The Key To Impeachment
By Norman Solomon

June 01, 2005 Norman Solomon's new book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, comes off the press in June. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com If you think President Bush should be impeached, it's time to get serious. We're facing huge obstacles—and they have nothing to do with legal standards for impeachment. This is all about media and politics. Five months into 2005, the movement to impeach Bush is very small. And three enormous factors weigh against it:

1) Republicans control Congress.
2) Most congressional Democrats are routinely gutless.
3) Big media outlets shun the idea that the president might really be a war criminal.
For now, we can't end the GOP's majority. But we could proceed to light a fire under congressional Democrats. And during the next several weeks, it's possible to have major impacts on news media by launching a massive educational and "agitational" campaign—spotlighting the newly leaked Downing Street Memo and explaining why its significance must be pursued as a grave constitutional issue. The leak of the memo weeks ago, providing minutes from a high-level meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair held with aides in July 2002, may be the strongest evidence yet that Bush is guilty of an impeachable offense. As Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in late May:
"First, the memo appears to directly contradict the administration's assertions to Congress and the American people that it would exhaust all options before going to war. According to the minutes, in July 2002, the administration had already decided to go to war against Iraq." "Second, a debate has raged in the United States over the last year and one half about whether the obviously flawed intelligence that falsely stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was a mere 'failure' or the result of intentional manipulation to reach foreordained conclusions supporting the case for war. The memo appears to close the case on that issue stating that in the United States the intelligence and facts were being 'fixed' around the decision to go to war."