Section 4. Impeachment

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.



From The New York Times, 7/8/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/in...08PREX.html?hp

Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON --

The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President
Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from
American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the
Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from
Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces
of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their
claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that
Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program.

Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military
action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not
await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at
the United Nations.

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions -- and sometimes
contradictory answers from White House officials -- about an article
published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph
C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West
Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase.

He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a
warning that White House officials say never reached them.

"There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium
from Africa," the statement said.

"However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to
be certain that attempts were in fact made."

In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't prove it, and
it might in fact be wrong."

Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an unidentifed senior
administration official as declaring that "knowing all that we know
now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa
should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."

Some administration officials have expressed similar sentiments in
interviews in the past two weeks.

Asked about the statement early today, before President Bush departed
for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer, the White House
spokesman, said, "There is zero, nada, nothing new here."

He said that "we've long acknowledged" that information on the
attempted purchases from Niger "did, indeed, turn out to be
incorrect."

But in public, administration officials have defended the president's
statement in the State of Union address that "the British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."

While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving the account
the credibility of coming from a non-American intelligence service,
Britain itself relied in part on information provided by the C.I.A.,
American and British officials have said.

But today a report from a parliamentary committee that conducted an
investigation into the British assertions also questioned the
credibility of what the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had
published.

The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair's government had asserted
it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to procure uranium.

But eight months later the government still had not told Parliament
what that other information was.

While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was apparently
primarily based on American intelligence -- a classified "National
Intelligence Estimate" published in October of last year that also
identified two other countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had
sought the material, in addition to Niger.

But many analysts did not believe those reports at the time, and were
shocked to hear the president make such a flat, declarative statement.

Asked about the accuracy of the president's statement this morning,
Mr. Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the
president's broader statement."

But when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later today.

Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials
issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they
no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement.

How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State of the
Union address is still unclear.

No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in,
or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate.

That document contained a footnote -- in a separate section of the
report, on another subject -- noting that State Department experts
were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.

If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed statements by
Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein was
actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and could build one in a year or
less if he obtained enough nuclear material.

In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the International
Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium reports about Niger, noting
that they were based on forged documents.

In an interview late last month, a senior administration official said
that the news of the fraud was not brought to the attention of the
White House until after Mr. Bush had spoken.

But even then, White House officials made no effort to correct the
president's remarks.

Indeed, as recently as a few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush
had quite deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he had
spoken more generally about efforts to obtain "yellowcake," the
substance from which uranium is extracted, from African nations.

Tonight's statement, though, calls even those reports into question.

In interviews in recent days, a number of administration officials
have conceded that Mr. Bush never should have made the claims, given
the weakness of the case.

One senior official said that the uranium purchases were "only one
small part" of a broader effort to reconstitute the nuclear program,
and that Mr. Bush probably should have dwelled on others.

White House officials would not say, however, how the statement was
approved.

They have suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency approved the
wording, though the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had
reviewed it.

Other key members of the administration said the information was
discounted early on, and that by the time the president delivered the
State of the Union address, there were widespread questions about the
quality of the intelligence.

"We only found that out later," said one official involved in the
speech.

__________________________________________________ ________

"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
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/script...tle=18&sec=371,
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."

John Dean

Harry

Section 4. Impeachment

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.

They are just clearing the deck before the elections...