A New Campaign: Indict Bush Now!

Hold Bush and His Joint Co-Conspirators Criminally Accountable!

You can join the movement to indict Bush Administration officials who committed war crimes, "legalized" torture, and engaged in massive illegal spying and wiretapping against the American people. Click this link if you support the indictment of George W. Bush and other high officials.

The rule of law, justice, and basic integrity require the indictment for criminal wrongdoing of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and other high officials of the former Bush Administration.  

The media establishment is surprised by the ground swell of support from the grassroots for the pursuit of individuals who committed grievous crimes during the Bush era.
We are not surprised that the people are demanding accountability for those who committed wars of aggression, torture, and subverted the Constitution and thus violated not only their oaths of office but domestic and international law.

These crimes are not abstract nor can they be ignored as belonging to a distant past. Millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer because of the criminal invasion of Iraq.

The vital resources of the country have been drained in a criminal enterprise benefiting war profiteers. The people know of and are outraged by the billions of dollars in profit made by Dick Cheney's Halliburton and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

The pressure is building. President Obama said at his press conference this week, "My view is also that nobody's above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen," when asked about the pursuit of  Bush Administration officials for criminal wrongdoing.

In a new poll, an astounding 2/3 of the American public favors investigating whether the Bush Administration broke the law. "A majority of respondents said a probe should be launched into allegations that the Bush team used torture...[and] investigators also should look into the former President's program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without first securing court-issued warrants." (AFP 2/12/09)

The Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, and the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, are both proposing to launch investigations into the possibilities of criminal conduct by high officials in the Bush Administration.

Six years ago, Ramsey Clark launched the movement to Impeach Bush. You and more than a million other people came forward to demand the impeachment of Bush and other high ranking officials at VoteToImpeach and ImpeachBush. It was this movement with its principled and primary demand for accountability that changed the political climate in the United States. It broke open the media blockade with newspapers ads calling for impeachment. Community organizing, person to person outreach, and demonstrations shifted the debate and helped turn the tide against the impunity of Bush's crimes. He has been forced to leave office in disgrace.

A Criminal Indictment is Necessary

Now we are taking the next step in the pursuit of protecting and saving the Constitution. Justice will have no meaning without the prosecution of Bush, Cheney and others for their criminal acts. It would also have a resounding effect on all those who would dare to subvert the Constitution of the U.S., take the country into a war of aggression and trash the economy and the fundamental human rights of people in the U.S. and around the globe.

Sign the new petition demanding that Bush and Co. be indicted now. Get everyone you know to sign. We had to fight an uphill battle to bring articles of impeachment to the floor of Congress - but we did it! If you signed for impeachment and you believe indictment is a necessity - please take one moment to sign now! We need everyone's voices, coming together to be heard. Now is the time to act.

We have launched a major new initiative that will include grassroots pressure on Congress, press conferences, petitions, newspaper ads, rallies and mass demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere

We can force the prosecution of Bush, Cheney and the other criminals.  Please take action to make it happen.

IndictBushNow.org:

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Colin Powell’s former chief of staff: Cheney is "EVIL"

Wow, people are finally admitting the truth. That's all well and good but I would feel alot better if Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were brought up on war crimes and all other crimes they've committed!

By Ali Frick - Weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, Dick Cheney gave an interview to Politico slamming Obama’s detainee policies and warning that he was making America less safe (charges he repeated again last Sunday). Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff who left the Bush administration in protest, wrote an essay on the Washington Note last evening slamming Cheney’s fearmongering. Wilkerson calls Cheney “evil” and says his detainee policies were only “assisting” terrorists:
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Prosecute-Prosecute the Bush Administration!

An anthem for anyone who believes Presidents and Public officials are not above the law and therefore must be held accountable under national and international law!



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92 Torture Tapes Illegallly Destroyed by Bush Team

New Bush Crimes Revealed: 92 Torture Tapes Destroyed
As Tens of Thousands Write Congress, NY Times asks "A Truth Commission for the Bush Era?"

Last week, we put out a call for IndictBush members to tell their Congressperson to pursue the indictment of Bush for its illegal torture campaigns. Over 30,000 letters were sent within 24 hours.
Just yesterday, we received stunning confirmation of the timeliness of our efforts. It was revealed that under Bush the CIA destroyed 92 tapes of illegal interrogation tactics -- in other words, tapes showing the Bush administration's record of torture. The CIA destroyed the tapes in response to, and in direct violation of, a Congressional investigation.
Destroying tapes is not small potatoes. For many months, former President Richard Nixon refused to turn over tapes that Congress believed showed criminal wrongdoing. When the Supreme Court finally forced Nixon to reveal the tapes, they included the "smoking gun" tape that showed Nixon's role in illegal break-ins, espionage and wiretapping. The Bush administration simply destroyed its evidence, knowing it could meet a similar fate. We can't let him get away with this.

