IMPEACH BUSH!

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-12-2004
IMPEACH BUSH!
37
Thu, 09-09-2004 - 11:13pm
HOw many out there think his actions merit impeachment? where is Kenneth Star when you need him, I thought He had some wild fantasy to impeach a president? Doen't it seem like a grand plan? I'd like to know who agrees!

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-03-2003
Thu, 09-09-2004 - 11:22pm
Oh goody, Ashley has a twin sister. How special. nt
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-27-2003
Thu, 09-09-2004 - 11:26pm
Make that triplets. I think many of his actions should be carefully scrutinized. I think the entire presidency from election night to war in Iraq need to be checked.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-03-2003
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 6:28am
Okay, so scrutinize. And when someone has something of firm substance, go for it. But we've seen these incessant calls for his impeachment for years now, without anyone providing anything truly objectively warranting impeachment.

Bush's "lies" concerning Iraq are a case in point... it's still not been established that Bush knowingly and deliberately lied, as opposed to acting in good faith on bad information. Merely not liking him or his policies doesn't really rise to the level necessary for impeachment.

~mark~

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-16-2004
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 7:49am
In fact, it has been shown that Bush did NOT lie, and one only need to look at the facts for five minutes to see that. If Bush did lie about Iraq, then so did the intelligence agencies in France, Germany, UK, Egypt, Spain, Russia, Israel, Poland, Latvia, Italy, the U.N., etc., etc., because THEY all said the same thing about Saddam's WMDs - that he had them, so there must have been one whopping big conspiracy orchestrated by W. Of course, the same people who say Bush lied also make claims that he is stupid, so I don't see how the conspiracy theory would add up anyway, but logic has never been a factor in liberal hatred of Bush.
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-13-2003
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 8:00am
Ahh, the vengefulness of the rabid leftists for electing the "wrong" man in 2000.

Since the campaign is going so badly for Kerry and no one can come up with anything positive to say about Kerry other than to spew venemous hatred for Bush, they turn to the tried and true buzzwords.

It's not going to happen, children. You've got nothing on Bush. Nada. Clinton deserved everything he got in impeachment. Thank God he wasn't removed from office, or Gore would likely be president now and America in ruins.

Gore LOST. It was a humiliating loss, especially the way he whined and stonewalled government transition. A Republican would never do that, and the Associated Press wouldn't have let one do it.

Kerry is Texas Toast.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-24-2004
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 9:53am
This sort of thread is only started because the Liberal's guy is sinking faster than a rock in the polls. Anyone else smell desperation here?
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 10:43am

More shame and disgrace from this article:


A Failed Investigation


Friday, September 10, 2004; Page A28



A DAY OF congressional hearings yesterday confirmed two glaring gaps in the Bush administration's response to hundreds of cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first is one of investigation: Major allegations of wrongdoing, including some touching on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials, have yet to be explored by any arms-length probe. The second concerns accountability. Although several official panels have documented failings by senior military officers and their superiors in Washington, those responsible face no sanction of any kind, even as low-ranking personnel are criminally prosecuted. To use the phrase of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), this "is beginning to look like a bad movie."


Mr. Rumsfeld has frequently boasted of the number of Pentagon investigations into the abuse scandal and has maintained that no others are necessary. Yet the senior officer in charge of one of those probes, Gen. Paul J. Kern, told the Senate Armed Services Committee of two major areas that remain unexplored. One is the Army's accommodation of dozens of "ghost prisoners" held by the CIA and deliberately hidden from the International Red Cross in violation of the Geneva Conventions and Army regulations. Mr. Rumsfeld has acknowledged that at least one of those prisoners was held by his personal order -- an order that two former secretaries of defense, James R. Schlesinger and Harold Brown, testified was "not consistent" with international law. Gen. Kern reported that the CIA had flatly refused to provide his team with information about the ghost prisoners or their handling -- prompting Mr. McCain's acerbic comment.


The only investigation of those cases underway -- other than the internal review the CIA claims to be conducting behind its stone wall -- is assigned to the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek. Yet Gen. Mikolashek has already delivered one report purporting to find no evidence of such detainees, and according to reporting by Elise Ackerman of the Knight Ridder news service, Gen. Mikolashek himself commanded ground forces in Afghanistan at a time when ghost detainees were being held.


