Talk Nation Radio interviews David Swanson of Afterdowningstreet.org and Impeach Pac as well as Democrats.com and Arcata California City Council member Dave Meserve of the Green Party talks about a January 4th decision by the council to vote in a resolution calling for the impeachment or resignation of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.

“At this stage the point is to push for that proper investigation and to push for censure and to demand a focus on these crimes as an educational end in itself and if it gets to impeachment so much the better.” David Swanson

We caught up with David Swanson as he was preparing to attend a forum hosted by Congressman Jim Moran featuring Jack Murtha. The event drew huge crowds in Arlington, VA Thursday January 5th and 500 people had to be turned away. You can read about the event and listen to the audio of the program here

The web site of Afterdowningstreet.org has announced that there will be 136 cities hosting “Out of Iraq” Events Saturday, January 7, 2006.

Transcript of January 5, 2006 Talk Nation Interview with David Swanson

Dori Smith: The co-founder of After Downing Street is our guest this time. Writer and activist David Swanson joins us to talk about impeaching George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. David Swanson is also Washington Director of Democrats.com and a board member of Progressive Democrats of America

A former newspaper reporter he worked as communications director for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign.

We will also be hearing a few words from Arcata California City Council member Dave Meserve of the Green Party at the end of the show. On January 4th the Arcata City Council passed what they are calling a “2006 New Year’s Resolution” demanding the impeachment or resignation of Bush and Cheney. Meserve explained that there is a good deal of interest in a national campaign for cities to pass impeachment resolutions. I asked David Swanson if the plea deal arranged with Jack Abramoff may provide more arguments to be used in making a case for impeachment.

David Swanson: I don’t know I think we’re kind of overwhelmed with an abundance of arguments and evidence. There is not really conceivably a stronger case for impeachment than having taken a nation to war on the basis of lies. If you read the remarks and the writings of our founding fathers that put impeachment into the Constitution this is precisely the key example of when impeachment would be appropriate. And we have not only a war that is blatantly illegal; not fought in self defense; not fought under UN authorization; but we have an abundance of war crimes. -The targeting of civilians. The use of torture, the ghosting of prisoners, the depleted uranium, the white phosphorus, and on and on and on.

And now we have the spying scandal and you know, what the Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and many others, scandal adds is simply an additional impression of the corruption and the arrogance that is currently rampant in the Republican Party in the White House. So if it helps to call people’s attention to that and to the need for some accountability and some oversight and some checks and balances than it’s helpful.

Dori Smith: Now in the State of Connecticut many people will remember 2004 when momentum was just gathering to impeach John G. Rowland our former Republican Governor. And John Rowland will be getting out of prison in a few months time, just in time to see the next election perhaps, but I thought that we might see some similar patterns emerging in the media. Would you say that there is a greater willingness on the part of the US press right now to start diving into these corruption stories and even considering impeachment as a consequence of some of the behavior of the GOP?

David Swanson: Well there is certainly greater (willingness) than there was some weeks back. In large part due to the NSA spying story and in part due to the work that we and others have been doing at Afterdowningstreet.org and Impeachpac.org but that’s not saying much you know. Greater than before which is nothing. The attitude that you find in the media elites in this country is that impeachment is something to be scorned and ridiculed and laughed at and dismissed. And of course that’s not a consistent position in that there were endless newspapers editorializing that Bill Clinton should resign over his sex life and that impeachment was absolutely called for when public opinion was quite low in support for impeachment proceedings against Clinton. -And understandably in that it was a private matter of a sexual relationship.

In this case the media has been very resistant to writing or speaking about impeachment and even to doing the polls to learn where the public stands. We have had to commission polls by independent polling companies to find out and the most recent by Zogby International found 53% of Americans would like Congress to consider impeachment if the President lied about the war. That’s dramatically, that’s over twice as high as you had for Bill Clinton, and so there is public interest out there and now what you are seeing with the spying story is experts with sufficient clout and media presence managing to slip the word in that the President has committed impeachable offenses.

Nonetheless, the prevailing attitude is that with the Republicans in the majority in both houses it’s silly and almost embarrassing to talk about impeachment because the Republicans will never do it. Well what about our responsibility as citizens to demand justice regardless of the predictions of the commentators?

Democracy is not a spectator sport and it’s our responsibility to get involved and there are members of Congress on the Democratic side who have taken that to heart and now have begun to act. And Congressman Conyers has introduced legislation and cosponsors are signing on. So the argument from the media that “we can’t cover it because it’s not in Congress” is no longer valid.

