor of H. Res. 333, Dennis Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment for Dick Cheney.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/27/212013/322

[Faryn Balyncd]

1. It's time for Congress to honor their constitutional duties.

[lovuian]

2. This reflects on the Congress & supreme court

that they allowed this man to run amok shows that Cheney has had help

[John Q. Citizen]

3. Kucinich is ahead of the curve. Once again. The man's a visionary.

[Me.]

4. Nancy Pelosi Needs To Read This

In the face of overwhelming evidence, how dare she leave it off the table?

[Faryn Balyncd]

5. Dear Nancy: "Here's some advice from a constitutional lawyer from Reagan's Dept of Justice....."

and here's what Mr. Fein, along with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief-of-staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell), had to say at Saturday's "Should Impeachment Be on the Table?" Town Hall Forum at George Mason University:

http://www.peaceandaccountability.com/greg/June23GMU.html

[Me.]

6. I'd Like To Know The Answer To This Too

"What has happened to the United States that might justify the Speaker's view? Whose position is more essential to the protection and preservation of our Republic today and in the future?"

[KAT119]

7. Pelosi and many in Congress are tied to Israel/Zionists

who have a strange hold on our gov't and Pentagon.Check out AIPAC....

[acmavm]

8. Whoa, you posted that and you haven't caught a bunch of shit

yet?

My hat's off to you. It's the truth but by now you should have been called a truckload of MFers (if it goes like it does with me).

[Gabi Hayes]

10. amen...have you read walt and mearshimer?

have you seen what's happened to their careers since?

[cassiepriam]

9. It is Bush's fault. He is supposed to be the boss.

Impeach them both.