A special Senate investigative committee is what led to Nixon's undoing, and there's already evidence that a similar truth commission could be in the works for Bush. The New York Times yesterday featured a widely-read forum entitled, "A Truth Commission for the Bush Era?" The article goes on to report the poll that 62 percent of Americans favor criminal investigation of Bush. The mass media's growing coverage of this story is proof of the nationwide clamor for accountability and justice.

Now we have to keep the pressure on. We've made great progress in just a few weeks since we launched the IndictBushNow campaign. You can help take us to the next level. 

Send a letter to Congress demanding accountability for Bush's illegal torture campaigns and subsequent cover-up.

Technorati Tags: activism,actions,congress,Bush Administration,Bush,war crimes,petitions

Why a War Crimes Commission Could Enable Prosecutions

Senate Democrats insist that the investigations they seek are not intended to spawn prosecutions. But they may not be able to control that.
By Glenn Greenwald
UPDATE II: Both Sen. Whitehouse and Sen. Leahy spoke today on the Senate floor to argue for the creation of an investigative Commission. The text of their speeches is here, and a video of Whitehouse's speech is here.
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Today's Cartoon: Any Minute Now

American Progress sent this cartoon by Mike Peters…I thought this is a great cartoon reminding us who got us into this mess in the first place…

Peace,

soul

Any Minute Now 

Supply side tax cuts failed to deliver jobs and growth between 2001 and 2007, writes Joshua Picker.

More: Before the Bush Recession

From the Cartoonist Group

View more cartoons in the cartoon archive.

Subscribe to additional American Progress newsletters.

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Have A Prosecution Commission, And We'll Get The Truth Too

One of the most sappy ideas we've heard in a long time was the suggestion of a certain Democratic Senate leader last week that the worst criminals at the top of the Bush administration should be effectively granted blanket immunity in exchange for "fessing up". We can only hope Leahy's actual strategic intent was to have the proposal get shot down, as it quickly was by others, for being pretty much totally toothless. We need to make sure that message was not missed. Indeed, we need to put an exclamation point on it!
The fact is that without prosecution, the top war criminals in American political office of the future will presume that they can always get off the hook by the so-called "truth" commission route. And yet the people who are in the media calling for non-enforcement of the laws against torture and illegal wiretapping are the SAME ones who are "zero tolerance" fanatics when little people get in trouble.

If you are motivated to call on your local district attorney to prosecute George Bush and Dick Cheney for the murder of American service men and women on false pretenses, as called for by prosecutor Vince Bugliosi [and here is a YouTube video], or for other state crimes, this one click lookup form will provide their mailing address, phone, fax and email (if available).
Then if you would like one of the new "CONVICT DICK & W" caps, you can have one for a donation of any amount by submitting the request form here.

Have A Prosecution Commision, And We'll Get The Truth Too

Technorati Tags: Vincent Bugliosi,crimes,Bush Administration,Cheney,Bush,truth,war crimes,activism,actions

Sen. Patrick Leahy: Investigate Bush-Cheney Abuses

By Sen. Patrick Leahy - We have just emerged from a time when White House officials often acted as if they were above the law. That was wrong and must be fully exposed so it never happens again.

The Huffington Post community and the netroots played a vital role pursuing, demanding, and exposing the Bush-Cheney administration's numerous abuses. But there's still more we don't know, and more we must uncover, about the misdeeds of the past eight years.



That is why I proposed the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney administration. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws. 



I have set up a petition at BushTruthCommission.com, and I hope you will sign it to urge Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney administration's abuses. We already have over 7,000 signatures, but we need to hit 10,000 signatures -- or more -- by next week, to build momentum behind this idea.

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Bush Admin Responsible For 176,000 American Deaths

If you could directly save the lives of 176,000 people in the United States, and you refused to do it, or worse yet, created conditions that would cost even more lives, would you be responsible for those deaths?

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Civil rights group to Obama: Release secret Bush memos

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is calling on the Justice Department to release Bush administration documentation pertaining to torture, surveillance and other controversial national security policies.

The civil rights watchdog sent a letter today to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that provided legal advice to the White House under George W. Bush.

The secret memos were essentially the legal foundation for many of the Bush adminstration's questionable practices, says the ACLU in a news release received by Raw Story.