Dori Smith: And you mentioned the NSA spy scandal. There have been shocking revelations from the Risen book and one item that I saw on your web site has to do with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell where Mitchell interviewed James Risen on the domestic spy scandal he broke and apparently Mitchell pressed Risen for information about the possibility that the White House might be spying on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. See: NBC Confirms investigation of possible Bush spying on Christiane Amanpour

David Swanson: NBC removed that bit from the transcript on its web site and did not air it and has put out a statement that leaves it pretty obvious that they believe that Ms. Amanpour was spied on and that wire tapping was done. And so you have this curious situation now of media organizations self censoring their reporting about the White House spying on reporters; I thought I had seen everything. This strikes me as a new low in terms of media corruption but it does seem very likely that reporters were spied on and political opponents were spied on because the President has offered no sustentative justification for why he needed to spy without court approval, which can be obtained after the fact, which does not delay anything, and so forth. And so it is very likely that members of the media have been spied on as well as political opponents of the Bush Administration and it is going to be very interesting to see how the media reacts to that, whether reporters step up and defend themselves because there have been cases including this most recent one where they seem reluctant even to do that.

Dori Smith: I want to talk about a few of the arguments being used by critics of the whole impeach movement and they have talked about the Democrats receiving some of Jack Abramoff’s money as a way to imply that the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, and, therefore, we might as well just retain the status quo. I noticed another piece on your web site by Bob Geiger who talked about “following the Abramoff money” and noted that it didn’t go to Democrats but went largely to people like Tom DeLay.

David Swanson: Well as far as I’ve seen not a dime went to Democrats but you know I’m not in a position of wanting to defend the Democratic Party and every member of it as some sort of saint. What I would like to see is the Democratic Party developed into a clear opposition party with a point of view distinct from that of the Republicans. And one step that could help greatly in moving in that direction is a willingness to want to hold the White House accountable through censure through impeachment through supporting the resolutions that Congressman John Conyers has introduced. And the Democrats on the Hill will whisper about all the things they will do once they have the majority. My position is unless they speak out forthrightly about what they will do there is no reason for anyone to vote them the majority and that’s certainly how the Republicans got themselves the majority. But there are all sorts of hesitations and worries from Democrats and from citizens around the country about impeachment and some of them focus on the idea that if you impeach Bush then you get Cheney and he is worse. This is just such muddled thinking on so many levels.

To begin with if Cheney were President he would still be running things as he is now but up front on the stage which would be disastrous for the Republican Party. This is not someone who could get reelected against any other living human being. And impeachment is not removal from office. A president has never been removed from office except by violence and impeachment is something that was done to Bill Clinton and destroyed what was left of the Democratic Party. It would do the same to the Republicans. On top of which you could never investigate either Bush or Cheney in a proper investigation with subpoena power without incriminating the other. There is no way that it could be done and at this stage the point is to push for that proper investigation and to push for censure and to demand a focus on these crimes as an educational end in itself. And if it gets to impeachment so much the better but we need to stop jumping five steps ahead of ourselves in order to fantasize about defeat precisely when we should be going on the attack.

Dori Smith: There have been arguments made that the people interested in impeaching the President are ignoring the threats we face and the so-called “war on terror”. How do you respond to those kinds of complaints?

David Swanson: Well the President was briefed about the threat from Al Queda weeks before it occurred and ignored that. He did not have insufficient information because he wasn’t able to spy on and torture people with a free enough hand. He had insufficient information because he is guilty of gross negligence and ignored the information that was placed on his desk. And since 9/11 he has not addressed the criminals guilty of those horrendous crimes. In fact, he has done everything in his power to describe those acts as something other than crimes, as acts of war, and so there has been no capture of Osama Bin Laden or the other top suspects. There has been no trial, no prosecution, no penalty, and in fact the President has done everything conceivable to put us in greater danger.

Terrorist attacks on US citizens and around the world are up drastically to the extent that the federal government has stopped reporting those statistics. And what is required now is taking action to make us more safe rather than continuing on the path that the President has taken which has made us so much less safe and has sacrificed the lives of over 2000 US soldiers, seriously wounded tens of thousands of US soldiers, and killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis. We need to restore some order and some legality to the world stage and if we are going to have international law, if there is going to be a way to say to one country, “no you cannot attack another country,” we have to get out of Iraq and have some accountability for that crime. That’s the first step. And then through financial assistance and diplomacy rebuild that country, undo the damage that we’ve done, and begin a new course of diplomacy with the world working with the United Nations, working with the world community to make this a safer place. Not a less safe place which is the current path.

