BUSH
ARTICLE II. ABUSE OF OFFICE AND OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE

(3) Failure to Uphold Accountability
Founder James Madison wrote that the power of the President unilaterally to remove subordinates is absolutely necessary because it will make the President himself responsible for the conduct of all executive officers and, “if he suffers them to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses,” subject to impeachment himself.

In abrogation of his responsibility under the oath of office to take care that the Laws be faithfully executed, by which he agreed to act in good faith and accept responsibility for the overall conduct of the executive branch, a duty vested in his office alone under the Constitution, George Walker Bush, failed to take responsibility for, investigate or discipline those responsible for an ongoing pattern of negligence, incompetence and malfeasance to the detriment of the lives, property, health and fortunes of the American people. He has also procured offices for persons who were unfit, and unworthy of them.

The Administration of George Walker Bush has failed to account for billions of dollars of government revenue shipped to Iraq, including payments made to private contractors involved in reconstruction efforts, resulting in the squandering away of the public treasure. It has failed to hold government contractors responsible to Congress and the people through transparent and public reporting and accounting controls, or by disciplining firms for such abuses as over-billing, price gouging, fraudulent accounting, violation of labor laws and breach of contract.

It has failed to take any disciplinary measures against those responsible for the failure to follow standard operating procedure in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And it has failed to hold to account those top officials responsible for allowing a natural disaster to become a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect by ignoring warnings since 1998 that a powerful hurricane could overwhelm the levee system of the City of New Orleans, by reducing rather than increasing Federal funding for the said levees, and by delaying the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina for five days as hundreds of thousands of citizens of the United States of America remained stranded and well over a thousand Americans died.

Those whom George Walker Bush, as President of the United States of America, has failed to hold to account include but are not limited to the following top-level officials in his administration:


(a) Richard Cheney. In violation of his oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, Richard Cheney, Vice President of the United States of America, played a key role in manipulating intelligence in the interest of promoting the illegal invasion of Iraq by pressuring analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency to “fix” their intelligence estimates of the danger posed by Iraq in relation to weapons of mass destruction; he promoted the use of torture methods which violate both federal and international laws by exempting intelligence agencies from legal restraints and opposing legislation that restricted its use; he promoted the privatization of the armed forces and war racketeering by private contractors, including multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to his former employer Halliburton, even while holding a pecuniary interest in Halliburton through stock options which grow in value as Halliburton’s war profits increase, whereby Richard Cheney, Vice President of the United States, did commit and was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors against the United States of America.

(b) Alberto Gonzalez. In contempt of the Constitution, the balance of powers and the Geneva Conventions, Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General of the United States of America, who when still serving as White House Counsel wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document,” did initiate and promulgate policies intended to grant the President limitless authority in perpetuity, by claiming that the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) of September 14, 2001 [S.J. Res. 23] gave the President unlimited authority in conducting the “War on Terror”, arguing further that by passing the AUMF Congress had granted the President authority for “unwarranted surveillance” and almost any other claim to legal immunity, and by drafting memoranda and legal justifications seeking to exempt United States forces from observing the Geneva Accords in relation to the use of torture and the treatment of detainees, writing in a memorandum dated 25 January, 2002 that “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questions of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,” as part of a pattern of seeking to subvert constitutional and international law in support of expanding the power of the executive, whereby Alberto Gonzalez did commit and was guilty of high crimes against the United States of America.

(c) Condoleezza Rice. In violation of her Constitutional duty to share and provide accurate and truthful intelligence information with the Congress, as former National Security Adviser to the President, did play a leading role in seeking to deceive Congress and the American public by repeating and propagating false statements concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program, including false information that the purchase of aluminum tubes demonstrated that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon and false information that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Niger; she also falsely denied that the United States was engaged in practices of kidnapping, rendition and torture, whereby Conoleezza Rice, Secretary of State of the United States of America, did commit and was guilty of high misdemeanors against the United States of America.

(d) Donald Rumsfeld. In violation of the Federal Torture Statute, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, Donald Rumsfeld, during his tenure as Secretary of Defense for the United States of America, oversaw the implementation of a set of changes to policy governing interrogations, including the transferring of General Geoffrey Miller from Guantánamo to Baghdad specifically to “enhance” interrogation techniques, and personally authoring a memorandum in December of 2002 suggesting the use of “stress positions, noise and light discipline, the use of music, disrupting sleep patterns, those kind of techniques,” thus leading several senior, high-ranking officers in the Judge Advocate Corps to challenge the “standards for detention and interrogation” being changed by the administration, noting that “with the war on terror a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Convention had come to an end,” whereby Donald Rumsfeld did commit and was guilty of high crimes against the United States of America.

By neglecting to superintend the conduct of these and other officials and contractors serving at the pleasure of his administration so as to check their excesses, by obstructing Congressional inquiry, oversight and investigation, by obstructing the work of appointed commissions and other means to hold members of the Executive Branch responsible for their negligence or violations of law, and similarly by frustrating judicial action in relation to his appointees, George Walker Bush has overseen an Administration characterized by a culture of corruption and the the death of accountability, whereby said George Walker Bush, President of the United States, did commit and was guilty of high misdemeanors against the United States of America.

Wherefore, by their forementioned conduct, George Walker Bush, Richard Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld warrant impeachment and trial, and George Walker Bush, Richard Cheney and Condoleezza Rice warrant removal from office.


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