New Quaker Notebook

The latest call for Cheney's impeachment comes from conservative Republican Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, whose case is made all that more convincing by the enumerated crimes:

Impeach Cheney
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped
Slate.com
June 27, 2007

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

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Creatures of darkness, like Dick Cheney, loath the light and flee its approach. The renewed public attention on the office of the Vice President, as on the whole Cheney-Bush presidency, can only be a good thing.

Bushevik propaganda machine cranks out al-Qaeda sausage

"So let us stop talking falsely now / The hour's getting late, hey" - Jimi Hendrix/Bob Dylan (All Along the Watchtower)

Have you noticed in the past few days how the word "insurgent" in the news about Iraq has suddenly become "al-Qaeda"? In fact, these al-Qaeda people seem now to be everywhere in Mesopotamia.

Yesterday, in Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald wrote about this latest curiosity in modern American journalism. The transformation is truly astonishing:

Each of these articles typically (though not always) initially refers to "Al Qaeda in Iraq" or "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia," as though they are nothing more than the Iraqi branch office of the group that launched the 9/11 attacks. The articles then proceed to refer to the group only as "Qaeda," and repeatedly quote US military officials quantifying the amount of "Qaeda fighters" we killed. Hence, what we are doing in Iraq is going after and killing members of the group which flew the planes into our buildings. Who could possibly be against that?

Are there some foreign fighters in Iraq who have taken up arms against the US occupation who are fairly called "Al Qaeda"? Probably. But by all accounts—including the President's—they are a tiny part of the groups with guns who are waging war in Iraq. The vast, vast majority of them are Iraqis motivated by a desire to acquire more political power in their own country at the expense of other Iraqi factions and/or to fight against a foreign occupation of their country. To refer to them as "Al Qaeda" so casually and with so little basis (other than the fact that US military officials now do so) is misleading and propagandistic in the extreme.

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One wants to know if these are "card-carrying" members of the al-Qaeda organization. Inquiring minds want to know.

Stop, Cheney

Bushevik propaganda machine cranks out al-Qaeda sausage