Ms. Van Bergen is teaching in Prague this fall semester 2008. She is a lecturer in law at the Anglo-American University in Prague, www.aauni.edu, and also teaches English at Charles University in Prague.
Jennifer Van Bergen is a journalist with a law degree. Her book The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America has been called a “primer for citizenship.” She can be reached at.
With the Democrats in the majority in Congress for the first time in 12 years, and after six years of executive overreach and civil liberties incursions by the Republican administration and Congress, one would think impeachment would be in the air. But many progressives and Democrats—even some who have been on the front lines demanding investigations and prosecutions—view impeachment as the wrong approach and a waste of effort. They say that impeachment can’t take place without Republican backing, which will never happen. They say that impeachment will take time and energy away from more important business, such as getting out of Iraq, lowering taxes, congressional ethics and pulling our budget back into line.
These arguments present a false dilemma, however. The choice is not between impeachment and Iraq, or impeachment and ethics, or impeachment and the budget. Impeachment proceedings are not the beginning but the end result of a healing process for the nation that needs to begin now. Impeachment begins with investigations.
The ever-growing list of egregious wrongs by this administration has been hypocritically ignored by the Republican Congress. When you remember what the Republicans did to Clinton over a peccadillo and compare that to the high crimes committed by Bush and his administration, there should not even be an argument over whether to move toward serious investigations with impeachment in mind. We are not talking bipartisanship; we are talking about law and morals.
Impeachment groups have formed across the country; at least one major city council, San Francisco’s, passed an impeachment resolution; the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, has issued a 200-plus page report; and there has even a citizens’ impeachment trial, complete with indictment, hearing and verdict.
The grounds for impeachment are far greater now than they were when Congress threatened to impeach President Nixon and there is a tremendous groundswell for impeachment which the newly-elected Congress would do well to heed.
Congress must start the national healing process by selecting an independent prosecutor. We don’t need another commission to merely make a report that finds some comfortable middle and allows the administration to play the national security card to further hide its wrongdoing. A prosecutor will be able to gather evidence from all corners, interview those with real information and see the entire picture. He or she can decide, on the basis of the law, where culpability lies and what charges to bring.
A sitting president or vice president cannot be tried in a court of law This is why impeachment is necessary at the end of investigation, if criminal acts are found. If an independent prosecutor finds that our leaders have committed crimes, this information must be brought before the House, and that body must vote to bring impeachment charges against them. The prosecutor could wait until the officials leave office, but there are strong reasons not to do so. First, if our leaders are criminals, they should not be permitted to retain office for even one more day; impeachment will stop the crimes from continuing. If we allow criminal officials to remain in office, we are as guilty as they for their crimes. It is already clear that this administration has severely damaged America’s reputation abroad and undermined our ability to hold other nations accountable to high moral ideals. Impeachment will ameliorate some of these effects.
Finally, there is a great sense of powerlessness and rage that the populace expressed strongly through the midterm elections. But more than elections are needed to address the deep concerns so many people have. A nagging malaise, a gray depression has afflicted the country, and ordinary people—those who are not politicians or journalists or activists or lawyers—have no outlet for these feelings and no sense of remedy.
Democracy is about the power of voice. All people have the right to speak and be heard. But the past six years have silenced millions, and merely putting the Democrats (whose track record is not sufficiently better than the Republicans to warrant celebration) back into office will not end the silence or cure the depression or the sense of powerlessness. Americans know that crimes have been committed in their name. Many now perhaps wish that the wrongs would simply fade and all would be as it was before. But we all know that crimes demand punishment. Punishment is the only way to even partially repair the damage.
Immediate investigation with an eye to impeachment may also forestall war with Iran and prevent worse action in Iraq. Cabinet members facing a criminal investigation and impeachment will think twice before they commit more criminal acts.
The right wing is already regrouping and restarting nasty attacks against Democrats who threaten their belligerent drives. We have the initiative now. We will lose it if Republicans take the stage and are allowed to divert attention away from the real issues.
This nation has been deeply injured, but not by the continued threat of terrorism. Instead, we have been afflicted by the criminal acts and executive overreaches of this administration. Cancer cannot be healed by being avoided; if we do not root out the causes, this cancer will spread from within. If we do not find a way to begin healing now and learn to engage again in healthy national discourse, the Democrats cannot save us. Nobody can.
Jennifer Van Bergen : "The choice is not between impeachment and Iraq, or impeachment and ethics, or impeachment and the budget. Impeachment proceedings are not the beginning but the end result of a healing process for the nation that needs to begin now. Impeachment begins with investigations."
