Impeach the SOB

Perhaps I should mention that Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

Mr. Roberts writes:

On June 29 the US Supreme Court in a 5-3 decision ruled that President Bush's effort to railroad tortured Guantanamo Bay detainees [see here] in kangaroo courts "violates both US law and the Geneva Conventions."

Better late than never, but it sure took a long time for the checks and balances to call a halt to the illegal and unconstitutional behavior of the executive.

...

Perhaps the Court's ruling has more far reaching implications. In finding Bush in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the ruling may have created a prima facie case for charges to be filed against Bush as a war criminal.

Many readers have concluded that Bush assumed the war criminal's mantle when he illegally invaded Iraq under false pretenses. The US itself established the Nuremberg standard that it is a war crime to launch a war of aggression. This was the charge that the chief US prosecutor brought against German leaders at the Nuremberg trials.

The importance of the Supreme Court's decision, however, is that a legal decision by America's highest court has ruled Bush to be in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

There are many reasons to impeach Bush. His flagrant disregard for international law, US civil liberties, the separation of powers, public opinion and human rights associate Bush with the worst tyrants of the 20th century. It is true that Bush has not yet been able to subvert all the institutions that constrain his executive power, but he and his band of Federalist Society lawyers have been working around the clock to eliminate the constraints that the US Constitution and international law place on executive power.

...

Americans are going to have to decide which is the greater threat: terrorists or the Republican Party's determination to shred American civil liberties and the separation of powers in the name of executive power and the "war on terror."

The rest of the world has already reached a decision. A Harris Poll recently conducted for the Financial Times found that the populations of our European allies--Britain, France, Italy and Spain--view the United States as the greatest threat to global stability.

But according to Mr. Roberts, it is hardly all good news:

Thus, in the two lands [England and America] most associated with civil liberties, courts have struck down the tyrannical acts of the corrupt executive. Perhaps the fact that courts have reaffirmed the rule of law will give hope and renewed strength to the friends of liberty to withstand the assaults on freedom that are the hallmarks of the Bush and Blair regimes. On the other hand the two tyrants might ignore the courts as they have statutory law.

What's to stop them?

I don't disagree in the least with Roberts' dire warning. And always keeping that in mind, as we must if we give a damn at all about liberty and our country, more like this, please. A lot more.