Text 13643, 112 rader
Skriven 2005-06-19 03:05:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Impeachment
===================
Excellent.  I hope they keep talking like this.  I also see the number 
100,000 is stil around from The Clinto days.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601570_pf.html

Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War

By Dana Milbank
Post
Friday, June 17, 2005; A06



In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a 
trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee 
hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look 
like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags 
to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the 
other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that 
he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly 
phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." 
The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more 
Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck 
would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied 
to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo 
on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun 
equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that 
he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.

"At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little 
subpoena power." That brought the house down.

As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and 
other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can 
regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles 
they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing 
Street Memo" is important.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 
members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on 
the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in 
Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such 
events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its 
assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go 
to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson 
IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely 
mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a 
son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."

No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally 
against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the 
biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos 
"establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." 
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get 
out" of Iraq.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former 
intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in 
Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration 
"neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of 
the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and 
that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," 
McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of 
Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering 
whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked 
McGovern for his "candid answer."

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing 
on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -
- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and 
that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has 
been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush 
lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you 
like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster 
of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."

Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-
for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the 
audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in 
the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a 
witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic 
headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing 
the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"

The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction 
from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush 
White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the 
equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon 
White House."

Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though 
Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of 
this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our 
work."

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