By David Swanson
When Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush on June 9, 2008,
the 35 had been selected from drafts of nearly twice that many articles.
President Obama has accumulated his own massive list of high crimes and misdemeanors that were unavailable for Bush's
list (thing's like openly murdering U.S. citizens, launching massive drone wars, selectively and abusively prosecuting
numerous whistleblowers as spies, holding Bradley Manning naked in isolation, attacking Libya without so much as
bothering to lie to Congress, etc.).
Nonetheless, it is instructive to review the 35 Bush articles in the Obama age. It quickly becomes apparent that Obama has either exactly duplicated or closely paralleled most of
the 35. Here's what I mean:
Article XXVI
Click the link to read the article introduced against Bush. Obama campaigned against this abuse and has routinely
engaged in it as president. Worse, he has established the policy of silently relying on previous Bush or Obama signing statements rather than restating his intention to violate laws
each time such intention is relevant to a bill he is signing.
Article XXII
Obama similarly uses Department of Justice arguments to reverse the commonly understood meaning of laws (bombing Libya
is neither war nor hostilities, for example). And he similarly uses arguments that are kept away from public sight.
While the United Nations, foreign nations, and human rights groups have questioned the legality of drone strikes, Obama
has not provided his legal defense or even felt obliged to make any assertion as to which victims were intended and
which were "collateral damage." This week the ACLU sued for release of such information. In addition, Obama announced in
2009 that he would review all of Bush's signing statements and decide which ones to keep as law and which to discard,
but the public has never been told the outcome of that review.
Article XVII
Obama did this from day one, proclaimed it in front of the Constitution in the National Archives, formalized it in an
executive order, signed it into law this past New Year's Eve, and expanded the practice at Bagram.
Article XXIII
Obama has continued each abuse detailed here and added to them, including through his use of the military to keep
journalists away from the BP oil disaster and in an effort to break a strike at the ports of the Pacific Northwest.
Article XIX
Obama has publicly claimed the power to continue this practice, in fact continued this practice, maintained black sites
despite announcing an end to them, and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor.
Article XX
Obama has continued this practice and added to it the murdering of children, refusing to say that Abdel-Rahman Anwar
al-Awlaki was not intentionally targeted or that he, Obama, does not have the legal power to murder U.S. children.
Non-U.S. children continue to die in significant numbers from drone strikes and by other means (including intentional
targeting from helicopter) as part of Obama's escalated war on Afghanistan.
Article XVIII
Obama has claimed the power to torture, worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor, and continued
to allow torture. He has also pressured other nations, including Spain, to drop prosecutorial investigations of U.S. crimes of torture.
Article XXIV
Obama has continued these practices and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor.
Article XXV
Obama has continued these practices and worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his predecessor and guilty
corporations.
Article XXI
Obama has continued these practices. In his most recent State of the Union speech he said, "America is determined to
prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a
peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible . . . if Iran changes course." When Iran recently took down a U.S.
drone, Obama simply asked that it be returned.
Article XVI
Obama's Pentagon is no more audited or accountable, nor the routine scandals involving misplaced millions or billions of
dollars less frequent. No-bid contracts have increased. Privatization has increased. Secrecy has increased. The use of
Special Forces in secret non-war wars has spread to more nations. The permanent stationing of U.S. troops has spread to
more nations. Secret agencies, including the CIA, have been given larger war-making roles. And Obama continued the war
on Iraq long beyond the date by which he had promised to end it, and continues to maintain thousands of mercenaries in
Iraq, and to use drones in the skies of Iraq. He has also worked to coverup and protect related crimes by his
predecessor.
Article XV
Obama's insistence on continuing this practice not just beyond 2008 but beyond 2011, combined with the Iraqi
government's refusal to agree, resulted in Obama's decision to comply with the Bush-Maliki treaty to end the war on Iraq
by this past New Year's Eve.
Article XXX
The details have to be changed to apply this article to Obama. The changes are not in Obama's favor. Obama met in secret
with the CEOs of health insurance corporations and pursued a vision of healthcare reform that they had secretly
influenced. In so doing, he misled Congress and the American people. He is quite open, in contrast, about his
willingness to slash Medicare, as well as Medicaid.
Article XXXI
The victims of Katrina have still not been compensated, nor the environmental and urban damage undone. Instead the BP
oil disaster has been added. Obama intentionally misled the Congress and the public, downplaying the quantity of oil
gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. He allowed a clean-up operation that was nothing of the sort. No real clean-up or
recovery is planned. Nor have the corporations or their supposed regulators been held accountable.
Article XXXII
Obama's approach to systematically undermining efforts to address global climate change has included blocking possible
global agreements at meetings in Denmark and South Africa, while promoting "clean coal," "natural gas," and "safe
fracking."
Article XIV
The exposing of a secret agent has not been repeated, but retribution against whistleblowers has been taken to new
heights with more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than by all previous presidents combined.
Article XXXIV
We're still waiting.
Now, we come to the launching of the war on Iraq:
Article I
Article II
Article III
Article IV
Article V
Article VI
Article VII
Article VIII
Article XII
Article XIIII
It was too late for Obama to exactly duplicate these offenses, as the war against Iraq was already underway. But
President Obama has embraced the lies that launched that war. He claimed in 2010 that the war on Iraq had been launched in order to disarm that nation. In the news around the world on the day
of Obama's most recent State of the Union speech was the anger among Iraqis at the failure of the United States to hold
anyone seriously accountable for the 2005 massacre in Haditha. The story was a useful reminder of how the operations of the U.S. military over the past decade have fueled hostility toward our
nation. President Obama began his speech by claiming the opposite, asserting that the war on Iraq has made us safer and
"more respected around the world." Obama has repeatedly used such rhetoric to pivot to promotion of his escalated war in
Afghanistan or other military operations. Similarly, President Obama misled the nation about the purpose and nature of a
war on Libya that has left Libya, like Iraq, in worse shape, and which has left Constitutional war powers in tatters, as
the Congress declared itself opposed to the war and the war continued. Meanwhile misleading propaganda about Iran,
Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other nations continues to emerge from the Obama administration. The Director of
National Intelligence has just claimed that Iran is a threat to the United States. While the Iraq War may have "ended,"
the Authorization for the Use of Military Force has been kept in place allowing Obama to use it as a legal argument for
other military operations and abuses of civil rights. Also emerging with ever greater frankness from the Obama White
House and Pentagon, including from the President, is the claim of presidential prerogative to launch military attacks on
sovereign nations, involving deaths to both militants and civilians, without any consideration of Congress, the
Constitution, the War Powers Resolution, the United Nations or its Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or any other law.
There is no quantitative way to measure whether Obama's additions to the presidential powers accumulated by Bush and
Bush's predecessors equals or exceeds those added by Bush. But measured against the pre-Bush baseline, or against the
written rule of law, Obama's power abuses far outstrip Bush's, while in the category of immediate death count Bush
retains a significant lead.
Would Romney or Gingrich be even worse? That's quite likely. If we continue to self-censor on these matters, Obama Part
II will also be significantly worse. A popular movement against these abuses could make any White House occupant better
than the current one, even if it's the same individual. Remember what Howard Zinn taught: It's not who is sitting in the
White House; it's who is doing the sit-ins.
*****
David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org
ENDS