David Corn : "The matter of impeachment, like most issues in the real world, cannot be considered in a vacuum. The key question is not whether there is a case, but whether it should be prosecuted. The Democrats would do so at their peril—and at risk to their agenda, which includes stopping the war in Iraq."
Jennifer Van Bergen is a journalist with a law degree. Her book, The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America has been called a “primer for citizenship.” She can be reached at
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A few months from now, after midterm elections, if Democrats regain a majority in Congressor if Democrats regain the Executive office in three yearsalmost the entire Bush administration could be standing trial.
That’s if Michigan Congressman John Conyers has his way. Conyers issued a scathing, nearly 400-page report detailing crimes that Conyers’ staff found were committed by members of the Bush administration.
Recently I wrote on TomPaine.com about White House liability for war crimes. The Conyers report is both a larger inquirylooking into crimes committed other than only war crimesand a smaller one, because it considers largely crimes related to the invasion of Iraq.
The report notes:
If the present administration is willing to misstate the facts in order to achieve its political objectives in Iraq, and Congress is unwilling to confront or challenge their hegemony, many of our cherished democratic principles are in jeopardy. This is true not only with respect to the Iraq War, but also in regard to other areas of foreign policy, privacy and civil liberties, and matters of economic and social justice.
Included in the report are such acts as Bush’s determination to go to war before obtaining congressional authorization; misstating and manipulating the intelligence to justify that war; encouraging and countenancing torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees; and cover-ups and retribution.
The report has not gotten much media attention, which is shocking given the serious and far-reaching allegations contained in it. The violations of 26 different federal laws and regulations range from committing fraud against the U.S., making false statements to Congress, misuse of government funds, obstructing Congress, retaliating against witnesses, and violations of the War Powers Resolution, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and war crimes and torture statutes and treaties. Conyers further details violations of laws relating to leaking and misuse of classified and other government information.
All in all, the picture painted is of an executive gone awry. It is an administration that has no qualms about lying either to its own Congress or to the public that voted it into office. Actively conspiring to interfere with and obstruct proper government functioning, decision-making, or oversight is not beneath this crew. What about going to war preemptively without authorization by Congress or the War Powers Resolution? No problem for this crowd: if there is no intelligence and no justification to support the decision to send our servicemen and women into battle, make it up. If someone stands up and tells the truthreveals the liesget back at him by leaking to the press that his wife is an undercover CIA agent. That puts her and her colleagues in danger and harms national security? So what? Nothing is going to stop these guys from carrying out their mission of aggression. It has nothing to do with preserving American values, democracy, or peace.
There is hardly a subject area relating to Iraq where the administration did not engage in some dirty tricks. The administration, according to the report, knowingly or recklessly made false statements about links between Saddam and al-Qaida and 9/11, Saddam’s alleged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons or his acquisition of uranium from Niger or possession of chemical or biological weapons, the Niger forgeries, and the “sliming” of Ambassador Joseph Wilson and outing of his CIA wife, Valerie Plame. Nor did they tell the public the truth about what was being done to detainees: unlawful deportations, “ghosting” detainees, authorizing torture and more.
The extent of the criminal enterprise is breathtakingly upsetting. Why? Because we all know every piece of it but not until the list is all put together and the laws are set forth in front of us do we see what we already knew. This is a criminal administration.
There are few stones unturned in the Conyers Report, but two important laws which Conyers does not cite are the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the general conspiracy law.
(The report actually does cite another part of the conspiracy statute, conspiracy to defraud the government, but it doesn’t cite the general conspiracy clause. Conyers does not try to pull together the substantive offensesthe actual criminal acts. However, he doesn’t need to: Any prosecutor worth his salt would jump at RICO and conspiracy charges with these sets of facts.)
Either RICO or conspiracy are appropriate where there is evidence of an agreement by more than one person (conspiracy) to commit a crime, or where there is evidence of a “ pattern of racketeering activity”which can be any act from a long list of criminal enterprise behaviors, including obstruction of justice, obstruction of criminal investigations, traveling interstate to promote a criminal enterprise, transactions involving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, international terrorism, and many others.
Either RICO or general conspiracy are used when many separate, otherwise unconnected acts may be viewed as part of a larger plan by more than one person. Indeed, when one considers the acts engaged in by the Bush administration which the report claims violate the law, it is hard to avoid the impression that they constitute a criminal plan or enterprise.
While Byron York commented in the conservative National Review that the Conyers Report is the “Democrats’ Impeachment Map,” the Democrats have taken no action and do not seem inclined to do so. But the report is both less and more than an impeachment map. Impeachment does not put criminals in jail. Conyers’ report could.
