Bush lied. Why not impeach now?

Via Larry Johnson at TPMCafe comes the final proof that George W. Bush lied this country into a war of aggression. From an article in today’s Washington Post:

[In late 2002], the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council’s reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal U.S. evidence as bogus. A Bush-appointed commission later concluded that the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was “transparently forged.”

Note the sequence of events. Before the IAEA investigation, before the commission’s report, and most importantly, before the 2003 State of the Union address in which Bush claimed that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium ore, Bush knew that the claim was false. Yet he went ahead and used this lie to sell to the American people the war he’d already decided on starting.

John Dean has boiled this down to its core:

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be “a high crime” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

It’s important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Less than ten years ago, a US President was impeached on charges that he had lied about his relationship with an intern. The list of lies employed by the Bush administration to drive this country to war grows longer almost with every passing day. If there is a high crime or misdemeanor more deserving of impeachment than sending the children of Americans to die in a war founded on lies, I’d certainly like to know what it is.