Has Mr. Bush and his entourage broken the Law? Your Thoughts?*?

Question

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked and said "The American people don't know the half of it". She also was asked about impeachment as a remedy for illegal conduct by Bush, Cheney and other administration officials and responded "Its not worth it". If the price of inaction is the forfeiture of our constitutional democracy , then the worth of action needs to be reexamined - quickly, and in earnest.* This congress has been saddled with an unenviable task: They are asked, scripted by the nations founding fathers, to undertake a rather monumental stand in defense of the republic.* The constitution is clear.* What will prevail, law or lawlessness?* Law or Lawlessness by Marc Ash> Truthout I Perspective

Answer 1

US Supreme Court
According to what the justices themselves wrote, if the Bush administration's claims of unlimited authority to imprison people on nothing more than the say-so of the president were to prevail, the basic foundation of civil liberties laid down in the Bill of Rights would no longer exist.It could not summon a majority to decisively repudiate the authoritarian actions of the Bush administration and, notwithstanding its warnings of the dire implications of the government's denial of due process to alleged terrorists,

All of those declared by the president to be enemy combatants, including US citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, are, according to the Bush administration, excluded from the protections granted to prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions as well as the due process rights afforded defendants in the American court system by the US Constitution and acts of Congress.

The executive branch, on the grounds of claimed war-time powers of the president as commander in chief, has arrested and imprisoned these individuals and asserted the right to hold them indefinitely, without informing them of the factual basis for their arrest, without charging them with a crime, and without allowing them legal counsel or the right to contest their detention in a court of law. The Bush administration claims the right to hold these people incommunicado for the duration of the so-called "war on terror."Padilla was nowhere near a battlefield when he was arrested two years ago. He was seized at O' Hare International Airport outside of Chicago.

These divisions arise under conditions of acute social and political crisis, and a drive by powerful sections of the ruling elite to deal with this crisis by dispensing with traditional democratic norms and establishing a form of authoritarian rule.

This is a government that proclaimed, without any congressional declaration of war, a global "war on terror"-a war without any historical precedent, waged against unnamed enemies and of indefinite duration. The US executive has, in effect, declared a permanent state of warIt is by now well known and amply documented that the Bush administration seized on 9/11 as a pretext for launching wars for oil and other imperialist aims that had been long in the planning.

It is also well established that Bush, Cheney and company have done everything in their power to conceal the facts behind the attacks of September 11, and have refused to account for the government's own failure to take elemental steps to prevent them.

The Bush administration launched, as part of this "war on terror," an unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq, and employed lies on a massive scale to justify it. These are, in themselves, colossal violations of the US Constitution and US law. Bush then used the excuse of a "war-time" emergency and "ongoing combat" to justify its frontal assault on democratic rights.

This criminal enterprise includes, as is now well documented, the use of torture, in violation of both international and US law.

Thus the government, the constitutionality of whose actions the high court justices are deliberating, is a government of conspiracy, lies and criminality. It is a lawless regime.

The nine justices are all well aware of these facts. But none of them, including the liberal dissenters, dare to challenge the legitimacy of the "war on terror" that underlies the administration's anti-democratic policies.However,

O'Connor explicitly accepted the validity of the "war on terror" and asserted that the Authorization for the Use of Force, adopted by Congress one week after the September 11 attacks, gave the president the power, presumably for the duration of this war, to wield extraordinary war-time powers, including the seizure of people, including American citizens, and their indefinite imprisonment as enemy combatants.

As Justice John Paul Stevens suggested, in his majority opinion in the Guantanamo case, at stake are not only the principles of American democracy, but democratic conceptions that go back nearly 800 years-to the Magna Carta.

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."

At another point he wrote: "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society.

Even O'Connor, in her Hamdi ruling, raised the specter of dictatorship, writing that "history and common sense teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression..."These quotations provide a measure of how far advanced the disintegration of American democracy really is

There does not exist a majority on the Court to repudiate the anti-democratic and unconstitutional actions of the government.

Long established rights, previously taken for granted by Americans, are now being eviscerated or revoked outright

Reflected in the legal contortions of a fractured Supreme Court is an attempt to arrive at a new framework of political rule, with the appropriate constitutional trappings, that will better correspond to the requirements of a ruling elite pursuing violent and aggressive imperialist aims abroad, and defending its massive wealth and power under conditions of ever-widening social inequality at home.

Answer 2

If a US law had been broken then the accusers would be able to provide both a quote from a US statute and verifiable evidence that the person committed the act.

As long as they cannot do this - they are nothing more than BS and hot air.

Answer 3

The forgiver can no longer consume for the hungry of the criminal. Karma is blind and could supply the outcomes who do this devoid of fail in duly time. The forgiver has no administration on any karma.

Answer 4

Democrats and Republicans make it almost impossible for other parties to be elected. They will oppose the following sites, http://www.friesian.com/ross/ca40/ and http://www.fija.org/.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

A Libertarian historian is Henry Steele Commager at http://www.commager.org/

Another is Howard Zinn at http://howardzinn.org/default/

Nancy Pelosi has backed down so many times she might as well become a Republican.