By Kara Singer, Georgetown Student- Georgetown National Lawyer’s Guild
Op-ed written by a World Can’t Wait organizer at Georgetown Law School. Bush has committed immoral crimes and impeachable offenses. Why has he not been impeached yet and what can we do about it?
If warrantless surveillance, misleading Congress into war, violating laws against torture, and subverting Constitutional separation of powers isn’t enough, what will ever be enough for impeachment? The answer is not an affair with an intern. The President of the United States, George W. Bush, has committed war crimes, and crimes against humanity – not only in far-off lands but within our nation itself. A new level of resistance is necessary for the level of judicial disregard we have witnessed for the past six years, and October 5th shall be our day of action against a tyrannical President and his administration.
We who call ourselves activists and progressives may have been in the streets for years, protesting the policies of an unstoppable America and praising those brave countries and persons who have stood up against our great nation. We have been in the streets begging President Bush to not bomb Afghanistan when the culprit of 9/11 was a non-governmental entity. We flooded the streets, with the rest of the world, on February 15, 2003 to protest military action against Iraq. October 5 is the day, the opportunity, to dwarf these previous days of action with a larger uprising than ever before – dwarfing not simply with numbers, but with message and impact. This is not a call to protest. This is a call to bring this disastrous course of action to a halt! And creating a political ethos wherein the Bush administration is forced out of office.
We face an unprecedented assault on the civil liberties established 300 years ago, and previously understood within the boundaries of customary international law. Our right to privacy has been pre-empted by wiretapping allowances. We have watched our government sanction torture, practices abhorrent to the rest of America’s darling “civilized” friends and neighbors for years. We have watched shady maneuvering to override the war powers granted to the President by Congress. We have watched our leader ignore a natural disaster set to disproportionately affect thousands of minority citizens. Any one of these actions, alone, could be grounds for impeachment. Yet these violations of national trust, these instances of disregard for the sanctity for human life and dignity have compounded to the point that we ask for impeachment upon multiple claims.
If we ignore these atrocities now, we lay a foundation to future administrations to cut and paste their own version of the U.S. Constitution. We invite other countries to disregard international law, to fly in the face of the U.N. and disregard the voices of their citizens. If we do nothing now, we will permanently surrender vital liberties and trade in checks and balances for a supreme leader.
If the U.S. began waging a different kind of war when it began the “War on Terror,” why shouldn’t the resistance be different as well? Kurt Vonnegut spoke in 2003 about the extent of protest to the Vietnam War, while pointing out that the public outrage did not stop the occurrence of atrocities. What can we do, then? Besides being outraged? We must take to the streets, in greater numbers than the world has ever seen, to cry out with one voice, and at one time: although we live in a country that has become a perpetuator of war crimes and humanitarian violations, although our country has committed egregious violations of international law, this is our country and we will not let our country be run by one man and one man’s goals which violate the very being of so many citizens of that same country.
We will not stand still when a fight has been demanded by our government. We will not be quiet when the state of the world demands righteous outrage. We will gather on October 5, 2006 to speak for ourselves, and every person who cannot be with us in person but has a voice equal to ours. We will gather, and we ask not for one simple reform. We demand the resignation of President Bush and his administration, and we demand that he admit his crimes before domestic courts. We demand that President Bush be impeached by Congress and held accountable for his negligence. Only through public acknowledgement and acceptance of the United States” mistakes will we contribute to the development of international law and move closer to the decades-old goal of a world without war.