Dave Lindorff: Inappropriate Behavior and Impeachment

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/782


So let's get this straight.


Douglas Feith, who headed up the insidious Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon that was created to develop, gin up, and manufacture "evidence" to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq, has been reprimanded in a long-delayed report by the Pentagon Inspector General's office, which concludes that the whole OSP project, while perhaps not illegal, was "inappropriate."


Feith and the Republican establishment are taking that as the final word, and as an official okay for the OSP's activities.


But wait a minute.


When is the last time we heard the term "inappropriate behavior" used?


Right.


It was Bill Clinton and his cigar in the Oval Office.


And that "inappropriate" behavior, according to the Republican Congress, was grounds for siccing a special prosecutor on the president, for calling him before a grand jury and grilling him, and finally for impeaching him in the House and trying him in the Senate. All over an "inappropriate" consensual sexual escapade that didn't hurt anyone.


Feith's inappropriate behavior, however, which was organized by the White House, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was central to the president's obsessive plan to invade Iraq. It was Feith's OSP operation that developed the false evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, that developed false evidence of Iraqi efforts to develop a uranium centrifuge, and that developed the false evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Feith and the OSP were central to the administration's success in gaining Congressional support for an attack on Iraq, and for the ensuing conflict that has killed over 3,100 Americans and as many as 650,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children. If there was any sense of integrity, courage, and patriotism in Congress today, members of the House would be lining up to file a bill creating a special prosecutor to investigate Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, the White House, and the whole OSP story. They'd be lining up too, to file bills of impeachment against the president and vice president.