Submitted Directly to ImpeachforPeace.org

By Sherwood Ross



If you, my fellow Americans, will not demand the impeachment of the worst president in American history, a man who is a traitor to our Constitution, a global tyrant, a destroyer of world peace and order, and a threat to the survival of human life on this planet, who will you impeach?



This George W. Bush, this native-born nincompoop, this dangerous dunce, this wastrel, this smirking twister of truth, this forked-tongued liar in a business suit, this heinous torturer, this killer of innocents, this Thief-of-Baghdad, this mass murderer, this fountainhead of human vomit, in short, this blot on the very name of America, must be compelled by Congress and the American People to answer for his alleged and apparent crimes.



He, and every culpable member of his Gang must be impeached and made to stand trial before the Senate for the Genocide of Iraq and countless other criminal acts. One of the least of his crimes, ordering wiretaps without court order in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, entitles him to a five-year vacation at Leavenworth for trampling the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. And his most heinous crime, the war of aggression against Iraq, violates the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 that subjects perpetrators to imprisonment and the death penalty if a victim dies. Surely, Americans who are too timid to sign a petition for impeachment might well consider there are 1,100,000 Iraqis who, had they lived, could have signed such a petition with their own blood.

As far back at October, 2005, an Ipsos Public Affairs poll found 50% of the public agreed with the statement, “If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reaons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him.” Now, as new evidence comes to light each day documenting how Bush and his aides lied this nation into a criminal war of aggression, yes, just as Hitler did when he invaded Poland, just as Stalin did when he invaded Finland, just as Mussolini did when he invaded Ethiopia, just as Hirohito did when he invaded China, the numbers of Americans who want George W. Bush impeached is swelling. Passively favoring impeachment, though, is not the same as actively demanding it.

At the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin insisted on the impeachment provision in the name of fairness, to give the president an opportunity to defend against charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Otherwise, Franklin said, the only way to remove an errant president would be to assassinate him. Americans today have more urgent reason to remove King George Bush II from office than the Colonists had for overthrowing King George III and founding this nation. King George III’s crimes against the Colonists were as nothing compared to the damage this self-made King George Bush II has visited upon America and Americans, and upon world order.

Even though he is not a king, George Bush conducts himself as one, for he has arrogated to himself sweeping kingly powers, powers seized in secret, powers stolen in the dead of night without debate, powers aggrandized with the cowardly compliance of a lied-to Congress, powers to arrest any citizen, fling the individual in jail, and then throwing away the key; powers to listen in on any private conversation; powers to order Pentagon spying on antiwar protesters and the clergy; powers to enter any home and search and seize without a warrant; powers to read without a court order any citizen’s mail and Internet communications; powers to invade our library records and medical records and financial papers; powers to nullify the Acts of Congress; powers to reach around the globe and kidnap any foreigner off any street in any country and to remove him without trial to a dungeon for torture; powers to invade other countries on lies and pretexts and to dragnet arrest their citizens, powers to tear their citizens away from their native lands and their families and to remove them to distant, secret prisons without recourse to the most primary principles of law, without lawyers, without trials, without habeas corpus, without Red Cross visits, and to detain them forever and there to torture them until bodily disintegration, madness, suicide, or death; and powers to trample the Geneva Convention against the use of poison weapons by firing ammunition containing radioactive uranium widely across Afghanistan and Iraq, whose deadly discharge is at this moment creating new Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in those countries while poisoning our own troops as well.

Bush’s invasion of Iraq was no war of self-defense, as claimed, but a crime against peace contrary to the Charter of the United Nations. The result of this war, which former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called “illegal,” has been the destruction of an innocent society; driving four millions from their homes and creating what the UN has termed Â“a humanitarian crisis.Â”

The president must also be put on trial for the mass roundup and arrest of more than 5,000 foreigners living in the United States; for the military incarceration of U.S. citizens; for violating the First Amendment rights of Americans; for violating the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions; for reinstitution of the notrious “Cointelpro” program; for violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; for violating Article II of the UN Charter by crimes against peace; for violating what the UN Committe on Torture declared was the “ill-treatment” of detainees in violation of the international Convention Against Torture; for violating the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare; for violating the Nuremberg Charter banning the wanton devastation of a city or area; for violating the Genocide Convention by his massacre of Iraqis; for violation as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army Field Manual Regulation 27-10 against conspiracy to commit war crimes; for usurping the power to imprison people arbitrarily for indefinite periods by making himself judge and jury; for signing into law the misnamed Patriot Act’s provision allowing the government to pry into any individual’s private records, including health care and finances; for lowering a shroud of secrecy over the operations of the U.S. government; for willful noncompliance with the Freedom of Information Act; for failure to faithfully execute the laws of the land including Article VI of the Constitution that holds U.S. treaties “shall be the supreme law of the land”; for withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and resuming work on nuclear devices; for launching an aggressive campaign to militarize space in order to dominate the earth; for violating the Bacteriological Warfare Covenant by engaging in germ warfare research including the restoration of long dead pathogens that imperil the planet, and for the creation of delivery systems for such pathogens.

My fellow Americans, we cannot wait until the next election. Our fathers and mothers, our wives and husbands, and our sons and daughters are dying in vain in Iraq by the thousands; and the death toll of the innocent people of Iraq, whose only crime was the possession of oil, is now more than one million. It is for all these reasons, and likely for treacheries and treasons yet undiscovered, that the American people must stand up to their sacred obligation to impeach George W. Bush now or go on living as a nation of patsies, stooges, and victims that allow their blood, treasure, and precious freedoms to be squandered by this heartless tyrant.

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(Sherwood Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, in the civil rights movement and as a reporter and columnist for wire services. Reach him at [email protected])