Editor,
The House of Representatives was seriously considering impeaching President Nixon before he resigned for his criminal involvement in the Watergate scandal. Then it unjustifiably voted to impeach President Clinton - without indictable grounds - for lying about his illicit affair. So why hasn't the House introduced a bill of impeachment against President Bush?
Nixon's and Clinton's cases pale in comparison to the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Bush and his administration.
I'm sure there are those who will say that since we're so close to an election, we should wait and just vote him out. Lest we forget, elections are about voting for a preferred candidate, while impeachment is about punishing criminal wrongdoing.
The Bush administration has violated domestic and international laws, circumvented the Constitution and undermined our democratic rights. The remedy is obvious - impeachment, as finely articulated in Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution: "The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
In 2003, Bush sent American soldiers to fight and to die in Iraq because he insisted Iraq had sufficient quantities of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to pose an immediate threat to the United States. According to United States weapons inspector David Kay, we have now learned that Iraq all but abandoned its banned weapons programs and destroyed its weapons stockpiles after the Gulf War in 1991.
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If Bush knew these weapons did not exist and deliberately lied to the American people and the world, then he should take full responsibility and immediately resign, along with every top official who participated in these lies, especially Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet and the rest of the top administration officials.
If Bush really believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction based on intelligence data furnished to him, then he should resign for failing to demand adequate proof from his top defense and intelligence officials. After all, it is the ultimate responsibility of the commander in chief to distinguish reality from fantasy before he sends brave American soldiers to fight and die.
If Bush and his top officials refuse to resign, then Congress must exercise its constitutional responsibility to hold them accountable by impeaching them in the House of Representatives and convicting them in the Senate, thereby removing them from office.
If the House of Representatives impeached President Clinton in 1998 for lying about an unsavory, but insignificant and illicit, but not illegal affair, the House has a greater and weightier basis to impeach Bush for falsely justifying the declaration of war against Iraq.
No apology can bring back the lives of the 2,326 American soldiers, and the thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died in Iraq as a result of this war. Furthermore, no apology can return to American taxpayers the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent so far in Iraq, with billions more to come.
Nahum Castillo
Daily Lobo reader