The Bush White House vigorously fought the release of such revealing (some would say, damning) documentation in the interests, it insisted, of protecting national security and other factors.

The ACLU's filing of the Freedom of Information Act request follows President Obama's recent directive to minimize federal secrecy and "usher in a new era of open government."The request is seen as a test of the freshly inaugurated president's transparency policy. "The ACLU now sees a new opening," writes Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers.

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I Survived the Bush Administration . . . the T-Shirt

A T-Shirt that will define a generation
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US has a 'lot of damage to repair': Clinton

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States has "a lot of damage to repair" to its standing around the world after eight years of President George W. Bush, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.

"The (new) approach to the world is one that we know is in the interests of our country going forward, and I have had that reinforced time and again with the all phone calls that I've been making," Clinton told reporters.

"There is a great exhalation of breath going on around the world as people express their appreciation for the new direction that is being set and the team that is being put together by the president...," she said.

She recalled that President Barack Obama's administration views defense, diplomacy and development aid as the pillars of the new foreign policy.


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Democrats Move Closer to Approving Torture Probe

Democrats Move Closer to Approving Torture Probe
By Jason Leopold | The Public Record

As President Barack Obama reverses some of ex-President George W. Bush’s most controversial “war on terror” policies, a consensus seems to be building among Democratic congressional leaders that further investigations are needed into Bush’s use of torture and other potential crimes.

On Wednesday – the first working day of the Obama administration – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would support funding and staff for additional fact-finding by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which last month released a report tracing abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002, decision to exclude terror suspects from Geneva Convention protections.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who issued that report, echoed Reid’s comments, saying “there needs to be an accounting of torture in this country.” Levin, D-Michigan, also said he intends to encourage the Justice Department and incoming Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate torture practices that took place while Bush was in office.

Two other key Democrats joined in this growing chorus of lawmakers saying that serious investigations should be conducted.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, a former federal prosecutor and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a floor speech, “As the President looks forward and charts a new course, must someone not also look back, to take an accounting of where we are, what was done, and what must now be repaired.”

Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters: "Looking at what has been done is necessary.”

On Jan. 18, two days before Obama’s inauguration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed support for House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers’s plan to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration “under claims of unreviewable war powers.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Pelosi specifically endorsed a probe into the politicization of the Justice Department, but didn’t spell out a position on Conyers's plan to examine the Bush administration’s torture and rendition policies, which could prove embarrassing to Pelosi and other Democratic leaders who were briefed by the CIA about these tactics.

Still, when Wallace cited Obama’s apparent unwillingness to investigate the Bush administration, Pelosi responded: “I think that we have to learn from the past, and we cannot let the politicizing of the — for example, the Justice Department, to go unreviewed. Past is prologue. We learn from it. And my views on the subject — I don't think that Mr. Obama and Mr. Conyers are that far apart.”

The emerging consensus among top congressional Democrats for some form of investigation into Bush’s controversial policies has surprised some progressives who had written off the leadership long ago for blocking impeachment hearings and other proposals for holding Bush and his subordinates accountable.

In 2006, for instance, Pelosi famously declared that “impeachment is off the table,” and prior to Election 2008, the Democratic leadership largely acquiesced to Bush’s demands for legislation that supported his “war on terror” policies, including a compromise bill granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted in Bush’s warrantless wiretaps.

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Missing White House E-Mails Traced, Justice Aide Says

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post - A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.
Civil division trial lawyer Helen H. Hong made the disclosure at a court hearing provoked by a 2007 lawsuit filed by outside groups to ensure that politically significant records created by the White House are not destroyed or removed before President Bush leaves office at noon on Tuesday. She said the department plans to argue in a court filing this week that the administration's successful recent search renders the lawsuit moot.
Hong's statement came hours after U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president's executive office -- with just days to go before their departure -- to undertake a comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003 to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.

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Pelosi Now Signals Support for Bush Probes

