Is that illegal? Is it illegal according to the laws of the United States of America or any of the fifty states?
Seems that in order to impeach him, someone would have to find an actual crime, in the sense of violation of some statute, as opposed to a questionable motivation for going to war.
If he did so with information that he knew was false and decided to go forth with it anyways, yeah.
You’d have to prove that damage was willfully done, I believe.
I’d consider something that falls under those pretexts to be an “illegal war”.
This is where someone points out a flaw so we can get a better definition working.
What was illegal about it was that he attacked the sovereignty of another country without a legal justification. The only justification for attacking the sovereignty permitted under the UN Charter is self defense (and any treaty ratified by the US is automatically US law).
Now this is the part where the Bush defenders tell me that International law doesn’t really count and that the US doesn’t really have to honor its own treaties.
Of course, there is the pesky line in the constitution that says that the Constitution and all treaties made in pursuance of it are the Supreme Law of the Land, notwithtanding any other laws to the contrary. And then the other pesky line that says that it is the President’s duty that the laws are faithfully executed.
Even if there is no statute which provides a criminal penalty for breaking a treaty, the impeachment process was deliberately made by the founding fathers to be separate from the criminal justice system. If breaking treaties with malice aforethought, killing thousands of people in the process, doesn’t fall under the category of impeachable but not “criminal” offenses, then I don’t know what the hell does.
While admittedly Congress fucked up in passing that resolution, Bush’s actions still violated the UN charter thingy. Plus, future Congresses are not bound by the actions of past Congresses.
Ever wonder why the Republican Congress didn’t impeach Clinton for bombing Serbia in “violation” of the UN Charter? I guess all those lawyer Republicans are just too stooopid to realize what a huge opportunity they missed.
The evidence congress saw to justify that vote was likely false, inaccurate or misleading, finding evidence that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy by the administration”* should be enough, if not to impeach, at least to make the yahoo testify under oath.
IIRC it was tough to start an impeachment process when ethnic cleansing was going on, it is important too that the international tribunals did not bring charges against any NATO Members, but Slobodan and buddies did.
The “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq”, which did not reach that conclusion, would trump the Downing Street Memo, don’t you think? I’d like to see someone argue either in front of Congress or in a court of law that a memo written by some flunky in the British Foreign Affairs office (or wahtever) should be given more weight than the findings of a Congressional Intelligence Committee. So what if that memo contains the opinion of the head of the British Foreign Intelligence Service? Are we to take his opinion over the actual judgement of our own Congress?
Now, you and I might think that the Downing Street memo is more representative of fact than the Congressional report. But no court of law is going to come to that conclusion. Not a change.
This whole violation of the UN charter thing is absurd. Congress is authorized by the constitution to declare war. Congress can’t sign away it’s authority by treaty. If Congress signed a treaty with North Korea that supsended the writ of habeus corpus, do you think that would stand up in court? If Congress signed a treaty with Sudan authorizing the enslavement of Black Christians, would that stand up in court? Would anyone here be rushing to defend that action because a treaty is the supreme law of the land, and overrides the constitution? No, of course not.
Just a point of clarification. In the hypotheticals in my last post, I should have talked about treaties that were signed by a president and approved by the Senate, not signed by Congress.
And IIRC the democrats that had doubts in the committee could not go to the floor in congress to tell other congressmen that there was a lot of evidence to the contrary not being reported, they did indeed follow the rules of secrecy and kept quiet. Contrast that with the acts the white house did at that time with Plame.
I’m now wondering if you actually even followed the evidence that many have posted before, it was not only the Downing street memos.
So? It doesn’t matter which party controls Congress. The Democrats wouldn’t have the spine to say that the Downing Street memo is more signfican that the findings of Congress (even if it was controled by Republicans at the time).
I’m wondering if you understand what is and what is not possible in Congress or in a US court. I thought we were debating what could actually happen, not what anyone here might wish would happen.
Doesn’t matter. The same would hold true in an impeachment procedure. Congress is not going to come out and say that a treaty trumps the constitution. Not gonna happen-- no way no how.