January 11: Impeach Bush!

Elizabeth Holtzman’s call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for authorizing “the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” was published in The Nation on this date in 2006. Holtzman, a former U.S. Congressional Representative, had helped pass legislation in 1978 to expel Nazi war criminals from the U.S. and to establish the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations for that purpose. “I have been deeply troubled by Bush’s breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions,” she wrote. “I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of U.S. criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail. . . . These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq.”

“[I]t wasn’t until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping . . . and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country’s laws — that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.” —Elizabeth Holtzman