Dori Smith: We are talking with David Swanson. He is Washington Director of Democrats.com and a board member of Progressive Democrats of America and also co-founder of Afterdowningstreet.org.

Let’s turn to headlines right now as we speak they are just coming over the wire as a hotel near the most holy Muslim shrine in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, has collapsed and there is no word in this report that I’m reading right now that it was terrorism. However, if we turn to Iraq we see major attacks there as well with about 100 people known dead after twin suicide bombings. Just talk about the extreme risks we face and how the possible worsening of these kinds of headlines might affect the American people as they look at their own government and how to bring about reform?

David Swanson: Well we are seeing a steady worsening of the situation in Iraq and yet we are seeing these predictions that if the US troops were to leave all hell would break lose, Iraqis would all attack each other, it would be a disaster, it would be a civil war, there would be great violence. You know I’ve spoken with many Iraqis who say that that’s a myth, that that is as big a lie as was the lie about weapons of mass destruction, or the lie about the ties to Al Queda and 9/11. And so we have now in Iraq a situation that can be described as civil war, that clearly includes massive violence, that includes greater and greater death tolls on Iraqis, while death tolls of US soldiers have remained steady or started to decline.

The US is likely to pull some troops out some day but to increase bombings and, in fact bombings were significantly increased in the past year, and so we are going to have more Iraqis killed but perhaps fewer Americans. We won’t know that because our media only tells us about American deaths. But that’s the reality. And so we have a situation in which the White House and the Pentagon are imagining that American resistance to the war will decline if US deaths decline. I’m not sure that’s going to happen. I’m not sure US soldier deaths are going to decline but the bigger factor that has swayed so many Americans against this war, so much faster than against previous wars is that no one any longer believes the rationale for the war.

The claims about weapons of mass destruction, the claims about ties to 9/11, and some of the subsequent claims made after the fact to justify this war, people in this country overwhelmingly no longer believe them. So you have parents understanding that their sons and daughters have gone and died courageously doing their duty honestly but for no good reason (see related story where Paul E. Schroeder say’s to stop the war before more heroes like his son are killed.) –And that is really tragic and that is what is moving people against this war.

Dori Smith: Now a number of organizations across the country are planning events in 70 cities? This will all start to take place today right and running through January 7th. Just talk about what kinds of events are planned and what you expect to see.

David Swanson: We did put out a press release some days ago saying 70 events. We are now over 130 events planned and they are almost all of them town hall meetings, forums, many of them with members of Congress who are supportive of ending the war and holding the Bush Administration accountable.

A few of them are protests at the offices of congress members who continue to support the war and one of them is this evening, an event scheduled by Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia who is hosting a town hall forum together with Congressman John Murtha and that will be very interesting. I’m going to be leaving shortly to go to that. But this Saturday January 7th the vast majority of these 130 some events will take place and chances are very good there is one near you. If you go to Afterdowningstreet you can click on the button about events and sign up to attend the one that is closest to your house and this is a way to build the movement and to bring more people into the movement to hold Congress and the President accountable and end the war.

If you have a couple of hours this Saturday these events are free and informative and in many cases likely to be quite exciting. I would recommend checking it out and going. We are also acting, and several large peace groups are asking everyone to phone their congress member in their district office on Monday the 9th and ask them to co-sponsor Congressman Conyers’ bill on an investigation into impeachment and on censuring Bush and Cheney. And that information also is at a href=”afterdowningstreet.org”>Afterdowningstreet

Dori Smith: Just talk about what those resolutions call for in a little detail here.

David Swanson: Sure. These were three bills introduced by Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee A couple of weeks ago now. And one of them, House Resolution 635 is intended to create a select committee that would hold serious investigations with subpoena power and make recommendations on impeaching the President and the Vice President. And this is the way that the impeachment process began that ended with President Nixon resigning. This is the first step toward impeachment and it is something that many activists and citizens around the country are thrilled with and have been waiting for for many months. And it’s something that is starting to gain ground in Congress. We are in recess now so the congress members are all gone but I know that at least several have already contacted Congressman Conyers’ office to cosponsor the bill.

The other two bills; House Resolutions 636 and 637 are aimed at censuring Bush and Cheney. Not for their crimes but for their refusal to turn over information and to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, and, in fact, it’s this lack of information that necessitates the investigation with subpoena powers to learn what more needs to be learned.

