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Septuagenarian Conyers and, for that matter, 80 year-old Senator John Warner (R-Virginia) who also seems to have forgotten his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution would do well to ponder my father’s dictum. (As for the “distinguished” senior senator from Commonwealth of Virginia, you may recall that, as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he caved in to White House pressure to let the Pentagon investigate itself regarding the abuses at Abu Graib and elsewhere—letting lower ranking soldiers take the hit for doing what then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made clear he wanted done. At that low point, surely groaning could be heard from James Madison’s resting place in Montpelier at the disdain in which successor Virginians—however “distinguished”—hold his beloved Constitution. Sorry, but I am a Virginian. And I feel this keenly. O Tempora, O Mores!)Attempted Trading on King
Toward the end of our meeting with Conyers, he showed uncommon chutzpah in referring to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was too much for me. You’re no Martin Luther King, I found myself wanting to say. Instead, I quoted a portion of Dr. King’s famous address at Riverside Church almost 40 years ago:
I used that quote in a letter I left with Conyers’ aides, in which I tried to express why my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity feel it is URGENT to find some way to apply the Constitution to restrain a run-away Executive.
The text of that letter follows:
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July 23, 2007
A Note to Congressman John Conyers:
On Impeachment and the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Dear John,
We each have our favored crime for which President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached. Many of us have several.
But the real challenge is to look AHEAD. What are Bush/Cheney likely to do in the coming months if the impeachment process does NOT begin?
One often hears, Oh, they will do what they want anyway, impeachment process or not. Not true. If we the people and our representatives in Congress choose the course given us by our Founders and impeachment proceedings begin, important swaths of our body politic AND military will be less likely to follow illegal orders from the White House. These important constituencies will become sensitized to the peril into which this administration has brought us and to the extra-constitutional orders they may be asked to carry out.
NEW ELEMENT: Even the Scaif-owned newspapers have begun to question Bush’s MENTAL STABILITY.
What could be more important at this juncture?
We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been applying all of our analytical techniques to assess the Bush/Cheney administration. We have helped to establish the long record of abuses and usurpations of the past. What about the future?
Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket. A Tet-type incident becomes more and more likely. The Green Zone is being hit by mortar fire more frequently than before. It may be just a matter of time before the Resistance gets lucky and lobs a shell onto our spanking new $600-million embassy, killing a bunch of Americans in the process.
What then? Will Cheney tell the president the US military has found Iranian markings on the shell fragments and we need to retaliate...and, actually, while we’re at it, let’s implement Plan A and hit all Iranian nuclear-related facilities. With Congress voting resolution after resolution against Iran, how would the president react to such a suggestion from Cheney?
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