Gen. Kern also acknowledged that the Pentagon has never answered the critical question of how harsh interrogation techniques promoted by Mr. Rumsfeld and other political appointees at the Pentagon and the Justice Department "found their way into documentation that we found at Abu Ghraib," the notorious prison outside Baghdad. As Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.) pointed out, those techniques were "way out of bounds"; "inappropriately" classified memos, he said, show that professional military lawyers opposed them from the beginning because "they violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they violated international law and they would get our people in trouble."


Nevertheless, as Gen. Kern put it, tactics that were "being debated back here in the United States found way into the hard drives of the computers that we found in the prison." No investigation has clarified that "migration," or why Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior officials allowed it to occur even after the methods they proposed were determined to be improper.


Nor has the malfeasance by senior officials so far documented been attached to any formal consequences. Investigators confirmed that senior officers in the headquarters of Iraq commander in chief Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, including two generals, knew of the illegal abuses at Abu Ghraib but failed to report them to more senior commanders. Gen. Sanchez himself twice signed off on interrogation policies that, the investigators found, contained illegal methods and opened the way to abuses. Yet none of these senior officers face the courts-martial of more junior personnel, or any other sanction. Rather, the Bush administration's investigators are striving to protect them: Gen. Kern insisted that Gen. Sanchez was "a hero."


To his credit, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, refused to accept this dodge. Instead, he asked that Gen. Kern and his associates reexamine the cases of Gen. Sanchez and other senior officers, and he pledged to investigate the ghost prisoner affair. Yet it seems unlikely that a single congressional committee, buffeted by the pressures of an election year, will succeed in filling the holes it has uncovered.


The best solution is that recommended this week by eight retired generals and admirals, including a former U.S. commander in the Middle East: an independent commission like the one that which studied the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The former officers said the panel was needed "to investigate and report on the truth about all of these allegations, and to chart a course for how practices that violate the law should be addressed." As yesterday's hearings showed, the Bush administration has failed at both those tasks.

Donna
Donna
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 11:13am

Djie

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-13-2003
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 11:17am
MORE Shame and disgrace for the leftists and CBS:


President Bush and the National Guard: the politics of the documents:

Whether these documents are valid or not, the debate over them has certainly pushed questions about Bush's National Guard service to the background. (And other things — did the politico-media world really process how the House rebuked the White House on overtime rules yesterday? Or actually read the Kaiser report?)

Just ask any reporter you know who works in politics were they focused on the curlicues of apostrophes yesterday? Or on whether Bush knew that he was (allegedly) being coddled by superiors?

Democrats, who deny up and down that they had anything to do with the documents, tell ABC News that they plan to continue their push to question the president's Guard service, irrespective of the CBS situation.

Top Democrats vow to continue to lead the charge against Bush along these four lines

1. Bush allegedly got special treatment

2. Bush allegedly was suspended for missing his medical exam

3. Bush allegedly didn't fulfill his requirements

4. Bush allegedly didn't release all the documents he said he'd release

But they acknowledge that it might be more difficult to break through the clutter of questions surrounding the documents' authenticity.

In less guarded moments, some Democrats express a sense of utter loss at the seeming turn of events in this story.

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos said on "Good Morning America" that "a lot of Democrats think this might have been a set-up" by Republicans — a sentiment we are likely to hear more of in the days to come.

Meanwhile, Republicans can rightly ask about the confluence of all the DNC, outside group, and media focus on revisiting the Guard story.

And Democrats can rightly say that Fox News Channel seems to like the "forgery" story more than the original CBS version.

And, meanwhile, Bush Republicans manifestly want to stay out of the way of this one and let the media work its magic. The sense one gets is that the White House — having disseminated the documents — feels the prospect of forgeries is too good to be true — or is it?

They will watch their friends at CBS twist in the wind, and keep repeating that the president was honorably discharged and all these attacks (get ready to lump the Kitty Kelley book in there!!!) are political and desperate from the side that is behind in the polls.

IF — IF these end up being forgeries, one of the interesting subplots will be the timing and method by which they were exposed.

We always favor looking at the content and substance over WHO is offering up the information, but in the war that will ensue about WHO gave CBS the potentially phony documents, it is interesting to Note that the right (Drudge, Fox, right-leaning blogs, others) led the way in pointing out the questions we have all been asking — and they were onto the questions, with remarkable detail, relatively soon after the documents were made public.

Here's part of how this story got here . . . from a little Marc Ambinder back-lurking on the blogs . . .

At 8:00 pm ET Wednesday night, CBS News does the story . . .

at 8:59 ET — before the broadcast is finished!!! — the documents come into question via a poster named Buckhead on the Free Republic Web site: LINK

Buckhead seems well-read on his forensic document examination skills.

"Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts. I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old."

Well, this is bandied about by dozens of Freepers, as they're called and is picked up at 8:30 am ET and added to by www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/ — this little green football guy is a very popular conservative blogger . . .

It's expanded upon by www.powerlineblog.com/ in the early morning:

and also by www.spacetownusa.com/hmmm

and here, at 10:36 am ET: www.allahpundit.com/.

Around midday, the popular author Roger L. Simon praises the blogosphere for getting this story . . . LINK

Between this time and mid-day, reporters in the MSM — that's the Main Stream Media to these folks (that's us) — are alerted by some sources to the blogosphere's agita . . . others have read the blogs themselves.

At 2:41 pm ET, one blogger even consulted his own forensic expert and told anyone using the blog that, well, they must credit him: indcjournal.com/.

To Drudge, around 3:00 pm ET . . .

and the Weekly Standard . . . around 5:00 pm ET . . .

to Fox after 6:00 pm ET and then the AP and then ABC . . .

John Podhoretz credits the blogosphere, as he should: LINK

In other stories:

The Washington Post 's VandeHei and Edsall report on the "multi-front attack on President Bush's National Guard service" by Democrats yesterday. Notably there is only one line about the controversy over the authenticity of the documents unearthed by CBS News, with the paper dealing with that separately in another story Noted below. LINK

The Boston Globe does not get into the debate about the documents, focusing instead on the full-throated DNC push on Bush's service. LINK

A New York Times editorial on the new documents and Bush's Guard service does include a reference to the documents' authenticity being challenged. LINK

The White House lobs claims that the Kerry team is behind attacks on Bush's military service record. The Washington Times ' Bill Sammon reports White House press secretary Scott McClellan describes it as desperate measures for desperate times. "You absolutely are seeing a coordinated attack by John Kerry and his surrogates on the president." LINK

The New York Daily News writes that the revival of debates over Kerry and Bush's military records is turning New York voters off. LINK

Corky Siemaszko of the New York Daily News reports President Bush' former Harvard Business School proof, Yoshi Tsurumi, has come out of the woodwork to say his former student supported the Vietnam War but did not want to fight it. Tsurumi says Bush claimed his father's connections got him into the Texas Air National Guard. "But what really disturbed me is that he said he was for the Vietnam War," said Tsurumi.. "I said, 'George, that's hypocrisy. You won't fight a war that you support but you expect other people to fight it for you.' He just smirked." LINK

Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times writes "For years, the Democratic attacks have centered on two charges, including one that Mr. Bush failed to meet drilling requirements from mid-1972 to early 1973. A less-persistent accusation was that he used his father's status as a prominent Texas politician to win entry into the Guard after he graduated from Yale and faced the military draft in 1968. That charge has never been proved. And the White House thought it had snuffed out the question on non-drill compliance last winter, when it released records showing he was paid for the drills during the period in question and that he received sufficient points to achieve an honorable discharge in October 1973 as he entered Harvard Business School." LINK

CBS News in Crisis(?):

CBS's "Early Show" did a tell this morning on the document story.

An anchor read: "The authenticity of those documents is now being questions. Family members doubt that Killian would have written an unsigned memo . . . "

And "there are questions about the typography, which some experts say appear to have been done on a computer."

"CBS News says it stands by the story."

And then they quoted from the second CBS statement (not the third) that said that CBS was "convinced" the documents were authentic.

That conviction was dropped from a third CBS statement, which they asked ABC News to use instead of the second.

Compare two sequential statements released by CBS News last night:

New: "As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the 60 MINUTES report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts. As importantly, 60 MINUTES also interviewed close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian. They confirm that the documents reflect his opinions and actions at the time."

Old: "As is standard practice at CBS News, each of the documents broadcast on 60 MINUTES was thoroughly investigated by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity. In addition to analysis of the documents themselves, CBS verified the authenticity of the documents by talking to individuals who had seen the documents at the time they were written. These individuals were close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian and confirm that the documents reflect his opinions at the time the documents were written."

The Washington Post 's Dobbs and Allen report that "A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that 'these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time.'" LINK

"'These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people,' the CBS News official said. 'Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles.'"

"The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as 'the trump card' on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas."

And let us not be the last to point out that if a(nother) major corporation was withholding information related to serious allegations made against the president of the United States, "60 Minutes" would be all over them, demanding to know about their documentation and expert back up.