What Congressman Conyers believes is, and I certainly agree, that there is already sufficient evidence to say that President Bush is guilty of impeachable offenses. The Congressman has released a report that is nearly 300 pages documenting many of these crimes related to the war and that would include the illegal launching of an aggressive war itself, the use of White Phosphorus and Depleted Uranium, the targeting of civilians, the ghosting of prisoners with no records, no accountability, the use of torture, the retribution against whistleblowers, and now, most recently, the spying scandal where Americans have been spied on without court authorization. And that report again also is at Afterdowningstreet

Dori Smith: David Swanson thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, I know you are busy today. Good luck on all of the events you have planned.

David Swanson: Thank you very much.

David Swanson is Co-Founder of Afterdowningstreet.org and a leading progressive democrat.

As momentum for an investigation into impeachable offenses grows in Congress, U.S. city and state leaders are also considering what kind of role they can play. And on January 4th members of the Arcata City Council in California adopted a 2006 New Year’s Resolution demanding the impeachment or resignation of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It lists as impeachable offenses the crime of misleading the American people and Congress into waging an unnecessary war in Iraq, the Bush Administration’s failure to adequately respond to the hurricane Katrina disaster, the secret surveillance of American citizens by the NSA, without any court warrant, and the torturing of human beings in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Joining us to talk about the Arcata City Council is Green Party Councilman Dave Meserve. I asked him to talk about the Arcata efforts that began in October of 2004 when the Arcata City Council passed a preliminary resolution calling for the resignation (impeachment) of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Dave Meserve: With the developments in the press around the NSA spying allegations it seemed appropriate to reaffirm this Resolution and try to encourage other cities to pass similar resolutions. (See: RESOLUTION NO. 056-34 -A 2006 NEW YEARS RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF ARCATA DEMANDING THE IMPEACHMENT OR RESIGNATION OF GEORGE W. BUSH AND RICHARD B. CHENEY)

Dori Smith: Are you in touch with other cities at this point? Is there any interest?

Dave Meserve: There definitely is interest and working through Cities for Progress and Afterdowningstreet.org and kind of the network that’s building up to put an end both to the war and to the Bush Administration, I think that there really is some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_to_impeach_George_W._Bush”>momentum that we can build on and I think that one of the most powerful ways that we can build this momentum is through city resolutions We certainly have seen that and continue to see it in the battle against the Patriot Act and it’s a long standing tradition for cities to make statements on issues of great national importance.

Dori Smith: Now you have sent copies of this resolution to members of Congress. Just tell us about what’s happening in terms of outreach to the Senate and the House.

Dave Meserve: We just passed the Resolution last night and within the Resolution our city will be sending copies of it to our Congressman Mike Thompson, to Feinstein and Boxer, our Senators, and to all members of the House Judiciary Committee. And that is of course where impeachment proceedings would begin. So most specifically we are hoping to encourage our Congressman Mike Thompson to join with Conyers and others in working towards impeachment.

Dori Smith: I note that your resolution says that the City of Arcada demands the impeachment or resignation of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. Did you take a long time to work on the language and if so were there people who really hoped that they might see a resignation by any of these top leaders? Is there any thinking that that could ever happen?

Dave Meserve: I think it’s certainly idealistic and also this Resolution does represent a collaboration between me and Harmony Groves, another Council Member, and both of our inputs were very important in order both to write the Resolution together and to have a resolution that we could actually pass with this council.

Dori Smith: It seems to me that the four points you go over would include a lot of different kinds of Americans because you point out failures to respond to hurricane Katrina, the secret surveillance of American citizens by the NSA without a court warrant, and you talk about misleading the American people and Congress into an unnecessary war in Iraq. So going over all of these four points you have honed in on did you find a great deal of broad public interest in this and support for this?

Dave Meserve: Yeah I think that’s really the key to any meaningful move towards impeachment is including people who are not necessarily on the left, who are not necessarily Democrats. People who are Constitutionalists and they can come from any political persuasion and you know I come at this from a very strong Constitutionalist point of view which is that each one of us on every city council, every elected official in this country, takes an oath of office in which we swear to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. And right now it’s very clear to me and becoming clear to many others that we are under attack from a very powerful and very dangerous domestic enemy, namely, our Administration.

Dori Smith: Arcata, California, City Council Member Dave Meserve.

To learn more about this program try Afterdowningstreet

To obtain phone numbers for participating in the national Progressive Democrats of America January 9th call in day supporting Representative Conyers in his call for accountability, try this link

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Visit WHUS to listen live Wed. at 5 PM. EST.