Nancy Pelosi has done a big 180 and is now ready to support John Conyers investigations and will be aided by Henry Waxman's recently released report about Bush administration secrecy: Rep. Henry A. Waxman has released a comprehensive examination of secrecy in the Bush Administration.
From THE PUBLIC RECORD:
In a stunning reversal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has for the past two years has staunchly refused to back calls to impeach President George W. Bush, now says she will support congressional efforts to investigate the Bush administration over it's controversial practices, such as the politicization of the Department of Justice.
Pelosi who famously remarked in 2006 after Democrats won control of both Houses of Congress that “impeachment is off the table” indicated during an interview with Fox News she was willing to support legislation proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration “under claims of unreviewable war powers,” including torture and warrantless wiretaps.
But told by Fox News’ Chris Wallace that President-elect Barack Obama signaled his unwillingness to support efforts to investigate the Bush administration, Pelosi countered, saying, “I think that we have to learn from the past, and we cannot let the politicizing of the — for example, the Justice Department, to go unreviewed. Past is prologue. We learn from it. And my views on the subject — I don't think that Mr. Obama and Mr. Conyers are that far apart.”
Pelosi’s comments seem to suggest that Conyers staffers may have already contacted Obama’s new administration to work jointly on the investigative efforts.
People working closely with Conyers on legislation to form a panel to investigate Bush’s policies confirmed Sunday that Conyers office has contacted Obama’s transition team and discussed their intent to investigate. But the aides said Obama’s team simply “listened” to what they had to say and did not verbalize whether they supported the move.
With regard to the politicization of the Justice Department, Pelosi made her strongest comments in support of continuing investigations to determine the role the White House played in the firing of nine federal prosecutors in December 2006.
"We have a contempt of Congress against members of the executive branch who withheld information from us on" the politicization of the Justice Department,” Pelosi said during her Fox News interview. She said one of the 111th Congress’s first actions earlier this month was to revive subpoenas that expired during the last Congress when the President Bush asserted executive privilege to block Karl Rove, his Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers from testifying before Congress about the U.S. Attorney firings.
Last week, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report that found a former top official in the agency’s civil rights division lied to a Senate committee and broke federal laws by using a political litmus test to hire and fire employees--a violation of the very laws he was charged with upholding.
Pelosi said issues related to the politicization of the Justice Department will require Congress to “look at each item and see what is a violation of the law, and do we even have a right to ignore it, and other things that are — maybe time spent better looking to the future rather than to the past.”
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Most See Bush's Presidency as a Failure

Half of those polled say the United States could be better off today if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000 rather than Bush, with 27 percent saying the country would be worse off if Gore had won. Twenty-two percent say things would be about the same. Only 3 percent of those questioned say Bush was one of the greatest presidents in history.

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Bush Protest: Shoes Thrown At White House, One Arrested

President Bush was given an Iraqi-journalist-style sendoff on his last full day in office Monday, as tourists and demonstrators lobbed shoes, pumps, boots, sandals and Crocs from Pennsylvania Avenue onto the White House lawn.

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Unlike Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who inspired the protest, none of the shoe-throwers in the group were arrested. (Later that day, reports NBC, one man was arrested for chucking a shoe at the White House.)

Presidential Thought Bubble

What the all the Presidents of the United States are thinking. Notice Bush isn't thinking at all.

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Bush's Only Gift to America

By Robert Parry - George W. Bush’s gift to the American Republic may be that he has discredited a host of right-wing theories and practices – “trickle-down economics”; “self-regulating markets”; “tough-guy” foreign policy; the “imperial presidency”; and the notion that “government is the problem.”

As the United States gazes out on the wreckage of the past eight years – a $1.2 trillion (and growing) budget deficit, 7.2 percent (and rising) unemployment, two open-ended wars, a sullied U.S. image abroad, environmental degradation and a world that seems to be ripping apart – the hope must be that Bush has so tarnished these policies, which trace back to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, that they will never be tried again.

If that is the lesson that the United States learns, then Barack Obama’s election truly could mark the end of an era and the start of something very different. However, if Obama and the Democrats fail to drive these lessons home – if they let bygones be bygones – they are courting a huge risk in that the same behavior could reemerge and the misjudgments could reoccur.
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more on Robert Parry;
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

What the Hell Just Happened? A Timeline of the Bush Years

You know 9/11, Iraq, and all the rest. Almost. Come on, did you remember that Google only went public in 2004?! Before we consider what's next, an abbreviated history of the last eight years of our lives.

By Tim Heffernan

[more from this author]

Click here to read Tom Junod's in-depth new essay looking back at the last eight years....

2000

December 13: The U.S. Supreme Court stops the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

The Dow closes at 10,794.

2001

January 15: Wikipedia is founded.

June 7: The Bush tax cuts become law.

September 9: Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, is assassinated.

September 11: Nearly 3,000 die in the 9/11 attacks.

September 18: The first anthrax letters are mailed.

September 20: The Office of Homeland Security is announced.

October 7: The United States invades Afghanistan.

October 26: The PATRIOT Act is signed into law.

November 25: CIA interrogator Johnny Michael Spann is killed in Afghanistan; he is the first U.S. casualty in the war on terror.

December 2: Enron files for bankruptcy.

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