What's going on in the halls of 57th Street and M Street today? (Note our use of superscript!!!)

We'll know more by 6:30 pm ET we bet.

Journalists play Gil Grissom: the documents:

It's important to point out from the outset that not a single piece of hard evidence has been uncovered that categorically proves these documents were forgeries.

Still, ABC News consulted yesterday with more than a half dozen top forensic document experts, including William Flynn and Peter Tytell, considered two of the best in the world.

Tytell and Flynn agreed on several points, namely that the proportional spaced Times Roman font does not appear to have been the result of available technology in 1972 and 1973. They questioned the superscripts, the spacing between lines (13 points separated each line, which, again, was not a technology that was available in typewriters back then.). Then there's the apostrophe, which is curled to the left in one of the documents — not something typewriters did with their apostrophes.

Richard Polt, a philosophy professor in Ohio and an amateur typewriter enthusiast, said he was 99 percent certain that no typewriter he knew of could have made the typed impressions that cleanly.

And two members of Killian's family (who certainly could have agendas of their own) told ABC News that they had suspicions.

Marjorie Connell, Killian's wife at the time, said she "just can't believe these are his words." Mrs. Connell said her late husband would be "turning over in his grave to know that a document such as this would be used against a fellow guardsman." She used the words "appalling," "sick" and "angry" to describe her feelings about Killian's name was "being battled back and forth on television."

She made it clear that Lt Col Killian was a fan of Bush: "I know for a fact that this young man as a lt was an excellent aviator, an excellent person to be in the guard and was very happy to have him become a member of the 111th."

She also mentioned her late husband was no typist. "He would not have typed because he did not type." When Killian did take notes his wife said he usually wrote on whatever scrap of paper was handy but "he was a person who did not take copious notes he carried everything in his mind." For more, see: LINK

Deb Orin and Ian Bishop of the New York Post key off of the radio interview with Mrs. Connell and a document expert to point to potential forgery. LINK

The New York Daily News reports forensic scientist Sandra Ramsey Lines says the superscript in the Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's notes are evidence of forgery. LINK

CBS News sent reporters a previously validated document last night that does appear to contain a superscripted "th," which confounds some experts we spoke with, including Katherine Koppenhaver, who said she is 75 percent certain even still that the new documents are forgeries.

The New York Times ' Seeyle and Rutenberg were careful to ask the political affiliation of their experts, which we think is a good idea. LINK

"Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio who created a commonly used database of at least 3,000 old type fonts, said he had suspicions as well. 'I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens,' said Dr. Bouffard, a Democrat. He also said the fonts were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," the commonly used Microsoft Word font. However, Dr. Bouffard said, a colleague had called his attention to similarities between the font in the memos and that of the IBM Selectric Composer of the early 1970's. But he said it would be unusual for Mr. Bush's commanding officer to have had the IBM machine because of its large size."

The Los Angeles Times talked to Killian's daughter: "Nancy Killian Rodriguez said only that her father, who died in 1984, had 'admired George Bush and was proud of the fact that he pinned his wings on him.'" LINK


From here:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/TheNote/TheNote.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2004
Fri, 09-10-2004 - 11:29am
REASON #865 TO IMPEACH AND IMPRISON BUSH:

Amnesty International has presented consistent allegations of brutality and cruelty by US agents against detainees in Iraq and other US detention facilities across the world at the highest levels of the US Government, including the White House, the Department of Defense, and the State Department for the past two years.

In July 2003 Amnesty International issued the report Iraq: Memorandum on concerns relating to law and order, which formed the basis for talks with officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. Among the concerns raised with the officials were allegations of torture of detainees.

On 14 November 2003 Amnesty International wrote to Secretary of Defense Ronald Rumsfeld following press reports that eight Marine Corp reservists had been charged in connection with allegations of ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees. In the letter Amnesty International also sought information about any other investigations relating to excessive use of force, torture or ill-treatment of Iraqi civilians, including detainees, by military officials. No response has been received.

In an open letter to US President George W Bush, on 7 May 2004, Amnesty International said that abuses allegedly committed by US agents in the Abu Ghraib facility in Baghdad were war crimes and called on the administration to fully investigate them to ensure that there is no impunity for anyone found responsible regardless of position or rank.

The United Nations Committee against Torture, the expert body established by the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has expressly held that restraining detainees in very painful positions, hooding, threats, and prolonged sleep deprivation are methods of interrogation which violate the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

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